Monty ensures he's not the goon from Troon

At nine in the morning, though, with hardly a breath of wind blowing off the Firth of Clyde, the early holes were there for the taking. The first looked almost driveable, but Monty went with the iron and made a conservative par. His partner Bjorn, though, sank a 12-footer to immediately go one under.

Their partnership today had been billed a mite fancifully this week as having the potential for some sort of grudge match, yet they nattered away like best mates wandering down the second fairway and both appeared to be in the mood to make the best of their advantage.

Monty almost holed a 30-footer in the third and he seemed so bereft of his normal rabbit ears that even when he drove into the fairway bunker at the par five fourth, he barely muttered a word to himself as he looked at a face as vertical as the Eiger. He just managed to flip the ball about 10 yards down the fairway but then drilled a splendid long iron to within 20 foot and saved par.

News had emerged of the Big Easy's hole-in-one and, from the cheer behind the short fifth, it seemed for one moment as if Monty had repeated the trick. Having drifted by some 15 feet, he still made the putt to go two under and better was to follow at the 601-yard monster sixth.

Having laid up with his second, Monty arrowed his third to within about three foot of the hole for yet another birdie. With Bjorn also making a birdie there, the pair of them were both close to the top of the leaderboard.

Surely, Monty was going to break that awful sequence of first rounds he has endured in this event - he's broken par in the first round in only two of 14 Opens - and perhaps enjoy the sort of start he had enjoyed at Royal Lytham three years ago when he carded a 65?

We should have known better. It wasn't just Bjorn who folded after the turn. At the 10th, Monty had pushed his ball into the dip at the side of the green, chipped poorly across to the other side and even more poorly back. A double bogey and a face like thunder followed and he still didn't seem to have recovered his equilibrium when he carved his tee shot at the next into the wilds and tramped into the undergrowth to discover an unplayable lie beside a bush.

A penalty drop and a bogey was the result and he was back to level par, back to square one. That early serenity seemed to be fading as the wind started to get up and that inward nine started gnashing its teeth. But then he fought back and birdies at the 12th and 15th moved him up the leaderboard at two-under.