I felt I could do myself more harm than good. It could take three weeks to recover from this.
Sandy Lyle
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Sandy Lyle managed only nine holes of the first round at Royal Birkdale before deciding to pull out of the 137th Open Championship.
The 1985 champion headed out in arguably the worst of the terrible conditions on Thursday morning and decided to call it a day after a triple-bogey dropped him back to 11-over-par.
The 50-year-old Scot plans to play his first Senior Open at Troon next week and insisted he opted to walk off in a bid to avoid picking up an injury.
"It's just a difficult, difficult golf course," he explained. "I was out of whack with my golf game and I think it was best to call it a day.
"I felt I could do myself more harm than good. It could take three weeks to recover from this. I want to make a good start for the seniors so I want to get back up north and get things sorted out."
Four-over through six, Lyle's problems really began at the seventh when having plugged his ball in a bunker he ended up taking a double-bogey.
He then dropped five more shots over the next two holes - enough for him to retreat for the safety of the clubhouse.
"I left a ball in a bunker from a very short distance (at seven)," he continued. "I left it plugged in the face and had to come out backwards.
"That put the nail in the coffin for me right there, that double bogey. The next hole I hit my third shot to the green from about 120 yards. My ball landed right on Graeme Storm's ball. His ball went about a foot from the hole and mine went off about 30 yards into the rough and was almost unplayable. So that was another double bogey.
"Then I dropped three shots at the ninth when I missed the fairway, had to hack out and went over the back of the green. So I'd gone bogey, bogey, bogey, double, double, triple."
Lyle claimed he had not seen such testing conditions so early in an Open in his previous 33 visits.
"Not this early in the morning and it's usually a bit warmer," he said when asked just how bad the weather was. "It was just constant rain all the time. It was difficult keeping my hands dry and, of course, I wear glasses, so that didn't help. It's a brutal golf course."
