“Don’t do it!” Tiger Woods chided himself, adapting Nike’s slogan to suit a frustrating occasion. The trouble was that Woods could not stop himself doing it — hitting the ball to the right, that is — in an opening round so ordinary that the bookmakers finally conceded that other players might have a shot at the title.

Pre-championship odds of 7-4 the favourite and 25-1 the field had implied that we should skip the golf and get straight to the speeches. Like Woods’s tee shots, it was never going to be that straightforward.

A one-over-par 71 was not a bad total given the number of fairways he missed and for those seeking omens, the last time Woods failed to break par on the opening day, at Royal St George’s in 2003, he still ended up in joint fourth.

But this was a scrappy round from the three-times champion in conditions that could not have been more benign. A reminder, too, that he has yet fully to assert his old dominance since knee surgery last year.

“God dammit, Tiger! You gotta be kidding,” he berated himself on the 17th as another shot refused to fly straight. You know a guy is struggling when he starts referring to himself in the third person.

Perhaps the only man here who had anticipated that he might play poorly was Woods himself, but then he had the inside track from his early-morning practice when he had been spilling shots to the right.

In his eagerness to correct, he hooked his drive at the 3rd at a television tower and required a free drop. That was one of only three holes on which he used a driver and each time he found the thick rough.

Yet even when he hit a two-iron off the tee, there were no directional guarantees and he was back on the practice range even as his playing partners, Lee Westwood and the teenage Ryo Ishikawa, were conducting post-round interviews.

The surprise was to discover that Hank Haney, his coach, would not be joining Woods on the range, having stayed in the United States. Apparently the pair believe that there is no more work to be done in the week of a major but one would have thought a perfectionist such as the world No 1 would leave nothing to chance.

Perhaps yesterday’s glitches were so obvious that Haney could provide diagnosis and cure over the telephone.

The 9th was typical of Woods’s day as his iron off the tee faded into the semi-rough. He topped his second shot, bouncing it on a cart-track running across the fairway, and hurled his club in frustration. Recovering his focus, he chipped and putted to scramble an ugly par.

There were other saves at the 13th, when Woods zigzagged from the rough on the right almost into gorse on the left, and another on the 14th, where he was forced to hack out of deep rough and pitched brilliantly to two feet. On a day made for birdies, Woods was scrambling pars.

In front of a large gallery — and that was just the Japanese photographers following Ishikawa — the woes continued.

Woods found the burn with his five-iron approach on the 16th. “I was trying to play about 20 feet left of the hole and the ball landed about 15 feet right. Not a very good shot,” he said, with some understatement. He did well to escape with a bogey.

It was on the 17th that Woods’s temper was closest to blowing. He drove into the crowds on the right and, despite landing on trampled grass, sent a three-wood into more thick stuff. Again he was fortunate with the lie and escaped with a par.

If Woods’s 71 could have been worse, Westwood’s 68 could have been several shots better. He began with three consecutive birdies, and it should have been four.

His ball control was hugely impressive, aside from a messy bogey on the 7th and the 16th, where he joined Woods in the burn. A double-bogey six pushed him back down a congested leaderboard and left him with the bittersweet conclusion that 68 was “the worst it could have been”.

Ishikawa was hitting the ball so high that one feared for the pilot of the microlight buzzing overhead but the 17-year-old added a prominent name to his huge fan club.

“Pretty impressive, eh?” Woods said of the teenager’s 68. We look forward to seeing today how the maestro can respond.