Gavin Cooney reports from Royal Portrush

IT’S 2.59PM AND now on the tee from the United States of America is Jordan Spieth but as his tee shot leaks away, so too do the fans lined down the right side of the fairway, pulled away from the barriers in unison like orange peel.

The bass rumble of applause and the clarity of the G’wan Rorys and Good Luck Rorys make it clear that He has arrived on the adjacent putting green. 

Fans flock 10 paces to the low, white picket fence enclosing the practice putting green behind them, to see Rory McIlroy descending the steps of the towering, temporary bridge that will soon lead to the first tee.

He briefly raises his hand to acknowledge the crowds now wreathing him, before tossing down golf balls and hitting practice putts a split-second more quickly than he usually would, the sleeves of his slate-grey jumper tugged a couple of inches above his wrists. 

To his left, Ludvig Aberg and Viktor Hovland tee off to diluted cheers. McIlroy meanwhile completes a slow rotation of the putting green, distractedly rolling a few putts about him.

At 3.05pm McIlroy turns his back on the crowds for the final time, and bounces back up the steps. 

Moments later, he materialises beneath a packed grandstand that is radiating a tense kind of ardour.

Anticipation among crowds at sports events is usually general and diffuse to the point of being almost inchoate: while everyone is excited for what they might be about to see, they cannot always be sure as to what that excitement will be; they can’t always pre-emptively direct their anticipation toward the outcome of a single event.

The first tee at Royal Portrush on this Thursday afternoon is very different: Bushmills up the road doesn’t have the patent on distillation today. Everyone looking down on McIlroy as he strides out before them is thinking some version of Don’t hit this fucking thing out of bounds again, Rory. 

The fairway down the par-four first looks to be a generous width but through a golfer’s eyes, it’s hemmed in dramatically by the out-of-bounds lines to the left and right. In his final practice round in 2019, McIlroy sent his tee shot out of bounds to the right, and so in competition he over-corrected and sent it to the left. He took a quadruple bogey – his fourth in his last 10,000 in-competition holes – and then missed the cut, wept on television and disowned the offending club so wholly that it ended up in the bag of Harry Diamond’s father-in-law. 

He has invested the first tee shot at Portrush with such a sense of drama that Tom McKibbin opened with a bogey this morning and said afterwards that “Rory’s made that tee shot a lot scarier”. 

Scarier still: McIlroy’s putting coach Brad Faxon has been on television and said Rory had sent the tee shot out of bounds on Monday and Tuesday this week. 

McIlroy has said that he’s changing his approach this week: rather than shut himself off from all the adulation, he would spend the practice days soaking in it, under the principle that these highs are more safely administered by IV drip than suddenly snorted. It’s a tentative kind of embrace, though, given he snuck out to the golf course at dawn on Monday and Tuesday to get some work done away from the clamouring crowds. 

The test of all his talk and overhauled preparation will be this first tee shot. This is a crowd that not only want the best for Rory McIlroy: they want the best for themselves too, and the longer Rory is in contention, the more electric their experience will be. 

But if McIlroy is going to be in contention, he needs to be able to deal with the expectation and pressure the crowd are eager to pour down upon him, and the first tee will tell us whether he’s ready to carry the burden this time around. 

McIlroy steps out before the crowd to hear their tension-gnawed roars.

This tension is a privilege of those in the grandstands who can actually see what’s happening. To McIlroy’s right hand side are fairways lined with people at least 15 deep, pressing gently against each other, straining their calves and necks to try and catch a glimpse of the man and his swing. People periscope their vision through whatever iPhone is held aloft in front of them. Kids complains to their fathers that they cannot see; fathers tell their kids they can’t see either. 

One woman places her hand on the shoulder of a man standing against the barrier and asks him to shift to his right to allow her to see. “Don’t touch me!” he spits in a vicious whisper, to which she replies “How dare you, I just want to see Rory!” 

“Don’t touch me, you ignorant woman,” he replies in an accent you’d place somewhere in Munster. 

“Go back t’where ye came fram, ye big ig-nur-aamiss,” she responds in a local lilt suddenly sharpened. 

A moment later, one fan steps back from the crowd admitting defeat, and he walks away saying, “It’s Rory McIlroy’s world we’re all living in.” It’s Irish unity of a kind.

McIlroy is called to the tee and the roars rise and ripple their way back down the fairway. Those who cannot see will have to rely on the sound of the grandstands to tell them whether Rory has managed not to go out of bounds. 

Then a hush, a swish, and the snap, flat clack of an iron before the crowd roars an instinctive roar that ends uneasily quickly.

Where is he?

Word filters frantically down the fairway: he’s gone left again but he is in the rough. He’s in bounds. It’s a bad shot but it’s not a ruinous one. 

Everything’s going to be fine. Isn’t it?