His day was effectively over by the fourth hole, where Tiger Woods needed two tries to get out of a pot bunker. What followed was something rarer still: Woods simply playing out the string in a major.

It's been a half-dozen years since he came down the back nine on Sunday in a Grand Slam event with absolutely nothing at stake. With good pal Lucas Glover in tow, Woods played fast, casually and laughed a lot, looking to all the world like a guy resigned to his fate. Critics no doubt will point to his performance here as more evidence that all those romps off the course sapped nearly all of his strength and resolve on it.

Woods won the past two times the Open stopped off at St Andrews, once by a record margin, and the best he could muster this time around was a tie for 23rd. Coming on the heels of fourth-place finishes at the Masters and the US Open, two other major championship venues where he also won by record margins, they'd have you believe he's become Samson in golf spikes - after the haircut.

But Woods is going to make them look foolish soon enough.

Only he knows where his head is at and his game remains a work in progress. Woods still can't putt, he's so-so with his irons and most troubling, he's back to making the big mistakes that produce momentum-killing double-bogeys, as he did at No 4 on Sunday. Yet he hasn't hit so many tee shots this sweetly in years.

"It's ironic that as soon as I start driving it on a string, I miss everything," he said. "Maybe I should go back to spraying it all over the lot and make everything."

Perhaps more important, though, he's most of the way back to being regarded as a golfer instead of a pariah - at least on the course. As his comfort level rises, so does his confidence. The tabloids here did their best all week daring fans to give Woods the English version of a Bronx cheer.

Instead, he drew applause from every corner of St Andrews and saw nothing more provocative than three women who shed their jackets on one tee to reveal matching Tiger-print blouses - they were hired by an Irish bookie looking for publicity - yet even they turned out to be on his side.