Birthday boy McIlroy gets back to action with opening 68 at Wells Fargo Championship

Rory McIlroy had crossed the creek and stood hopefully on the pine straws with his stray ball at his feet, and waited to see if it was in play. Then, the words from the rules official came his way: “It’s out of bounds!”

Bending down to retrieve the ball and nimbly recross the rocky waterway, the world number three moved towards his provisional ball on the seventh fairway – his 16h hole of the day – in subsequently running up a bogey six that was his only blemish of his opening round of the Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow.

On his 34th birthday, with congratulatory shouts going his way from spectators, McIlroy’s first competitive outing since his missed cut at the Masters brought a well-crafted three-under-par 68 – four birdies and just the one bogey – that left him well-positioned, two strokes adrift of clubhouse leaders KH Lee and Kevin Streelman.

All in all, it was a good day’s work for McIlroy following the disappointment of Augusta and his decision to skip the following week’s Heritage Classic (a decision which will cost him $3 million in fines by the PGA Tour).

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“It was nice to get off to a good start, yeah. Nice to feel like I played well. I didn’t want to spend my birthday afternoon grinding on the range, so it was nice to play okay,” said McIlroy.

McIlroy’s putting proved to be a strong part of his game and he had to rely on scrambling at times – hitting only 11 of 18 greens in regulation – while his birdies came at the 10th, 14th, fourth and, after that blip on the seventh, a closing birdie from 11 feet on the ninth.

He was unlucky with the bogey on the par-five seventh, after his tee shot down the right wickedly hit a wall and bounced upwards and to the far side of the creek. Unsure whether or not it was out-of-bounds, McIlroy waited in hope that some birthday cheer might come his way. “There’s no white stakes, so I wanted to ask a question. I felt like I sort of knew the answer, but I just wanted to get it verified,” recalled McIlroy.

A three-time winner at Quail Hollow – in 2010, 2015 and 2019 – McIlroy’s comfort levels on the course were again obvious.

“The golf course has become a little bigger, a little longer. There’s one less par five, which probably isn’t great for me, but then there’s a couple really hard par fours put in there. I think it suited me both ways. And I’ve always had a level of comfort on this golf course, whether it was back in the sort of 2011-2012 era or sort of post-PGA in 2017. If you look at all the results, I certainly excel here in May rather than when we played it in August,” said McIlroy, who added it was a “shame” that Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia and Lee Westwood had resigned their memberships of the European Tour and won’t be eligible to play or captain in future Ryder Cups.

McIlroy noted: “I think it’s a shame that you’ve got the highest points score ever in the Ryder Cup [Garcia] and two guys that when they look back on their career, that’s probably going to be at least a big chunk of their legacy is the roles that they have played in the Ryder Cup for Europe. For those three guys to not captain Europe one day, it’s a shame. But as the DP World Tour said in their statement, at the end of the day that was their choice and they knew that these were potentially going to be the consequences of those choices and of those actions and here we are.”

Séamus Power birdied three of his closing five holes to sign for a two-under-par 69 to also make a strong start.

Playing for the first time since missing the cut in the Heritage, Power – currently 14th on the FedEx Cup standings – had an eventful round of five birdies and three bogeys. Critically, however, three of those birdies came in a brilliant closing stretch as he sank a 25 footer for birdie on the fifth, rolled in a 15 footer on the seventh and hit his approach to five feet on the eighth.

In the Italian Open on the DP World Tour, Frenchman Matthieu Pavon – seeking his first career win – shot a superb eight-under-par 63 to claim the first-round lead in the Italian Open at Marco Simone Golf Club in Rome where Tom McKibbin’s 71 had him best of the Irish players in action.

Meanwhile, Conor Purcell made a strong start to the UAE Challenge in Abu Dhabi where the Dubliner opened with a four-under-par 68 to lie in tied-second, a shot behind Spain’s Ivan Cantero Gutierrez.