Rory McIlroy, Patrick Cantlay tame Pinehurst No. 2, share lead after Round 1 of US Open

It giveth, if grudgingly, but don’t be surprised if Pinehurst No. 2 doesn’t taketh it away.

Like the turning of the screw, bit by bit and little by little, the red figures that floated up the leaderboard in the first round of the 124th U.S. Open — 15 of them — may fade to black as Donald Ross’ masterpiece bakes like a brisket in the sort of sweltering weather that serves as a portal to a North Carolina summer.

If nothing else, opening day was a chance to build a little cushion to defend against No. 2’s humpback greens, puzzling swales and the wild bits that line its fairways. No one did that better than Patrick Cantlay, the Californian who dusted up the Ryder Cup last year in Italy over, of all things, a cap, and Rory McIlroy (whose European side hoisted that cup), with each posting a 5-under-par 65. McIlroy, who hasn’t won a major championship since he took both the Open Championship and the PGA a decade ago, birdied the 16th and 18th holes to lead the afternoon wave. Cantlay shot a 31 on the front (his back) in the morning. They were a shot ahead of rising Swedish star Ludvig Åberg.

It hasn’t been a particularly good year for the tough-minded 32-year-old Cantlay. He has had just two top 10s in 13 events, shot 76 on the last day of the Masters, 75 in the final round of The Players and finished out of the top 50 in the PGA Championship at Valhalla in Louisville, Kentucky.

“I’ve been working really hard on my game, and usually when you make just a couple changes and you’re working really hard, it’s just a matter of time,” he said. “I knew going off at 7:40 in the morning, it’s going to play maybe the easiest it will play all week. I imagine they can get the golf course as difficult as they want, with the Bermuda greens and no rain in the forecast, I expect the golf course to play very difficult in the next few days.”

McIlroy’s year has had its own bumps and bruises off the course with a divorce that was on and now off. Between the ropes, however, he won in Dubai and, more recently, a couple of hours down the road in Charlotte in the Wells Fargo Championship at Quail Hollow Club. And he had a great chance to win the U.S. Open last year at Los Angeles Country Club.

“The golf course is a little different to what it was last year, but still the same strategy, same mindset,” said McIlroy. “Just trying to hit it into the middle of greens and giving yourself chances every single time, taking your medicine if you do hit it into trouble. I think with my demeanor, just trying to be super stoic. I really feel like that’s the thing that has served me well in these U.S. Opens over the past few years.”

And it helps that Pinehurst No. 2 gives him the feel of home.

“It sort of brings me back to links golf when I was a kid a little bit,” he said. “The greens are a bit more sort of slopey and there’s a bit more movement on them. But there’s options. You can chip it. You can putt it. I’d love if we played more golf courses like this.”

Åberg, who teed it up in last year’s Ryder Cup before he’d ever played in a major championship, kicked off his U.S. Open career with a four-under-par 66. The Frenchman Matthieu Pavon, who eagled both par fives, was another stroke behind at 3 under, joined there by Bryson DeChambeau, who very nearly made off with a come-from-behind victory in last month’s PGA Championship at Valhalla Golf Club, finishing second.

Should Åberg manage to come through on Sunday, he would be the first player to capture the championship in his inaugural appearance since Francis Ouimet 111 years ago. The 24-year-old, who played collegiately at Texas Tech University, may be young but he thinks more like an old pro — or maybe just a highly polished tactician.

“I think staying very disciplined is important. There’s a lot of pins you don’t really think about going for,” he said. “When you have a wedge in your hand where normally you would go at the pin, you can’t really do that here. It’s the U.S. Open, it’s supposed to be hard. That’s what we’re doing here.”

Coming in, the talk of the town was of either world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, who had five wins in his last eight starts — including The Players and the Masters — or Pinehurst No. 2’s “native” areas and terrifying turtleback greens.

“You can have a nice little run but then most of the time you kind of fall back to whatever, a more average week,” said Viktor Hovland of Scheffler. “But his average week is just really, really good. It’s very, very impressive to watch.”

McIlroy was asked what impressed him the most and he replied with typical Irish wit, “The fact that the only thing that took him from winning a golf tournament was going into a jail cell for an hour.”

Scheffler’s one-over par 71 was only the third time all year his first round score wasn’t in the 60s.

No. 2’s greens have vexed, confused and confounded golfers since they were changed from sand to grass almost 100 years ago. Nothing new there.

As for the native areas, there was such a wide assortment of organic schmutz that if you trained one of those plant identification apps on it you’d blow up your iPhone. The only thing missing was javelinas. McIlroy hacked his way out of it on the 11th and held up the excavated grassy clump like it was the severed head in a horror flick. These wild spots weren’t necessarily a catastrophic place to visit but you wouldn’t want to live there. It seems a certainty that whoever wins on Sunday won’t.