PORTRUSH, NORTHERN IRELAND | Even now, after all these tears, the most remarkable thing about golf is that anyone continues to play it.
It has broken more hearts than summertime romances and crushed more dreams than alarm clocks.
Late Sunday afternoon someone will stand on the 18th green at Royal Portrush, cradling the Claret Jug for having just won the Open Championship, awash in cheers and a salty sea breeze and it will be a deep, rich and enduring victory worth celebrating.
Everyone else is likely to leave bent, bruised or broken if Thursday was a hint of what’s to come. In a game that’s sometimes challenging to watch as it plods along, it was impossible to turn away on a Thursday that included weather spells that touched on all four seasons and felt at times like an episode of Stranger Things.
Consider the holy trinity of Northern Irish golf: Darren Clarke, Graeme McDowell and Rory McIlroy, whose accomplishments were emotional drivers of this championship’s return to Northern Ireland after 68 years away.
If golf had a heart, if it had an ounce of warmth and a dash of decency, it would have given them one day to revel in the joy of being home. But this is the game that teased 59-year-old Tom Watson until the bitter end a decade ago at Turnberry before kneecapping him.
The sound of hearts breaking whispered in the heavy Irish air.
There’s a reason they don’t show golf tournaments on the Hallmark Channel – not enough happy endings.
Clarke, a man who appreciates his evenings, limited himself to two glasses of wine the night before hitting the opening tee shot in a championship he helped bring to his homeland and spent the morning in what felt like a charmed trance until he finished with two late bogeys.
Meanwhile, McIlroy was caught in a living hell, sideswiping his nervous opening tee shot out of bounds with what felt like all of this island pulling for him. After making an opening quadruple-bogey 8, he played his next 14 holes in 1-under par to keep himself relevant but threw it all away at the end, even missing a putt no longer than his foot.
The sound of hearts breaking whispered in the heavy Irish air.
The screams came from all those who had wagered a few quid on McIlroy to win this week.
All the while, McIlroy’s buddy McDowell dropped the dishes coming in, going from one off the lead to needing a ride back to the 18th tee to replay a drive lost in the wild stuff, a torturous start to a dinner-spoiling triple-bogey finish.
“Getting off that first tee this morning, I literally had a tear in my eye. It was kind of cool stuff,” McDowell said. “To … play as well as I did all day, and then to finish like that way – it hurts, you know, it hurts a lot. But it’s golf. It’s golf.”
It’s also a reminder of the old joke about why it’s called golf – because the other four-letter words were already taken.
Sure, Jon Rahm and Shane Lowry and the seemingly unbeatable Brooks Koepka had good days but there is a cliff’s edge kind of danger lurking between the high grass, the par-swallowing fairway bunkers and the greenside slopes that work like magnets pulling shots away from the hole at Portrush.
This may be the most universally loved major championship venue in memory, the praise for the inherent fairness of Portrush’s design unanimous, but it can twist the plot quicker than Quentin Tarantino.
David Duval knows.
He arrived here quietly confident and when he made two early birdies, it felt like 1998 all over again. However, he lost two balls on the fifth hole then made what he and the calculators thought was a 13 on the par-5 seventh when he played the wrong ball and, after correcting his mistake, struggled to get the proper ball in the hole. Only later did Duval learn his score was changed to a 14 on the hole, turning his 90 into a 91, made literally more painful by a recurrence of tendinitis in his arm.
“It is one of those God-awful nightmare scenarios which happened today and I happened to be on the end of it,” Duval said, admitting he felt a hint of embarrassment at the number he posted.
Props to Duval for saying he intends to tee it up again Friday, something not every player would do.
McIlroy, too, put on a brave face after what had to have been one of the most disappointing days in his career. It’s fair to debate the concept of out of bounds on the interior of a course – for years Portrush did not own the small pie-shaped piece of land where McIlroy’s opening tee shot settled, prompting the white stakes which the club chose to keep after acquiring the land – but he knew there was no room to the left.
It was a cruel reminder of how unforgiving the game can be.
“It almost settled me down. It was almost like, well, that’s sort of the worst that can happen. Put your head down and keep going,” said McIlroy, who played the par-4 first and 18th holes in 15 strokes.
If the start momentarily numbed McIlroy, the finish angered and discouraged him. Asked if there’s a way back from an opening 79, McIlroy gently smiled.
“Definitely a way back to Florida,” he said.
A sense of humor. Like make-up, it’s great at hiding things.