ROYAL BIRKDALE — You win or you learn.
It’s a sporting cliché, but one that athletes find comforting as it allows them to put a positive spin on bad days at the office.
The other cliché in play here is that you cannot win the title on the first day of a major golf championship, but you can certainly lose it – and Rory McIlroy spent most of the first day of the Open Championship fulfilling both aphorisms: learning an awful lot and desperately trying not to lose his shot at the title.
His well-received birdie at the last added a little shine to a battling day, and somehow a score of +2 and a gap of only seven shots, rather than eight, to bolt-from-the-blue leader Jackson Suber seemed manageable.
It is one of the great privileges in sports journalism to watch the very best up close. But the day I spent watching McIlroy, one of the best to swing a golf club this century, was more soap opera than heroic epic.
