PINEHURST, NORTH CAROLINA | The U.S. Open is a unique golf creature.
It’s that gym teacher who makes you climb the ropes you don’t want to climb, the interviewer who asks the piercing questions, the water that finds the cracks in your walls.
If the Masters is a Rolls-Royce, the PGA Championship a high-end SUV and the Open Championship a best-in-class Mercedes, the U.S. Open is an oversized pickup truck that’s as sturdy as a barbell and just as hard to bend.
Place the U.S. Open at Pinehurst No. 2 and it can feel as tough as the slog back from a long day at the beach, sand stuck to places it shouldn’t stick, a heavy cooler in one hand and an overtired youngster in the other.
Once in a while, however, the U.S. Open turns the other cheek.
Thursday was one of those days.
Anyone anticipating carnage – and there is a legion of tormented golfers who revel in seeing the game’s best made miserable at the U.S. Open – was disappointed. Pinehurst and the USGA allowed for a soft opening, a handshake that was firm but not knuckle-crunching.
Unless a thunderstorm or two crashes the party, Thursday was probably as benign of a day as there will be in this U.S. Open. There was trouble to be sure: Collin Morikawa made a pair of double bogeys but he also made enough birdies to shoot par 70.
“Tough, very tough, but fair,” is how Morikawa described the first-day setup.
That is the USGA’s stated goal, and it has shown itself to be effective in doing that in recent years. That doesn’t mean there aren’t wrenches to be used to tighten some bolts as the remaining three days unspool.
As opening chapters go, this one provided all the necessary hooks.
The game’s reigning triumvirate – Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and Rory McIlroy – had a leisurely 5-hour, 15-minute stroll together Thursday afternoon, with McIlroy walking in a long birdie putt at the 18th to tie Patrick Cantlay for the first-round lead at 65.
The start puts McIlroy in full tease mode, fueling notions that this might be the week when he lands that elusive fifth major. Over the past five years, no one has more top-10 finishes or more birdies in the U.S. Open than McIlroy, who as any serious golf fan knows is a decade removed from his last major-championship victory.
McIlroy has a simple focus this week: Conservative golf and a super-stoic mindset.
“I really feel like that’s the thing that has served me well in these U.S. Opens over the past few years,” McIlroy said.
“With the weather cooperating, it being warm, I imagine they can get the golf course as difficult as they want.” – Patrick Cantlay
Scheffler, sporting a fresh summer-length haircut that revealed his tan lines, struggled to find fairways, a rare lapse in form, but he duct-taped together a 1-over par 71. Schauffele, meanwhile, posted a better-than-it-looked 70 in a round that sometimes resembled a scavenger hunt.
That’s one of the secrets to surviving a U.S. Open: doing more with less, especially with the sense that it will get more difficult with every passing day.
“With the weather cooperating, it being warm, I imagine they can get the golf course as difficult as they want,” Cantlay said after shooting 5-under-par 65 in his methodical and stone-faced way.
Cantlay, it should be noted, is a grinder of the first order, and the U.S. Open rewards grinders like Santa rewards those who stay off his naughty list.
Joining Cantlay near the top of the tasty leaderboard is Bryson DeChambeau, who while reinventing the clubs he plays has managed to reinvent himself with fans, who have warmed to his quirkiness, perhaps because they see less of him now that he’s a LIV golfer and ineligible for PGA Tour-run events.
If it’s possible for a 30-year-old to be the game’s crazy but strangely entertaining uncle, DeChambeau, whose 67 put him two strokes behind the leaders, owns that role now.
Ludvig Åberg is right there as well because he’s Ludvig Åberg and he swings like Barishnikov in soft spikes. Matthieu Pavon reversed a recent downturn in form with an opening 67 that included a pair of eagles.
“It’s funny because they pretty much come when you don’t really expect them,” Pavon said of playing the two par-5s, Nos. 5 and 10, in a combined six shots.
One thing the U.S. Open is not is sentimental. It has been 25 years since Phil Mickelson had his heart ripped out by the late Payne Stewart with the final stroke in the 1999 U.S. Open here, and the best that can be said about Mickelson on Thursday is that he broke 80 by a stroke.
It’s remarkable how Mickelson’s place in the game has been diminished, but that’s another story for another time. There was also a Dustin Johnson sighting at Pinehurst, this time with a 4-over 74 by his name, raising the question of whether he has made peace with never again being what he once was. There are tens of millions of reasons to suspect he has.
Since we are on the subject of fading glory, Thursday dawned with such promise, Tiger Woods making a birdie on his first hole and putting his name atop the leaderboard while the coffee was still brewing.
After signing for an opening 74 that lacked any fireworks, Woods explained himself in a way every golfer can understand.
“I was pretty one-dimensional early in the week, which is interesting. I was drawing the ball a lot. Now I’m cutting the ball a lot. Welcome to golf,” Woods said, the sarcasm dripping like sweat.
After a box of nails for dinner, Koepka figures to be lurking around the lead when it matters the most.
Brooks Koepka had the early lead for an extended moment, all muscle and menace, chasing a six-pack of major-championship trophies until Pinehurst began paper-cutting bogeys into his scorecard. Don’t be deceived, however. After a box of nails for dinner, Koepka figures to be lurking around the lead when it matters the most.
It’s the nature of No. 2 that seeing golf balls skitter into the scruffy sandscapes begins to look like those nature films showing small rodents scurrying around for their dinner or cover, or both, and there was plenty of that Thursday.
The greens and their surrounding areas lived up to their infamy, repelling less-than-ideal approach shots as if they were telemarketers.
The best thing about the first round of this U.S. Open?
They will do it all again on Friday.