His arrival moment came at the par-three sixth when there was a wait on the tee and Woods suddenly appeared just feet away on the adjoining fourth tee.
“It was the first time I ever seen him hit a shot,” McKibbin beamed. “It was pretty cool and then the crowds that go with him. Incredible. I had a bit of a wait and watched him go off. Just cool to see him around and some of the guys.
“I have never seen crowds like this, don’t get it back at home, so it was cool to hear the applause but you never quite know how good the shot is until the ball finally stops. There were a few claps that you were just praying the ball was going to stay.”
One-under after five holes, he flew the green and double-bogeyed the 15th (his sixth) and mixed further bogeys at the 17th, first and eighth with great par-saving puts at the 16th, fifth and sixth.
“Obviously, it’s a very hard golf course, very tricky, but overall, it was all right,” McKibbin said of a performance that might have resulted in a sub-par score at a regular DP World Tour event.
“You can hit so many good shots that don’t even get close to hitting the green, so that’s the difficulty. It’s definitely the hardest course I have played, definitely the hardest with the greens and the hardest challenge.
“I only really hit one bad shot into the first, and it plugged in the left bunker, so I had literally no chance to hit the green from there. Besides that, I left them all in reasonable spots. I was quite happy with that. Life can be hard around the greens.”
McKibbin added: “It was nice, I played quite solid. I got it nicely around the greens the first couple of holes and then one bad one, and after that, it was such a hard test, and you didn’t want to try and push too much to try and get some birdies back because you’d just keep racking up numbers.”
The Newtownabbey star has seen the course slowly transformed since he first saw it on Sunday, though his strategy has not changed.
“The mindset was pretty good, very similar,” he said. “Obviously the golf course changed a lot since I first saw it on Sunday but I’d sort of a very similar game plan, just a bit more to work out when hitting into the greens because on Sunday and Monday, the balls were stopping pretty quick but today you were getting eight, nine 10 yards of release on them, so you just had to be more precise.”
McKibbin is slowly becoming accustomed to a test that is far different to the challenges he regularly faces on the DP World Tour.
“I think I was a lot more comfortable,” he said. “When you see the pins, and they were so close to the edge, I think the practice rounds were quite hard because you were in the middle of the greens, and if you hit it slightly one way or the other, you missed the green no matter what.
“Knowing the pin was on the right or the left, you could aim a bit offline and still hit the green, which was quite comforting for me. But definitely a challenge.”
Had he played as he did on Thursday in a regular European event, he believes he might have shot around par
“It would have been under par probably, or maybe around par,” he said. “I hit a lot of good shots that just got rejected by the greens, and I think if I played that type of golf back in Europe, it’d be a decent enough score.”
