The flags were barely flickering on the back of the grandstand at the 18th when Colin Montgomerie appeared at the rear of the clubhouse, exchanged a cheery good morning with a club member and joined his caddie on the practice green to hit a few putts.
It was 6.22am, the Isle of Arran was barely an outline across the Firth of Clyde, the sun was out and the dew was on the ground. It was an idyllic setting, the silence broken only by the occasional shouts of “Come on Colin” as he approached the stand at the side of the 1st tee and a roar when he emerged from the tunnel underneath it to join his playing partners, Luke Donald and Marc Leishman, to hit the first shot and get the 145th Open Championship firmly under way.
The stand had been full for more than half an hour and spectators lined the left-hand side of the fairway all the way to the green in readiness for the start, this one uniquely to be kicked off by Troon’s most famous son, a 53-year-old who came through local qualifying to contest his 22nd Open and his first since 2010.
That came at 6.35am after the new starter, David Lancaster, who replaces the now retired Ivor Robson, welcomed the spectators and called out the players’ names. “There were nerves, of course there were,” Montgomerie said. “But I sort of dug deep into my Ryder Cup ways, where I’d led off the tee twice in singles, three or four times in the foursomes. It was that type of feeling.”
What followed was classic Monty. After finding the semi-rough to the left of the fairway and walking away from his second shot to ask a bank of photographers to desist, he took his stance again and shovelled his second shot into the front-left bunker. He then turned to remonstrate with someone at the back of the 18th grandstand.
Monty is a man who could be disturbed by a butterfly in an adjacent field and in this instance he had picked up the sound of a technician removing plastic bags from the Wi-Fi points at the top of the stand. His morning equilibrium had been disturbed and, to make matters worse, when he got to the bunker he found his ball was buried in the face of it and virtually unplayable.
It took him two shots to get out, the second played from his footprint from the first shot and away from the hole. A great chip and putt then salvaged a double-bogey. Donald and Leishman made birdies, of course, and the Scot was three down after one hole. “The best shot I hit, probably one of the best shots of my life, was the fourth shot out of the bunker at the 1st,” Montgomerie said. “No one in the field would have got the first one out.”
Then came a run of five birdies in seven holes from the 3rd, the one at the 4th courtesy of a 25-footer and his effort at the Postage Stamp helped with local knowledge, his tee shot pitching back-left of the green and rolling down the slope to four feet right of the pin. The birdie at the 9th, his last of the round, took him to the top of the leaderboard at three under, alongside Sanghee Lee of South Korea. “I had a quick look,” said Montgomerie, “and I thought that was all right.”
He was to stay there for 30 minutes, during which a couple of cyclists, a dog walker and a handful of locals watched from the other side of the railway line as he teed off safely at the perilous 11th. He left his second shot short and three-putted from there, with the cyclists still bearing witness from the other side of the line.
From there on in it was a case of hanging on. A magnificent 40-foot putt across the 13th green saved par, though he yielded a shot at the next when a five iron from the tee came up short and behind a bunker. A bogey six at the 16th could have been worse, after he hacked his second shot out of deep rough and flew his ball towards the burn. But it rolled across a footbridge and after asking for a ruling on a free drop as his right foot would have been on the bridge when he played – an immovable obstruction within a hazard – he decided in any case to try to reach the green from where it lay with a driver. But he could not get there.
Another great save at the 18th, where he short-sided himself and made a 20-footer after chipping over the front-left bunker and past the hole, secured a level par 71, out in 33 and back in 38, two shots better than Donald and three fewer than Leishman. The round had taken four hours and four minutes, the flags behind the stand were a little livelier, and the group behind them were two holes adrift. Classic Monty indeed.
