Forty years ago the defending Open champion, Tony Jacklin holed a long pitch at the ninth hole to get the turn on the opening day at St Andrews in 29. At lunchtime on Thursday just as Rory McIlroy was putting the finishing touches on a 63, Jacklin said that ‘they are machine gunning the course to pieces. It's just like it was on that day in 1970'.

The day dawned grey and breathless and the course, there for the taking, was duly assaulted by players armed with equipment against which the course had no defence.

McIlroy hit a brilliant shot into the Road Hole green but missed from inside a couple of paces and although he did finish with a three to tie the lowest score in major championship history.

The par in the morning half of the draw was probably somewhere nearer 68 or 69 that the official 72 but as is so often the case in an Open Championship one half of the field faced a much different test that the rest. The forecast wind arrived by lunchtime and the outstanding round from the second half of the draw was Lee Westwood's 67.

Probably it was the equivalent of a morning 63 and Westwood is due to win one of these big championships soon enough. He was a single shot from the playoff last year but he three putted the 72nd green after hitting the shot of the year onto the green out of a fearsome pot bunker 150 yards from the green.

The Old Course is a brilliant place to play golf but it is entirely dependent on the wind for its defence. If there is no breeze, there are nowhere near enough difficult holes to test the best players in the world. Courses like St Andrews and Royal Melbourne are the real victims of the modern ball and club and one wonders why the people who run this championship - the ones who have the ultimate power to regulate equipment - seem impotent in the face of manufacture threat to properly regulate the game.

Tiger Woods was out early and back in 67 which was about normal for him around this course. He dominated the last two championships here and he understands how to play the golf course no matter the direction of the wind or the placements of the pins. The intangible question is how he will deal with a crowd that is now hoping someone else is going to win. For a decade we watched entranced as he set about chasing and passing the record 18 major championships wins of Jack Nicklaus.

The golf was always breathtaking and the shots he came up with right at the end when he needed them were some of the most memorable in the game's history.

It was never a question that he would reach 19 but now the world wonders. Can he distance himself while he is on the course from his life and its issues off it?

This week will go a long way to answering the question but, unlike years past, the crowd is not wholly on his side.

One of the great things about this Championship is the coming together of so many of the past Champions. They were scheduled to play a four-hole exhibition on Wednesday but the weather was atrocious and we never got to see men like Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer and the 1967 champion, 87-year-old Roberto de Vicenzo. The Argentinean was best known for signing an incorrect scorecard at the 1968 Masters and missing the playoff by a shot. He was one of the greatest strikers of the ball who ever played and one of the most admired men in the game. He guided a young Severiano Ballesteros and generations of fantastic Argentinean players including Eduardo Romero and Angel Cabrera.

I walked into one of the hotels adjoining the final fairway just as McIlroy was finishing and ran into a friend who said ‘I have someone I want you to meet'. He introduced me to de Vicenzo and we sat and talked for half an hour about the game.

They say players now hit the ball further because they are better athletes but here was a bull of a man who hit the ball as powerfully as anyone who ever played. It was great pity that he never got to play on Wednesday afternoon so a new generation could see one of the finest players ever to tee up a ball.