Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson shine in their three-ring Masters circus

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2015/apr/09/rory-mcilroy-phil-mickelson-masters

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Some circus, this. Rory McIlroy and Phil Mickelson together, nine major titles between the pair of them. A 10.41am start and the crowd all around so thick you needed a knife to cut between them. PT Barnum couldn’t have rigged it better.

Ryan Moore, a 32-year-old from Puyallup, Washington, was playing third wheel. “I guess they felt they needed me there to boost the TV ratings,” Moore said. He has a sense of humour, and he needed it. He spent a lot of his round looking at the backs of his playing partners as they marched on ahead down the fairway, as their drives invariably fell 40 yards beyond his. Either that or Moore was waiting for a little peace and quiet to play in. It never came, since the patrons were always rushing past to get a prime spot to watch McIlroy and Mickelson’s next shots.

McIlroy shot 71. All week, word among those in the know has been that if McIlroy brings his best game to Augusta the rest of the field will be playing for second place. Well, on day one, he didn’t have it. He struggled with his short game all round long, chunking his chips on the 3rd, 8th, and 11th. Little doubt what he will be up to at the practice area overnight. But here’s the thing – time was when, while making a string of mistakes like that, McIlroy might have fallen apart and ended up signing for some ugly numbers. Instead he found a way to scramble, and finished one under par for the round. It wasn’t great, but it was good enough. As the old saw goes, nobody wins the Masters on Thursday, but a few do lose it.

McIlroy declared himself “pretty satisfied” with it all. “Anything under par is a decent score. If I can drive the ball the way I did today, maybe hit a few iron shots a bit closer, maybe convert a few more, I should be OK.”

It certainly could have been worse. On the long, downhill 2nd, McIlroy hooked his drive left into the trees and trouble. It fetched up in a little creek. McIlroy has been worrying about the par fives all week, and this was the first he’d had to play. “If you look back at the previous winners here, they’ve all played the par fives well,” he said on Tuesday. “Bubba last year played them at eight under par; I played them at even par, and he beat me by eight shots.”

McIlroy says he tends to be a “little over-aggressive on them”, that he is too busy thinking about scoring an eagle when he should be settling for a birdie instead. He had been letting the best be the enemy of the good.

All that talk, and yet here he was making the same mistake all over again. This time, tellingly, he managed to pitch out and get away with a par. As he did on the 3rd, after he hit the first of those duff short shots from close in to the green. It was tough stuff under a hot sun. The heat was so fierce, in fact, that a woman fainted by the tee box at the 4th. McIlroy walked over, gave her a banana and a bottle of water, shot her a smile. Made her day.

Mickelson was giving a masterclass in how to play the opening holes. Birdies at the 2nd and 3rd put him two-under through the first five. But both he and McIlroy made bogey at the par-three 6th. Mickelson needed three putts from the back of the green. McIlroy hit an egregious chip, which rolled back to his feet. Next time he hit a long putt instead, and got the ball much closer.

Mickelson made another bogey at the 7th, where McIlroy bounced back with a birdie, a good second shot setting up a 10-foot downhill putt. Back to even par for the pair of them.

At the 8th, a long uphill dog-leg to the left, McIlroy and Mickelson matched each other with a pair of drives that landed in the same square foot of turf. From there, though, Mickelson whipped out his magician’s wand, also known as his fairway wood, and hit his second 262 yards, round the corner, to within a foot of the pin. An eagle.

It was the kind of miraculous shot McIlroy’s fans were hoping to see from him. Instead, he was playing steady stuff. On the 11th, the third of those awful chips cost him his second bogey. The frustration was starting to show.

He hammered his club into the ground and kicked his heels but he has played here enough now to know he had two chances to undo the damage, on the two par fives ahead. So at the first of them, he decided to take the safe option and hit his second to the far side of the green.

Mickelson and Moore both decided to attack the flag, and they both ended up watching their balls rolls back into the water. McIlroy followed it up with a lovely curling putt on 15. And somehow he was one under. Still one behind Mickelson, who shot 70, but a fair score after a hard day’s work. Moore finished on two over par.