Tiger Woods struggles on his return

He walked by himself a lot, muttered under his breath a little and couldn't play a lick. Whether any or all of it had to do with the loss of a father who shaped his swing from the beginning, Tiger Woods wouldn't or couldn't say.

"I understand the situation where everyone is looking for me to be more emotional," he said. "Right now I'm just focusing, just trying to get the ball in the hole."

That being so, Woods sure went about it in a funny way. He shot 76, the same number the rest of the field averaged on a day when so many golfers spent so much time wading through the tall grass at Winged Foot that the place looked more like an Easter egg hunt than a golf course. And Woods certainly contributed his share of eggs.

He hit just three of 14 fairways, depositing tee shots in the rough on both sides, then hit just 10 of 18 greens, and once there, he still needed 33 putts to get off. Coming on the heels of a tournament layoff stretched over nine weeks, it was Woods' worst first round ever as a pro at a U.S. Open, by two strokes.

"I expected to be on the rusty side, but I really felt good," he said. "I started off swinging well. The thing that got my round off to a bad start was not adjusting to the greens. And once I did that, I was fine. But I was so far behind."

Bad putting is always Woods' go-to alibi whenever he plays poorly, and there's always some truth in it -- but only up to a point. His tee-to-green game Thursday was shaky, and his judgment was not much better.

Woods bogeyed the first three holes by missing par putts of 8, 7 and 6 feet, then got a measure of revenge with a tap-in birdie at the par-5 5th. And so at No. 6, a par-4 stretching just 321 yards, he tried to exact even more. Much to the delight of a gallery ringing the tee box, Woods pulled out driver, then promptly smashed the ball into ankle-high rough just behind the left greenside bunker. Some 30 yards from the flag, he needed four more shots to put the ball in the hole.

That hole, though, simply turned out to be a preview of Woods' full-blown adventure at No. 9. Trying to lop off a sizable chunk of the 514-yard, par-4, he swung his driver hard enough to break his shoelaces. The tee shot sliced so far right that it cleared the trees on that side and came to rest a club length or so from the catering tent.

When he caught up with the ball, Woods looked at the handful of spectators and policemen kneeling a few yards ahead on the right and said, "You guys might want to duck." The green was 195 yards away. There were trees all the way down the left side, between Woods and the fairway. There was the catering tent -- where the service workers clambered up to the roof for a bird's-eye view -- and there was another tent all the way down on the right.

Woods settled over the ball with a 9-iron in his hands.

Even at this stage of his career, people are surprised to learn that Woods' consuming competitive fires were a gift from his mother, Kultida. His limitless imagination, on the other hand, was a gift from his father, Earl, a Green Beret who toughened his kid up plenty, but always made Tiger find his own way out of trouble.

Earl named his son Eldrick but called him Tiger almost from birth to honor a friend and fellow soldier he got separated from late in his second tour of Vietnam. Earl shared a foxhole with a Republic of Vietnam colonel named Nguyen Phong and so admired his courage and ferocity that he nicknamed him Tiger. He reckoned his friend might find him one day by connecting the names "Tiger" and "Woods."

They never were reunited, but Earl didn't regret the choice of names. His son wore the moniker with pride, and every time little Tiger hit the ball wildly -- and as a youngster, that was often -- he learned to make one fearless recovery shot after another.

"I used to tell him he was aptly named," Earl recalled a few years ago, "because he was always in the woods. He would say, 'Yeah, Pop, but I can get out."'

On this day, Tiger got out again, rifling that 9-iron -- think about that for a moment -- high into the sky, over the left edge of the second tent, then bending it back all the way into the grandstand behind the ninth green. A youngster in the stands walked to the edge with a big smile on his face, held up the trophy ball, then threw it over the railing to Woods.

Tiger got a drop without penalty at a pre-marked spot just in front of the grandstand and behind the green -- that was his plan all along -- and was left with a flop wedge and a chance to put it close enough to save par.

On another day, the story might have a happier ending.

Just as he had at No. 6, though, Woods hit the wedge too far past the hole and the ball slithered off the green. He got his chip close enough to roll in the bogey putt for a front-nine 40, saw the number next to his name on his scoreboard climb from 4-over-par to five and set off to see what he could do on the back. He knocked off four strokes, good enough to tie the field and maybe just enough to climb back into this thing.

Afterward, someone pointed out that both Ben Hogan and Jack Fleck shot 76 in the opening round of the U.S. Open and still won the tournament.

"Are you close enough to win this?" a reporter asked Woods. You could almost imagine Earl whispering in Tiger's ear long ago, father reminding son to always dream big.

"It's been done before," Tiger said, his smile widening, "hasn't it?"