CARNOUSTIE, SCOTLAND — On the third tee at the Carnoustie Golf Club yesterday morning, Mike Weir was surprised at what he was seeing.
Down the fairway, his tee shot was running and running and running. He'd hit just a 3-iron because he had 235 yards to a deep pot bunker on the line he chose. Hitting into the wind, Weir figured he'd carry the ball 210 yards and that it would run out perhaps 15 yards on a fairway softened by rain.
The ball's fate wasn't apparent to Weir from the tee of the brilliant, 358-yard short par-4, where a burn runs along the left side of the fairway and curves in front of the green. But its fate was all too apparent to spectators on the right side. The ball hit a down slope and shot forward, collapsing into the bunker on its last roll.
Having birdied the first hole of this 136th Open Championship after hitting his approach from the light first cut of rough to within a couple of feet of the hole and having parred the second, Weir was looking for another birdie on the short third. But his only shot was back to the fairway, which he did.
Now, Weir would try to get up and down for par from 50 yards short of the green. The hole was cut near the front, only 25 feet beyond the burn. Tricky, to say the least. A half-shot, requiring touch, and with cold hands and a chilling rain.
Weir provided himself and the spectators with quite a surprise. He came right under the ball, which floated straight up into the air and came to the ground only 15 yards forward.
"I chunked it," Weir said later, having shot 38 on the front nine and 33 on the back to finish at even-par 71. "I just buried that thing [the clubhead] right in there," Weir continued, laughing at such a goofy, poor shot. "The lie was tight, and I just decelled."
After decelerating through the ball, Weir might have gone on to make a real mess of the hole. But he hit his next shot 12 feet short of the hole and made the putt.
"It ended up being a nice bogey," he said.
Still, Weir wasn't really on his game. Dressed in layers to keep warm, he couldn't get much feel in his hands and blew on them to help. Weir had missed the first, second and third fairways on his tee shots, although he had excellent lies in the first cut of rough on the two opening holes. But he continued to miss fairways and admitted that he was lucky to escape with that two-over 38 on the front nine.
"It felt like 1999," Weir said of the brutal weather conditions during the first round of the 1999 Open here. But the course isn't nearly as severe this year.
"If it was like it was in 1999, I could have been seven over through the first nine holes," Weir said.
Weir soon warmed up and played a terrific back nine that included a 3-iron shot to six feet on the 10th hole that set up a birdie and a two-putt birdie on the par-5 14th. He made par on the 15th, 16th and 17th holes, three of the toughest finishing holes in the game. Then came the brutally tough 18th, which was playing 499 yards, into the wind.
"I killed my drive there and I still had to hit a rescue club in," Weir said.
He made sure his miss would be away from the out-of-bounds fence that's almost on the left side of the green and found the bunker to the right. Weir's bunker shot from 60 feet ran out near the hole, and he parred the difficult hole.
Fellow Canadian Stephen Ames wasn't having a good day. He started even earlier than Weir, and in the worst of the weather. He was freezing by the time he started to play. Ames drove out of bounds at the sixth hole, made three double bogeys and shot 81.
"He doesn't like playing in cold weather, and he was a bit impatient out there," Ames's coach, Sean Foley, said.
Patience was a necessity yesterday morning, in the worst weather of the day. Weir had it, Ames didn't. In this major, the difference wasn't minor.
