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

ON, 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.”