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By Brian Wacker
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — The land at Shinnecock Hills is rumpled and exposed. In other words, it’s a lot like Tiger Woods’ game was during Thursday’s opening round of the 118th U.S. Open.

There was the triple bogey on the first, where his approach on the 407-yard par 4—one of the easiest holes on the course on a day where easy didn’t present itself often—airmailed the green. He followed it with two attempts to bounce his ball up the shaved down bank, only to have it roll back to his feet.

Then came a missed six-footer for par on the second. Two holes, four over. Oof. Some welcome back to the U.S. Open for the three-time winner of the tournament, playing for the first time in the championship since 2015.

Still, there was plenty of time and hope, right? After all, in 2008 Woods doubled his first hole of the week at Torrey Pines and doubled the same hole again in the third and fourth rounds—and still went on to win the U.S. Open.

That was then.

Related: The U.S. Open is a brute once more

Thursday, after a run of six pars and one bogey following the stumbling start, the wheels came off the tracks of the 42-year-old Tiger Express.

Woods four-putted the 13th en route to double. On the 14th, he played military golf, going right off the tee and left with his second as the hay he was hitting out of grabbed the clubhead and shut the face down. When he reached the green, he missed an eight-footer and made another double.

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Woods hit just nine of 14 fairways as he struggled on the back nine to grind out a score.

It was all pars from there, but the damage—an eight-over 78 that left him tied for 101st place—was done.

“I didn’t putt well today,” said Woods, who took 30 putts in all. “It’s tough out there. But, I mean, I shouldn’t make two doubles and a triple.”

Tiger didn’t hit it very good either. As impeccable as his ball-striking was the last time he competed two weeks ago at the Memorial, it seemed to vanish in the punishing conditions of Shinnecock. That’s what this course does. It’s exposed and it exposes, and Woods hit just seven greens in regulation on Thursday.

He wasn’t alone in the struggle.

Only four players broke par in the opening round and none of them went lower than one under. Phil Mickelson shot 77, Jordan Spieth and Jon Rahm 78, Jason Day 79 and Rory McIlroy 80. In all, 28 players shot in the 80s, while Scott Gregory had a 92, the highest score in a U.S. Open since 2002.

Golf can be hard, but the U.S. Open is harder, especially when it plays like a U.S. Open again. Woods has 14 majors but is a decade removed from his last and a half-decade from his last win anywhere.

Parts of his game have looked sharp at times this year but parts are just that. Shinnecock doesn’t take kindly to that sort of golf.

“It’s frustrating because I hit the ball—I’m hitting it well,” Woods said. “In the last, I think, four tournaments, I have not putted well. So if I can putt like I did at the beginning of the year, we’ve got something.”

Plenty of other guys could say the same.

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His one-over-par 71 was no great shakes in terms of where it put him in the field (T-58 and six strokes behind the leaders), but it felt so much better than that. When the final putt went in, the Northern Irishman gave a fist pump discernibly more emphatic than what is usually seen on a Thursday, even at a major.

Afterward, McIlroy was candid about his fragile state of mind, and how his caddie helped him go from negative to positive.

“Yeah, like I was nervous going out — a little anxious, timid,” McIlroy candidly admitted. “Just really, probably not as much belief in myself as I should have had.”

McIlroy was referring to the affects of a so-far winless season that began with high hopes—coming off his dramatic victory at the Tour Championship last September that won him the FedEx Cup—but has been disappointing. His performances in the first two majors of the season, a T-7 at the Masters and a missed cut at the U.S. Open, where the wide fairways at Erin Hills seemed tailor-made for his dominating driver, were a letdown, and then missing consecutive cuts at the Irish and Scottish Opens made a mental shambles of his preparation for Birkdale .

“Just a bit of lack of confidence just over the last couple of weeks, and just letting that get in my head a little bit,” McIlroy further confessed. “Yeah, it’s a major championship. I’m always more nervous playing in these four tournaments than I am anything else. And I felt that out there today just because of the lack of self belief I had going out.”

It manifested early, with McIlroy driving poorly off the first hole, only saving bogey with a 30-foot putt from off the green. He parred the second, but then got on a four-hole bogey train.

He was four over par on the sixth tee when his longtime caddie, J.P. Fitzgerald, decided to go to his emergency psychology kit – his 28-year-old charge’s record of four major championships, two of them by eight shots and one of them the 2014 Open Championship. “You’re Rory McIlroy,” the caddie said. “What the —- are you doing?”

Although decidedly subdued at the moment—he could only mumble “whatever” in response—McIlroy said Fitzgerald’s prod “helped, it definitely helped. It kept me positive. I couldn’t look within myself. I was trying to look within myself. But J.P. kept me positive out there, so that was very much appreciated.”

The effect had a slight time delay, as McIlroy would also bogey the difficult sixth, and then pulled his tee shot on the 7th. But he made a good up and down for par and from that point showed the kind of superbly powerful ball striking that is his trademark.

“The up and down was big,” McIlroy said. “There’s a big difference between five over par and six over. It was a big momentum, if you can say you have momentum being five over after 7.”

McIlroy, who in addition to a slow recovery from a rib injury has been fighting a two-way miss off the tee along with decidedly mediocre putting and wedge play, said that his rebound was also due to “trusting what I was working on on the range. I sort of felt I was caught in between (techniques) on the first six holes. Yeah, I found a little swing thought or a little trigger that I think is going to help.”

Might McIlroy’s turnaround become the start of a larger turning point? He didn’t dispute the possibility, and even used a historical moment as a parallel. “Yeah, I could be standing here and have hit 18 greens and shot 1-over and missed every putt and feel terrible. But because of the way I started, I actually feel really positive.

“It’s a bit like Ryder Cup at Medinah in ’12. We’re 10-6 down on Saturday night but we feel like we were right in with a chance, because we won the last two points. It’s sort of like that. Even though there’s a lot of golf left, in other circumstances it might have been a disappointing day. But just with the way I finished, I feel really good about it.”

Who knows? Perhaps what J.P. Fitzgerald said on the sixth tee at Royal Birkdale in 2017 will also become a moment in golf history.

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To hear Rickie Fowler after, you’d think he had just finished the finest day any professional golfer ever had. Smiling, all but glowing, he declared the day “nice … stress-free.” Even when a reporter reminded Fowler that he now is the best player who has not won a major – Sergio Garcia having graduated – Fowler called the label a compliment: “There are a lot of really good players out here that haven’t won a major.” Shoot a 65, it’s Christmas morning all day.

If Fowler mis-hit any shot of any kind, it escaped attention. For the ninth time this season, he got it to the house without a bogey; no one else has done that as often. In the first round of the U.S. Open at Erin Hills, a golf course that no pro had played in competition, he went seven under par, tying an Open record set by Jack Nicklaus and Tom Weiskopf in 1980, eight years and six months before Fowler was born.

“It’s just nice to go out and actually execute the game plan and not have to think about ‘what if that one went in,’” he said. On this bright, warm, perfect heartland summer day, it all seemed so simple. “It did, just because I’ve been swinging really well. I feel like I have great control of the ball right now and distance control.”

To hear him after, you could imagine Fowler had contrived to move his Titleist by telepathy, silently and smoothly, no what-if’s allowed. It would be in keeping with his work all season. He has won once, finished second twice, and earned nearly $4 million. He’s better than ever from bunkers, better off the tee, and so comfortable all-around that he says there’s nothing much to work on before tomorrow’s round: “So go hang out, relax.” Maybe a movie, he said. Maybe two movies. Life is good after a 65.

Fowler is the prodigy coming to maturity. He is 28 years old, a four-time winner on the PGA Tour (with $30 million earnings). He has five top-five finishes in the majors, four of those near-things coming in 2014 when he finished fifth in the Masters and runner-up in both our Open and the Brits’. Representative of his growing self-assurance today was a small piece of his remarks to the assembled literati. Instead of detailing even one of his seven birdies – he birdied all four par 5s — Fowler chose to memorialize an otherwise-unremarkable par on the fourth hole, a 439-yard par 4. On that one, he liked the “execution” of his game plan and the “distance control.”

“Hitting 2-iron off the tee,” he said. “Not necessarily pushing it or challenging the bunkers too much. Then hitting a cut 5-iron and staying disciplined to the middle of the green and hitting my numbers. We had 195 to the hole with the wind in off the left, and just hit a nice choke-down cut 5-iron. We missed our number by two yards, which, from that distance with a 5-iron and wind in from the left, was pretty spot-on.”

Nothing came that easily today for the defending champion, Dustin Johnson. Drives into Erin Hills’s knee-tickling fescue caused DJ to become a thrashing machine. He cut more hay today than any farmer for miles around. The resulting 75 left him in the bottom half of the 156-player field. Still, he remained optimistic despite the evidence: “I’m swinging good, everything feels good. I just need to make more putts here.”

Fowler was happy with the record 65. “It’s always cool to be part of some sort of history in golf.” He also was happy to have that first major a possibility: “There’s a lot of golf to be played. But, yeah, I’m ready to be out there.” He came ready, by the way, to please the Wisconsin galleries; his golf bag is a Green Bay Packers’ gold and green: “As many times as you can get as many local fans on your side, it helps.”

The day’s work done, Fowler walked from his last hole to the scoring room a couple hundred yards away. He walked hand-in-hand with Allison Stokke. Some of us noticed Ms. Stokke in her previous life as a pole vaulter at the University of California-Berkeley. She is now a fitness model. To see her walking with Fowler was to remember what the television broadcaster Brent Musburger once said on seeing the Alabama quarterback, AJ McCarron, and his girl friend, Katherine Webb, then Miss Alabama.

“You quarterbacks,” Musburger said to his broadcast partner, Kirk Herbstreit, once an Ohio State quarterback, “get all the good-looking women.” After which Musburger said, “If you’re a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with Pop.”

Or, maybe, find a 5-iron and work on that choke-down cut to the middle of the green.

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