Severiano Ballesteros withdrew, his body battered, after only eight holes of the Wales Open at Celtic Manor yesterday while Robert Coles from England gave the fearsome Wentwood Hills course a fearful hammering with a round of 64, eight under.

Ballesteros drove out of bounds at the first - his ball bounced unkindly off the cart path over a hedge - and took a triple-bogey seven. It was all downhill from then, a bit like the course, and Ballesteros gave up the ghost before he had to face the steep and unrelenting climb out of the Usk valley.

"It's my back and right hip," explained the Spaniard, who has had a troublesome back for years but never a bad hip. "I had no power in my right leg and I think it might have happened travelling. The longer the round went on, the worse it got. I'm going home to consult with a specialist and hope to get better for the Irish Open at the end of the month."

This is no place for people with bad hips but apart from Coles, who is 27, there was a good showing by the over-40s, with Mark James, the former Ryder Cup captain, leading the pursuit with a 67 that featured a back nine of 31, five under par. Out in 36, level par, James gradually got better and better and, he said, "by the time I hit the back nine, I was flushing it".

Ian Woosnam was in the group on 68, enjoying the unaccustomed feeling of being the favourite. "I haven't been favourite for a long time," the former Masters champion said ruefully, but with two top-10 finishes in his last two outings he justifies the tag, especially in front of enthusiastic home support. He dropped only one shot, at the 15th, an uphill par four of 456 yards where he left his four-iron second shot, from 169 yards, short.

"I'm very surprised the scoring is so low," Woosnam said. "It's a tough course but it was a quietish wind day and the course played pretty good really."

Coles had no real explanation for his sudden burst of form - three missed cuts in succession did not augur well - but he made the most of it and did not drop a shot as he sailed serenely to neat halves of 32.

"I missed the first fairway," he said, "and never missed another. If you put yourself on every fairway, then it's going to be an easy golf course straight away. I was hitting quite a lot of greens as well. It's pretty basic really and if you start making putts it's going to be a lot easier. I'm just wondering why I can't do this every week."