It was a contrasting day for Irish hopefuls as Shane Lowry enjoyed a promising start to the Players Championship while defending champion Rory McIlroy had a day to forget at TPC Sawgrass.
Lowry, who has finished no better than 27th in his five events to date in 2021 and missed the cut in the Arnold Palmer Invitational, was five under par after 17 holes before dropping a shot on the last after being unable to get up and down from a greenside bunker.
He goes into the second round tied for third place, three shots behind leader Sergio Garcia.
Meanwhile, McIlroy suffered a nightmare start to the defence of the title.
McIlroy’s miserable 79, which included a quadruple bogey on the 18th, equalled the worst opening round in the event by a defending champion, set by Sandy Lyle in 1988.
McIlroy hooked his drive on the 10th – his opening hole – into the undergrowth and had to take a penalty drop on his way to a double-bogey six.
McIlroy also three-putted the par-three 13th but worse was to come on the 18th, where he hit two balls into the water which runs the length of the hole and compounded the error with another three-putt to reach the turn in 43.
That matched the highest nine-hole score of his PGA Tour career – 2011 Masters, final round; 2014 Memorial, second round – and although birdies on the first and second repaired some of the damage, McIlroy promptly bogeyed the next two holes.
A birdie on the fifth was followed by three pars and another bogey on the par-five ninth, where McIlroy was unlucky to find a tricky lie in a greenside bunker but then three-putted from 25 feet.
McIlroy had spoken in his pre-tournament press conference of struggling with a “two-way miss” and said: “You’re trying to figure it out but you still know you’re not really sure where the shots are coming from and then it’s hard to at least try to eliminate one side of the golf course, basically.”
