The ‘surprise’ enemy behind Rory McIlroy’s Open Championship head-scratcher

TROON, Scotland — Rory McIlroy’s eyes were off in the distance as he started to shake his head, but something jolted him back to reality.

“At places like Portrush you’ve had bad starts where you were too far back to make up ground,” the reporter had asked, his language innocent but telling. “Are you close enough now to pull back into contention?”

McIlroy had been silent for three very long — and revealing — seconds, a pause several beats too long for the answer to be anything other than no. His head had started to confirm as much to be true, tilting back and forth in the negative, before the rational side of his brain kicked on, halting his movement altogether.

“I mean, all I need to focus on is tomorrow and try to make the cut,” he said, defeated after an opening-round 78 that placed him 10 shots off the lead. “That’s all I can focus on.”

How did we wind up here, just hours into this 152nd Open Championship? How did McIlroy, one of the favorites, all but admit his dreams were dashed with 54 holes still left to play? And why was he just one of a handful of stars, Bryson DeChambeau and Tiger Woods among them, to find heartbreak on Thursday at Royal Troon?

Enter stage left (or right, depending upon your orientation on the golf course), the enemy in question: The Wind.

Professional golfers do not like surprises, and they like surprise weather least of all. It is why they pay hundreds of dollars per year for access to highfalutin weather apps (AccuWeather is pro golf’s preferred choice), why they spend days obsessing over small details in the forecast like humidity and dewpoint, and why, on Thursday at the Open Championship, they were mostly peeved.

All week, they’d been told to expect Royal Troon playing in the prevailing, northerly wind — and on Thursday morning they arrived to find 25 mph gusts blowing directly into the south. The gettable-out and thorny-back routing had been reversed in just a few hours, and now the players were all out of sorts.

“Well, 14 is 210 yards, back left pin, severely downwind off the left. Short of that pin, it’s all downhill,” Jon Rahm said with a grin after what he deemed a deceptively good two-over round. “We all agreed, we had consensus in the group, that the only way to hit it close is hitting the pin.”

Rahm did not hit the pin on the 14th. He made a tidy up-and-down par and ran to the next tee box, relieved. From the podium on Thursday, he estimated he wouldn’t be the only one with a similar reaction to the par-3 that played as one of the easiest on the course the last time the Open came here in 2016.

“I recommend whoever’s watching to watch 14 and 17 because you’re going to see some crazy holes and crazy bounces,” Rahm said with a masochist’s grin. “Bob’s drive on 18, that must have been at least close to 400 yards.”

Indeed, MacIntyre’s drive on the downwind 18th was the longest of the day at a beastly 389 yards … for about 10 minutes. DeChambeau arrived in the group behind MacIntyre as the helping wind reached its strongest of the day — not whipping but howling — and bombed it a full 15 yards past MacIntyre. Total distance: 405 yards.

“It’s a completely different test,” DeChambeau said after his own disappointing opener, a five-over 76 that marked his worst major championship round in close to 12 months. “I didn’t get any practice in it, and I didn’t really play much in the rain. Yeah, it’s a difficult test out here. Something I’m not familiar with.”

Bryson intimated his struggles may have been equipment-related, which is possible, but equipment was not to blame for the knuckling draw that fed five front-nine bogeys. That cause was the wind, which Mutombo’d DeChambeau’s mile-high irons from the sky all afternoon long.

“I should have just cut the ball,” DeChambeau said, somberly.

Of course, no morning round was more somber than McIlroy’s, who followed up the Panic at Pinehurst with a true rarity in recent history: a major championship stinker. McIlroy spoke to the press earlier in the week about his pride for his recent major championship form, which has featured top-10s in all but three majors since the start of 2022.

“It means I’m getting closer,” he said then.

On Thursday, though, he seemed as far as he has in some time from major championship relevance. Spare a comeback on what’s expected to be a similarly dastardly Friday, Rory could very well be sent packing before the weekend at Royal Troon — one that will officially mark 10 years since his last major championship victory.

“I guess when that happens, you play your practice rounds, you have a strategy that you think is going to help you get around the golf course, but then when you get a wind you haven’t played in,” McIlroy said. “It starts to present different options and you start to think about maybe hitting a few clubs that you haven’t hit in practice.”

These things happen to golfers — surprises and stinkers — as Rahm tried to make light of Thursday afternoon.

“I think we all suffered equally,” he said with a smile.

But McIlroy was not smiling as his major championship hopes faded in real-time at the press area on Thursday afternoon at Royal Troon. He was quiet as the reality washed over him.

On a shocking Thursday at the Open Championship, he’d drawn the most rotten surprise of all.