By Some of it wasn’t kind. Each of these two gorgeous malcontents staged a double bogey for Rory McIlroy until his 7-over-par 78 made it near-certain his unforeseeable major-title drought will reach 38. They mistreated Tiger Woods with bogey and double toward his 79, of which he said, “I didn’t do a whole lot of things right today.” Postage Stamp merrily helped fresh U.S. Open champion Bryson DeChambeau to his 76 by supplying a windy bogey. But on an opening Thursday when everybody talked about how the wind got fickle and the club choice got weird, Postage Stamp and Railway also knew prowess when they saw it.
The sunny Irishman Shane Lowry birdied both toward a fleeting lead at 5-under-par 66. The near-anonymous Englishman Dan Brown, a 29-year-old qualifier from Northallerton in the first major round of his life, made par at Postage and a birdie at Railway toward passing Lowry with a back-nine 31 and an overall 65 that finished at 9:34 p.m. when most patrons had gone off for a pint or otherwise. Justin Thomas made a birdie at Postage and a par at Railway amid his 68.
Fresh PGA Championship winner Xander Schauffele birdied both to help him get to 69 as the seven players with that score included Justin Rose.
“You’re very happy to walk off with a 3,” Thomas said of Postage Stamp. “It was nice to make a 2.”
Postage Stamp would be that 123-yard wonder that always winds up looking even tinier than you picture it. It’s where Gene Sarazen aced at age 71 in 1973, Ernie Els aced in 2004 and the German amateur Hermann Tissies in 1950 etched his name into tournament programs clear into 2024 by making a 15. It’s the kind of hole that prompts a player such as Thomas to favor shorter par-3s and say, “I’ve never played a bad one that’s 120 yards.”
McIlroy went into a green-side bunker and needed two shots to get out. Woods reached the “native area” and did pretty well to bogey. Then Schauffele, for one, found the grandstand blocking the wind around the tee but the flag doing something else, which helped.
“Fortunately, it wasn’t pumping dead in,” the San Diegan said of the wind. “I think a dead-in wind there is so brutal. It was awkward because the stands hid the wind, but the flag was just whipping to the right of us. Luckily that [sight] was there. I played five yards of hurt on that. I just tried to get it moving on the wind.”
He knocked it to 7½ feet and converted. Thomas converted from seven, Lowry from nine, all while the galleries had made long queues getting into the grandstand just to sit overlooking the old gem.
Three holes later at Railway, things got more graphic as the trains went right by, thus the name. That’s the 498-yard hole Jack Nicklaus once called the hardest he had played in pro golf, a statement that bears repeating with every mention of Railway.
Well, McIlroy went so far right it carried all the way over the train tracks as if begging for a special category called “very out of bounds.” Woods, with a provisional, went right to the right and right to the bushes, his round the latest in a season in which he has played five events and made one cut — at the Masters, only to shoot 82 that Saturday. “I thought I could play a little bit more earlier in the year,” he would say. “I think I was a little bit too optimistic. I need to do a lot more work in the gym and keep progressing like we have.”
To birdie the brute, Schauffele and Lowry both stayed parked on the right edge of the fairway, then went 36 and 20 feet with their putts, far from givens. Railway had starred with its eternal co-star, wind. “The conditions are very difficult in a wind that we haven’t seen so far this week,” McIlroy said. “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, it starts to present different options, and you start to think about maybe hitting a few clubs that you haven’t hit in practice. Yeah, just one of those days when I just didn’t adapt well enough to the conditions.”
“I had not played that front nine into the wind before,” Thomas said, “and that was wild.” He remembered 2016, when last the Open stopped here, said he had tried to drive Nos. 1 and 3, for example, but had to hit a 7-iron into 1 on Thursday and a 3-wood on 3 to have a wedge in.
What was Lowry’s edge? For one, he would come and played Troon two weeks ago in wind that happened to behave pretty much identically. Pretty soon, Thursday, it felt a little like 2019, like the Open in Northern Ireland then with the goose-bumpy cheers with Lowry’s title. “We’ve got three more days,” Lowry said. “I kept telling myself that out there because for some reason, I felt like the crowd were getting very excited out there,” he said. “It was late in the afternoon,” and, “They were quite excitable out there, and it felt more like the weekend.”
He led, and that was that, but then here came Brown, an unknown man built not completely unlike a linebacker. He had knocked it out of a bunker to three feet on Postage (par), and he had knocked it from the fairway to five feet on Railway (birdie). Now he inched up the leader board birdie by birdie — No. 10, No. 11, No. 16, No. 18 — even as it got “really dark,” he said, darker than it looked on TV clips.
He finished to hollowed-out stands and limited roars, and he looked forward to “a proper Open major championship experience” in the throngs Friday morning as a sudden leader. Asked which player he admired as a kid not so long ago, he said, “It is probably, not surprising, Tiger Woods.”
Now Brown had played Postage and Railway on the same day as did Woods, and the results had been rather dramatic.
