Rory McIlroy starts with Nightmare Start in the British Open

They say you can't win a major on the first day, but you can lose it. Among those who quickly lost the British Open this year was the pre-tournament favorite, Rory McIlroy, who fired a four-fold bogey at the first hole on Thursday and ended the day at eight pari.

McIlroy was perhaps the most watched golfer in the days prior to the event, both as one of the best in the world, but also because he comes from Northern Ireland and grew up in Portrush. He broke the course record there at the age of 16. There would be no new course record on Thursday.

McIlroy & # 39; s first tee-shot in his house Open went off the air, hit a fan and cracked the screen of her cell phone.

His next tee-shot hit the deep rugged, and he found tangled, unplayable greenside rugged on his approach shot, causing him to take a drop.

After he found the green in six, he managed to get it into two holes in the hole.

"I shot my first shot out of boundaries yesterday, but it went right, so that might have been a bit in my head," he said on the BBC. "I turned the ball around a bit too much. It was a bad tee-shot, but not bad that it deserved to go beyond the borders."

McIlroy had more problems on the 16th, where he was a six-footer for par mass, and then a one-footer for bogey. David Leadbetter, the well-known coach, called it a "real junior golfer type mental error" at the BBC.

For good measure, McIlroy triple the 18th, and ended the day with a 79, hoping for a troubled title.

There were no tournament-winning expectations about David Duval, the 2001 British Open champion. That Open was the last of his 13 victories on Tour.

But he started the Open this year with two birdies, so he may have been looking forward to a good day on the track. It didn't work out that way.

Duval & Misery started with a fourfold bogeyman in fifth and threw away his early win. Incredibly, that wasn't his worst point of the day.

At number 7, Duval shot an eight-fold bogey 13. The score came in part because he hit the wrong ball.

The seventh hole is a giant of 590 yards, one of the two new holes added to the course for this event. Duval's shot at the hole was fearfully lost, so he hit a provisional and then another. Once he landed on the hole, he wrongly played the wrong provisional ball. That is a penalty of two points. He then had to restart the gap, and that didn't go much better.

The haunted bogey on the par-5 hole was initially feared, as the scoreboard administrator, perhaps overwhelmed by the large number, initially posted a decuple-bogey 15.

Duval & # 39; s 13 is the third highest score in the legendary history of the British Open, Golf Week reported. Even worse was a fifteenth by Herman Tissie in 1950 and a 14 by a certain "D. Murdoch" in 1925. Duval also had a triple-bogey at 17 and ended the day with a 90, 19 over par.

Despite not making a cut in the PGA Tour since 2015, Duval qualified for 47 the Open as former champion. That exemption will be maintained until he is 60 years old.

Phil Mickelson also struggled and made a five-over-76.

Not every hole was terrible for every golfer on Thursday. Emiliano Grillo from Argentina finished in 13th place, the first hole-in-one at the British Open since 2016.