“My leg is not quite as good as I want it to be,” Woods told the media afterwards.
“We’ll start the recovery process and get it back tomorrow. I can’t load it. Loading hurts, it hurts to walk, it hurts to walk. It’s just golf. If I don’t play that, I’m fine.”
Woods’ run started bright with two birdies and three quarters in the five hole hole before his leg began to bother him as he limped to 4-over at the end of the day.
On his last 13 holes, he hit only three greens, made six bogeys, and consistently misjudged his blocking shots.
“All the vault shots came in kind of hot,” Woods said. “The sand is much faster than I thought.”
“It’s been kind of like this all week, especially if I get up in the areas that aren’t combing…I sometimes feel like sand—I guess I was wrong.”
Woods appears to have arrived at the Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa with a relatively conservative strategy, opting to ditch the tee while the other players in his star-studded group – McIlroy and Jordan Speith – beat the drivers.
While McIlroy averaged 331 yards from a tee, Woods averaged just 293.4 yards–the 136th of the shortest in the 156th field.
“The game is completely different,” Woods said. “It’s more aggressive now, I know that. But I’ve been playing on my points. If I was going to hit the ball really hard on those two holes and put the ball in the lane, I would have been fine.”
Woods departs for Round Two at 2:36 p.m. ET on Friday.
“Tv junkie. Lifelong beer trailblazer. Evil coffee evangelist. Award-winning social mediaholic.”