TROON, Scotland — The Open Championship asks different questions of golfers, and Nick Taylor had a unique decision to make after completing his first round at Royal Troon.
“I might throw my putter in the ocean or go work for three hours,” Taylor said. “We’ll see.”
Taylor’s frustration was understandable after shooting a four-over par 75 along Scotland’s Ayrshire Coast.
“I don’t think I made a putt out of my own shadow today. If I can do something like that tomorrow, we can get a good round going,” he said.
The longest putt the four-time PGA Tour winner managed to make on Thursday came from just five-feet away from the hole.
“Just slight misreads, hit quite a few edges,” Taylor said of his putting woes. “I don’t think I was necessarily hitting a lot of bad putts, yeah, just nothing went on the greens. If I can make a few more tomorrow and see the ball going in, but it doesn’t want to go in the hole currently.”
Scoring wasn’t great for most of the field early in the day, but Taylor was left particularly disappointed after finishing his day by missing a four-foot birdie putt on the final hole.
“I would have felt better making that,” he said of the final missed putt of the day. “It leaves a sour taste.”
“My speed was decent, just kind of rolling over the edges with slight misreads. They’re very subtle breaks. Trying to factor in some wind when it started gusting a little bit. Even the last hole, we played it straight with the wind off the right, and it somehow broke right a little bit.”
It was a cool Thursday morning to kick off the season’s final major, but the lacklustre scoring couldn’t be attibuted to any brutal links golf conditions. What seemed to be flummoxing the players was a complete change in the wind direction between the practice rounds to the opening round of the championship.
“The practise round wind to today has been very different. The front nine was playing almost tougher essentially off the tee,” he said. “The last hole was just a 3-iron and a pitching wedge. On the first day, it was a driver and a wood. You’ve got to pick where you can attack.”
Most days at Royal Troon the gentler front nine is played with the wind at golfers’ backs, making it the perfect opportunity to put a few birdies in your pocket before turning around after nine and trudging back toward the clubhouse into the wind for the more difficult back nine.
But for Taylor, it all came down his putter on Thursday, and the ocean might be getting a new golf club.