The question was pointed and Rory McIlroy rolled his eyes to the left and then upwards.
Is he too far back to rescue the situation to still make a run at a fifth major title in The 152nd Open?
After shooting a seven-over 78 to lie 10 strokes behind clubhouse leader Justin Thomas on a day of 25 mph southerly gusts at Royal Troon, the eyes said it all even if McIlroy didn’t.
“Erm, I mean, all I need to focus on is tomorrow and try to make the cut,” he said in a media appearance that was limited to just three questions. “That’s all I can focus on.”
It was a brutally frustrating day for the world number two, who began with a soft bogey at first, got a shot back with a wedge to three feet at the fourth before coming unstuck by making two double bogeys and a bogey in a four-hole stretch around the turn.
After taking two to escape from sand left at the Postage Stamp eighth, he bogeyed the 10th and then double-bogeyed the 11th, driving the ball so far out of bounds right that he was close to the railway nine.
Another shot went at the 15th, where he put his second in a pot bunker. And while he made a good up and down for par from more sand at the 17th, he drove into another bunker at the 18th, splashed out and missed an eight-footer for par
“Yeah, difficult day,” McIlroy said. “I felt like I did okay for the first part of the round and then missed the green at the Postage Stamp there and left it in and made a double.
“But still, felt like I was in reasonable enough shape being a couple over through nine, thinking that I could maybe get those couple shots back, try to shoot even par, something like that
“Then hitting the ball out of bounds on 11, making a double there. Even though the wind on the back nine was helping, it was a lot off the left. I was actually surprised how difficult I felt like the back nine played. I thought we were going to get it a little bit easier than we did.
The switch in the wind from the north in practice to the south for the first round flummoxed many of the stars as the front nine played into the wind and the back down off the left.
“The course was playing tough,” McIlroy said. “The conditions are very difficult in a wind that we haven’t seen so far this week.
“I guess when that happens, you play your practice rounds, you have a strategy that you think is going to help you get around the golf course, but then when you get a wind you haven’t played in, it starts to present different options and you start to think about maybe hitting a few clubs that you haven’t hit in practice. “Yeah, just one of those days where I just didn’t adapt well enough to the conditions.
His woes began in earnest when he double-bogeyed the 118-yard eighth, the Postage Stamp, where his tee shot dribbled off the right edge of the green onto the downslope of a bunker
He splashed out to the fringe, but his ball toppled back into the sand, and he would go on to two-putt from 14 feet for a double bogey five.
Another shot went at the 10th, where he hit a fairway wood 333 yards through the fairway into heavy rough and went on to compound his troubles with another double-bogey at the ferocious 11th.
While the hole was playing downwind off the left, McIlroy chose the driver and sliced it out of bounds, almost as far as the railway line.
He then scrambled for pars at the 12th, 13th and 14th, making a nine-footer for his four there before another shot went at the 15th.
He fired his second under the lip of a deep pot bunker and did well just to leave himself a 19-footer for par that he failed to make
Now six-over for the day, he manfully saved par at the 17th but failed to avoid more woe at the last.
Ruling out mental fatigue as he bids to bounce back from his US Open heartbreak, he said: “I just think that your misses get punished.
“Your misses get punished a lot more this week than even last week or even, geez, any weeks.
“Whether you miss it in a fairway bunker or even the rough. The rough, the balls that I hit in the rough today, the lies were pretty nasty.
“I think it’s more you just get penalised more for your misses.”
