Life comes at you fast on the links, where fortunes change as quickly as the weather. At 10 past 10, Rory McIlroy walked on to the 1st hole the 8-1 favourite for the Open, 10 minutes later he walked off it again, a 33-1 outsider, scrambling to make the cut. In between, he played one of the most dismal holes of golf of his life, and made a quadruple-bogey eight. “At that point I was thinking: ‘Well, that’s the worst that can happen, what else can go wrong?’” McIlroy said. He found out at the 16th, where he three-putted from four feet, and the 18th, where he finished with a triple bogey that left him eight over on 79.

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After it was all over, McIlroy was asked whether he thought there was a way back from that. “There’s definitely a way back to Florida.”

The party, then, ended up feeling more like a wake, the atmosphere around his little patch of the course as heavy as the grey rain clouds that kept blowing over from the sea. McIlroy’s chances in this Open, a tournament he has been planning for all year, which he has been dreaming about even longer than that, since the R&A first announced it would be played here, lasted all of one round. If you are being generous, that is. Because the moment his opening tee shot swung away left into the crowd you could see he was going to struggle.

It hit a young woman called Anna, from Bangor, bounced off the mobile phone she had tucked in her pocket, broke the screen, and ricocheted away out of bounds. “A little too much right hand,” McIlroy said, “and then it went left in the wind.” He explained he had hit that shot out of bounds the other way in practice the previous day, and that he had been overcompensating for it. So McIlroy tried again, and this time he lumped what was his fourth shot into a bush up by the front left of the green. He took a drop for an unplayable lie, then chipped on to leave himself an 8ft putt for triple-bogey. Which he missed. And, just like that, he was seven shots back.

Well, McIlroy has shot 61 around here, knows every bump, tump, and swale, so if anyone was going to know how to drag it back, it was him. Or should have been. But at the 2nd, a hole he had said on Wednesday where he knows exactly what to do, he missed a birdie putt from five feet. And at the 3rd, where, he said, he had such a big advantage because he knew “all the little things and where the lines are”, he made another bogey. So now he was five over. Then at the 5th he flamed his drive wide right, played another provisional ball, and was lucky to get a free drop because his line of sight was obstructed by a scoreboard.

McIlroy said later he had been “resilient” but he was fooling himself. The hard, unpalatable, fact is that he choked. It is true he played the middle 12 holes of his round in two under par, with birdies on the 7th and 9th, but then came that “lapse of concentration” on the 16th – “inexcusable,” McIlroy said. He was still thinking about the second putt when he missed the third too. And then there was the mess on the 18th, where he followed up another wild drive with a hack out of the rough that sent the ball exactly nowhere, and topped it all off with one last, grisly, missed putt from 6ft.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rory McIlroy chips from the rough at the first. Photograph: Paul Childs/Reuters

He insisted, unconvincingly, that he was not any more nervous than he would be at any Open. He has not seemed able to make up his mind which line to take about this all week. You could sense his uncertainty about how to handle it all listening to him talk before the tournament, when he described it both as “just another Open”, and something much more, “a massive thing for the country”.

They will say his failure here, when the stakes were so high, is symptomatic of another problem, one that has been dogging him for a long while. McIIroy may have won the Players Championship in March, but more often he has been close, without closing them out. He consoles himself by talking about how well and steadily he is playing, but all that consistency does not count for much when you then go and blow up in the most important round of the year.

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Now it was over, McIlroy was oddly phlegmatic about how it turned out. He was not angry, bitter or wounded when he spoke, but even cracked a couple of jokes. “I’m disappointed, but at the end of the day I’m still the same person,” he said. “I’m going to go back and see my family, see my friends, and hopefully they don’t think any less of me after a performance like that today. And I’ll dust myself off and come back out tomorrow and try to do better.”

McIlroy makes it sound as if he has grown inured to the vicissitudes of the game. It is as if he is obsessed with treating triumph and disaster just the same. Maybe he needs to let himself feel the pain. After all, it is not a sensation champions enjoy, and the great ones will do anything to avoid it.