Carnoustie has a well-deserved reputation for cutting the big boys down to size, and even in the most benign of conditions the list of fallen idols was as long and distinguished as ever. A grand total of 26 Major winners teed off in Angus on Thursday, and collectively they ended the day 67 shots over par.
Thanks to the exemption for those who have already lifted the Claret Jug, that list includes several makeweights. Todd Hamilton has about as much hope of adding to his 2004 Open triumph as Robbie Coltrane does of winning Mr Universe. Sixty-year-old Sandy Lyle is in the last year of his exemption. The increasingly roly-poly Darren Clarke, who yesterday shot an 11-over round of 82 that could just have easily been 92, looks like he is one long testimonial tour before disappearing off to the Seniors on his fiftieth birthday next month.
But not all of Carnoustie’s Major makeweights are yesterday’s men. One who was widely expected to make an impression this week was Dustin Johnson, the world number one. Instead, the 34-year-old ended his first round with a triple-bogey for a five-over round of 76, equalling the worst opening round in a Major for a World No.1, which came when Seve Ballesteros imploded at Troon in 1986.
Once again, Johnson’s putting was his achille’s heel, just as he suspected it might be when he looked ahead to this Open at a course he has grown to love through playing it in the Alfred Dunhill. “Just a month ago at the US Open, I played well enough to win but I didn’t putt well enough on the weekend to win,” he said. “I didn’t feel like I was hitting bad putts, but I just wasn’t making anything. That’s golf.”
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Actually, that’s Johnson’s golf, or at least his golf at Majors. Yesterday he took 33 putts in his opening round, in the process bogeying the eighth, twelfth and sixteenth, before ending his round with a horror-show triple-bogey at the par-4 18th. It will be cold comfort for the American that the final hole was the scene of a succession of car crash finishes, with numerous double bogeys, four triple bogeys and a quadruple bogey for Belgium’s Nicolas Colsaert, a rare sighting of a snowman at a Major.
At times, Johnson’s huge length off the tee was problematic. On the 410-yard seventh, for instance, he crashed a monstrous drive to within a few feet of the greenside bunker, leaving himself a difficult pitch to a pin tucked in behind the bunker.
At other times his driving was so sublime that he was in the perfect position to ease himself into contention. On the 415-yard fourth his drive was so long that he was able to putt his second, only to leave it so short that he had to settle for a par.
This was a re-run of Shinnecock Hills, where he saw putt after putt slide by. That pattern was set early on: he missed a birdie by a couple of inches on the first, then repeated the feat on the second. The big man had missed putts on the rinse-and-repeat cycle.
His luck gave out on the par-3 eighth, when a curiously lethargic quarter-swing landed him in the bunker and he failed to get up and down. As playing partners Alex Noren and Charley Hoffman made a succession of birdie putts only to then bogey holes, DJ was down on his putting luck, except at the fourteenth where he registered his sole birdie of the round before almost immediately cancelling it out with a bogey at 16.
And then came the meltdown at the last. Johnson has long made a habit of chucking in a nightmarish hole at an inopportune moment, with his quadruple bogey at the PGA in 2015 the most spectacular – but this one was right up there. It is a long way back to make the cut, far less challenge for his second Major.
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