And now, the No-pen Championship

The verities will always be verities, when you stand on the tee with a club in your hand. If you swing like Elaine Benes dances, your ball is going to take you to some interesting places. If you putt like you're using a garden hoe, your scoreboard is going to look like it lives on Wendy's triples.

And if you are a 43-year-old with a bad back?

Well. You're gonna be a 43-year-old with a bad back.

Which means you can take what Tiger Woods did at Augusta back in April, and preserve it under glass. He is that 43-year-old, you see, and because of that the magic is a dwindling resource. Maybe he can reach back the way he did in April occasionally, but the back isn't going to like it.

And so here the man was at Royal Portrush in the first round of the British Open, back to looking like a 43-year-old again. He winced when he hit the ball. The ball winced and generally made a beeline for the heather and the sand. And thus Tiger staggered in with a 78, tied for the third-worst round he's ever played in a major, hitting only eight fairways and little more than half the greens in regulation. And he didn't putt so hot, either.

This means we'll likely have just one more day of wall-to-wall What Did Tiger Do from the Tiger-besotted media, which will likely put a dent in the weekend ratings for the Open Championship. It will, however, be a cooling balm to all those who are frankly sick of All Tiger, All The Time. it will also inject a note of reality back into a discussion that sailed into zany flights of fancy after Augusta; in the two majors since, he's missed the cut (PGA) and tied for 21st (U.S. Open).

On the other hand, he wasn't the only guy Royal Portrush kicked around yesterday. It could have been worse. He could have been Rory McIlroy.

Northern Ireland's favorite son could scarcely have imagined a worse nightmare than what happened yesterday, in the first round of the first British Open to be played on McIlroy's home soil in 68 years. He opened with a quadruple bogey, and things just sort of traveled on their merry way from there. In the end, he brought it home with a 79, about ten light years off the lead and nowhere to be if you want to keep playing after today.

Imagine that: Rory McIlroy, a suburban Belfast boy, missing the cut in the British Open. In Northern Ireland.

It doesn't get much worse than that. Well, unless you're one-time world No. 1 David Duval, who shot a 91 yesterday. He took a 14 on one hole that included a two-stroke penalty for playing the wrong ball, and incurred another penalty for losing a ball.

Owie.