For 10 holes of his round, Rory McIlroy was like a guy down on his luck. He couldn’t buy a thing, for love nor for money.
And, then, like a magical swish of a wand, the hangdog look disappeared, at least for a time. The spark, when it came, was from out of nowhere, not from a birdie or an eagle, but rather from the unlikeliest of par saves.
On the second hole, his 11th of a tortuous start to this 105th US PGA Championship at Oak Hill Country Club, McIlroy’s travails seemed set to continue when his wedge approach went over the back of the green and down the slope and somewhere defied gravity to stop mere inches from the thickset greenside rough.
Those inches, though, enabled him to ask caddie Harry Diamond for putter rather than lob wedge and, so, his fourth shot, from 35 feet, was putted up the slope and he watched as the ball died into the hole. For that moment at least, he discovered the world wasn’t out to get him, that the golfing gods had a heart.
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Up to that point, McIlroy – showcasing a fashion hoodie – had laboured, his swing out-of-synch to the point that he found only one fairway on his opening nine holes. His body language was that of someone fighting a lost cause.
Not only did he struggle to find fairways off the tee but his approach play too misfired and he was generally battling to keep his score from running away from him.
The late catalogue of bogeys on his front nine told its own story: having started with five straight pars, some hard-earned, the sticking-tape came loose with a bogey on the par-three 15th, where his tee shot plunged into a greenside bunker, and another on the 17th after his drive was pushed into trees down the right. His frustration showed on the 18th after another pushed tee-shot, where another bogey came his way, to turn in three-over 38.
The walk from 18th green to first tee was that of a man weighed down by troubles with little sign of an respite.
Then, one putt for par on the second changed all that. McIlroy hit his tee-shot on the 209 yards par-three third to two feet and the sound of the crowds packed around the green was as if the Hallelujah chorus was being sung.
“It was massive,” he said of the putt, adding: “I don’t know, depending on what happens over the next three days and what I go on to do, you know, I may look back at that shot as being the sort of turning point of the week.”
He found only his second fairway of the day on the par-five fourth, where he cut the corner and even had the tantalising prospect of an eagle putt from 20 feet to contemplate. A two-putt birdie brought him back to one over and the dead-footed walk from midway through his round now had more of a spring.
But those back-to-back birdies didn’t form a longer sequence. A three-putt bogey from 35 feet on the fifth brought a shuddering halt. However, a wedge approach from the intermediate fairway rough on the eighth to six feet offered a birdie chance which he didn’t need asking of a second time. He rolled it in and worked his way towards finally signing for an opening round 71, one over par, that he described as “messy”.
He looked back on his round without painting a rosy picture in any way. “I’m just not at my best. I’m just struggling with my swing. I guess it was tough as well. There was a lot of crosswinds off tees, so it made it hard to hit fairways. I can definitely hit it better than that.”
Still, an opening 71 was far from the disaster that looked possible midway through the round. He salvaged something on his homeward run. Whether it will be enough, only time will tell. But that miraculous par save with the putter from off the green on the second could yet be a moment to recall. Maybe.
