Donald Trump has applied to extend the ballroom at his Doonbeg hotel, but the planning process has been held up by an objection centred on protecting the rare narrow-mouthed whorl snail. Any of our protected snails watching on at the first round of the Irish Open would recognise its pace.
Rory McIlroy stepped off the course six hours and six minutes after he teed off, the grandstand on the 18th green almost empty and the early autumn gloaming closing in around him. He signed for a one-under 69 and described it as the longest round of golf he has ever played.
“I can’t recall a round of golf that has taken that long before,” he said. “We’ve had some rounds that are five-and-a-half or five-and-three-quarter hours, but six hours is a first for me.”
It might have been worse had play not quickened in the latter part of his round, as it took McIlroy’s group three-and-a-half hours to play the front nine holes. Shane Lowry, playing in the group behind McIlroy, was able to complete his round, as did the group that followed him. Twenty-one players were unable to finish, however, including Ireland’s Liam Nolan. Having teed off in the day’s final group at 3.10pm, Nolan will return on Friday morning with five holes of his first round still to play.
The glacial pace was a compound of the course design and the conditions.
The first factor was the fact everyone teed off on the first hole, with the prospect of split tee starts deemed logistically unfeasible in advance of the tournament.
“It’s just a one-tee start, [which] doesn’t help,” said tournament director Miguel Viador. “There’s no space out on the golf course. There’s nothing we can do. We can’t really time players because there’s no space for us to do anything. So it’s just a combination of fatal things. But it is what it is. There’s nothing we can do.”
The first big hold-up was caused by South Africa’s Erik van Rooyen, who sought a ruling early in the day after wiping his tee shot wide on the fourth hole. That ruling stalled play for 20 minutes.
The whipping wind then conspired to stack a series of further delays. Gusts caught tee shots and blew the ball left and right into dunes and thickets of rough, sending playing groups on lengthy search-and-rescue missions. Players continually backed off putts as their balls quivered and budged on exposed greens, with Jon Rahm and Sergio Garcia gesturing to suggest they wanted play suspended.
Irish Open: Shane Lowry best of the Irish on long opening day at windy Doonbeg
On the fifth hole Rahm let rip an “are you f**king serious?” after he watched the wind divert a birdie putt past the hole, while Garcia, with cap cast aside, stood moodily over a par putt on eight and shrugged his shoulders in theatrical annoyance before he eventually rolled in the putt. The downwind par-fives on the front nine caused particular logjams, with virtually all of the field capable of riding the wind to reach the green in two.
“We backed up on the par-5,” said Pádraig Harrington, who teed off in the morning wave and carded a one-over round of 71. “When it’s back-up in front of you, everybody then subconsciously wants to slow down even more, because there’s nowhere to go. That’s the nature of golf. As slow as the round was today, it’s a bit like rush-hour traffic in bad driving conditions. Everything slows down. It really is a traffic jam.”
Different groups concertinaed on tee boxes, and so Lowry had plenty of opportunities to catch up with McIlroy, despite the fact McIlroy teed off one group ahead. Séamus Power said there were three different instances across his front nine holes that there were multiple groups standing on a tee, and at one stage there were three groups standing on the fourth tee box.
Not everyone struggled with the pace, however – Power’s playing partner Joaquin Niemann took the overnight lead with a five-under round of 65 that he described as “sexy”.
“It was so slow and so stop-start as well, you couldn’t get any rhythm,” said Power. “By the time we hit our tee shot on 10, we were almost three hours and 15 minutes into the round, so that wasn’t easy. It wasn’t great, but, you know, that’s going to be the same for everyone. It’s not something you can do [anything about], especially when I watched a guy shoot five under.”