If a seismic shift had occurred in Southern California at 8.06 yesterday morning, you would not have been surprised. When Tiger Woods, Adam Scott and Phil Mickelson drove off in the US Open Championship, it seemed that almost all the spectators had crammed around the 1st tee here at Torrey Pines. You feared that another stretch of the glorious coastline north of San Diego might crumble under the weight and topple into the Pacific.

There was no surprise at the enthusiasm to watch Woods and Mickelson, two Californians, the best players in the world, in direct competition with one another. The pair are thought to have a shaky relationship and to see them side by side, Woods playing competitive golf for the first time since a knee operation and Mickelson after spending Monday on a drip in hospital in the city of his birth, was a bit like buying a ticket to a concert at which Mozart and Salieri would play a double-hander.

“Go Phil” and “Take it to him, Phil,” fans shouted as a sombre-faced world No 2 ambled on to the tee. As Mickelson stood at the starter’s lectern looking at some notes, spectators shouted “speech, speech”. When Woods appeared a couple of minutes later, voices shouted, “Welcome back, Tiger.” The 1st tee at a major championship is often as solemn as a churchyard at the dead of night. This one was as noisy as the 1st tee during a Ryder Cup.

Initially, on a morning when the June Gloom (seasonal fog) was blessedly absent, it went the way it was expected to go. Woods, in his first competition for 60 days, pulled his opening drive, pitched out of thick grass and hit his approach over the green on his way to a six on the 448-yard par-four. Mickelson, not carrying a driver, split the fairway with a three-wood and walked off with a par.

Mickelson, the home-town favourite, the man who grew up playing competitive golf on this very course, had taken a lead and this, surely, was how it would continue. Woods, out of practice and favouring his left knee, which appeared to be bandaged, could not be anywhere near his best after so little golf. When he revealed earlier in the week that he had not walked 18 holes since his operation on April 15, it was a shock. Surely not even Woods could claim his fourteenth major championship on so little preparation, not on the longest course used for a US Open.

“You’ve got to prepare yourself for the US Open,” Jack Nicklaus said. “You wouldn’t have any college student take an exam without studying for it. You don’t just walk in after playing the week before and say, ‘I can handle this.’ You don’t handle it.”

Yet it was Mickelson who failed to handle it on the front nine. He was missing putts. Woods, though missing fairways, was holing his putts and one glorious stroke will live long in the memory. It was a five-iron that he picked clean from a fairway bunker on the 4th. The ball whistled through the still air like a missile and came to rest a handspan from the hole. It was the first of Woods’s three birdies. Mickelson three-putted the 5th and 6th, Woods birdied the 8th and 9th.

It was not the first time that Woods and Mickelson had played together in the first round of a major because they did so in the US PGA at Medinah, near Chicago, in 2006. But it was the first time that the world’s top three players had been put in one group. All eyes were on Woods and Mickelson and there were times when Scott must have felt like the third man on a bicycle made for two.

Woods did not appear to be holding anything back for fear of his knee. His walk was brisk. His putting was sharp, even if he did make a mess of the 14th by running up another six on a par four. Mickelson, meanwhile, was clawing back to respectability. A birdie on the 10th started a fightback.

The first real sign of Woods’s injury came on the 18th, a long par-five. He gave his drive everything, coming up on his toes in an effort to get his ball as far as possible down the 573-yard hole. As he did so he winced, visibly. It did not bode well for his second round. More to the point, Mickelson birdied the hole to beat him by one stroke, a 71 to a 72.