Round 1 of The British Open

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 16:14:29

My first round at the Open Championship was actually a solid one. I know the score might not reflect that but I felt quite good about the way I hit the ball. Considering I was coming off an extended break, I really felt there wasn’t that much rust and a lot of good things.

If there was any part of my game that wasn’t all that sharp, it was my putter. I just didn’t make those good two-putts from long distance. It seemed I was hitting the ball to the spots I wanted on the greens and then three-putting or failing to get those birdie putts to drop.

The greens here are a bit slower than we are used to on the PGA Tour and I think that coming off the break, I wasn’t hitting them hard enough to get them to the hole.

Early on, I thought I was going to perhaps get a solid round in. I had it to three under and figured with a couple of good shots coming in, I might get it to five or six. Instead I went the other way.

Part of the problem with that bad stretch was the wind, which was blowing right to left, which is tough for a lefthander playing here. On the 17, for example, I had a tough tee shot as I would have had to start it in someone’s room at the hotel. I tried to draw one in the wind there and ended up in the rough and made a double.

The course today was there for the taking in the early going, anyway. You don’t always get calm conditions like that at the Old Course so it’s perhaps not surprising that there were so many red numbers on the scorecard. It was certainly a lot different than when I went out to hit few balls in the deluge that hit us on Wednesday.

That’s the one thing you can never predict over here – the weather. I’m not sure what I’ll get tomorrow in that regard, but I’ll come out and work hard and hopefully change things around

As always, thanks for your suppot

Mike