SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — As TV cannot do justice to the peaks and valleys of Augusta National, neither can it capture Shinnecock Hills — not as it played on Thursday, with a heavy wind coming off the Atlantic, over beachfront mansions and across Sunrise Highway, before sweeping across the old William Flynn course here. The Thursday round of this 126th U.S. Open was all set up for another USGA Shinny set-up screwball comedy, except it never happened. The opposite. The players . . . liked it.

They liked the speed of the greens, the hint of moisture they retained all day and into the night. (Play ended at 8:25 p.m. with 50 players still on the course.) They liked the width of the fairways (often 50 yards wide!), the first-round pin positions (no holes on weird knobs!), the tee positions (no surprises!). They liked player parking (almost on the 10th tee), the food in player hospitality (beef tenderloin and fresh pizza to go), the purse ($22 million!). There was a lot to like and nothing to dis.

“The USGA did a great job,” Keegan Bradley, last year’s U.S. Ryder Cup captain down the road at Bethpage Black. Bradley shot 70, even par.

A great job!

When was the last time anybody swaddled in Tourwear said those words?

Certainly not in 2004 and 2018, the last two times the U.S. Open was played here. At those Opens, nothing like that was said, not even by Retief Goosen, the ’04 winner, not even by Brooks Koepka, the winner in ’18.

“The conditions were tough,” Koepka said Thursday afternoon after shooting 73 in the first round of his 13th U.S. Open. He’s won the event twice. “It’s weird how soft the greens are. It’s odd. It’s not what I remember. I understand why they’re soft. I get that. [I’m] not complaining.”

Not complaining!

Rory McIlroy started on the 10th hole, his tee time delayed by two hours, on account of fog brought on by a shifting wind, Wednesday night into Thursday morning, and with it a dramatic increase in humidity. (In a day, this sand-splashed South Fork of Long Island went from late spring to mid-summer.) McIlroy was two under through three holes and but finished with two bogeys, on 8 and 9, for a 69. And even after that rough finish McIlroy was not moaning.

“It’s a challenging course already and then you put 30 mile-per-hour winds on it,” McIlroy said. “I think they were prudent with the course setup.”

Prudent!

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McIlroy’s day was certainly made more pleasant by having two Ryder Cup teammates, and lovely gents, as playing partners, Tommy Fleetwood, who shot 70, and Ludvig Åberg, who shot 69. Play was brutally, absurdly slow. It took the threesome, all fast players, nearly five hours and 40 minutes to play.) At least, starting as they did at 9:52 a.m., they knew they would complete their first round.

McIlroy & Mates were announced at the 10th tee by David Jacobsen, a veteran USGA volunteer and the winner last year of the organization’s prestigious Joe Dey Award. Jacobsen is the kid brother of Peter Jacobsen, the veteran Tour player and broadcaster, and the players, one after another, got a warm greeting from the starter. It may sound like nothing. It’s not. The players are playing in the U.S. Open. They’re tense. They don’t want to see a starter who is nervously looking at his watch every half-minute. A little chill goes a long way.

Jacobsen was at his post, ready for the day’s first group, well before 6:30 a.m., a cold fog all around him. Ten hours later, his workday was over. But in the final hour of his workday, he called the names of a bunch of former U.S. Open winners, including Dustin Johnson, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Gary Woodland, Bryson DeChambeau and Jon Rahm. Those guys caught the day in a gorgeous, golden late-day light, but the wind was not abating. There was sand in air and sometimes in their eyes. Flagsticks were shaking. Over the course of the day, and now and again, a hat went flying. The standard bearers were angling their scoreboards on considered angles, to slice through the wind. There were few spectators left on the course, at this witching hour. They were spent. The players were spent. The caddies were spent. A LIRR diesel train whistled on by.

It takes hundreds of crew members and USGA officials employees working long days to get these events — and this event — to a Sunday-night trophy presentation without getting called out for this or that or some other thing. On Thursday, Mother Nature had her mercurial say, and the USGA knew how to handle her.

Three more days.

Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com

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If you had told Keith Mitchell that he’d sign for an even-par 70 to begin the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills, he’d have taken it and run. That was especially true after the way his round began when he went out early on Thursday in blustery conditions and made a mess of the back nine (his opening nine) on the William Flynn design.

Mitchell opened with a double bogey on the par-4 10th after flying his approach shot over the green. Then he dropped shots at 11, 13, 14 and 16 to go out in six-over 41. His U.S. Open seemed destined to end before it even got started.

Instead, Mitchell did something that hadn’t been done before in U.S. Open history.

History started on the par-4 1st, where Mitchell drove it near the front of the green, pitched to 11 feet and poured in the putt for birdie. After a par at the 2nd, Mitchell stuffed his approach shot on No. 3 to three feet for birdie to get back to four over. He followed that by rolling in a 10-foot putt for birdie on the 4th.

Then came the par-5 5th. Mitchell’s drive split the fairway and then hit his approach from 229 yards to 12 feet. He drained the eagle putt to make it five straight 3s to start the front nine and get back to one over on the round.

Mitchell’s 3 streak came ended when he made a par at the par-4 6th. He followed that with pars on No. 7 and No. 8 before hitting his approach shot on the par-4 9th to eight feet and making the putt for a closing birdie to come home in 29.

With that closing birdie, Mitchell became the first player in U.S. Open history to shoot 40 or worse on one nine and break 30 on the other in the same round.

Mitchell’s 29 is also the lowest nine-hole score on the front nine at Shinnecock Hills. It ties the lowest nine-hole score in history at Shinnecock, which Neal Lancaster shot on the back nine during the final round of the 1995 U.S. Open.

Due to expected high winds, the USGA syringed the greens and had them rolling a bit slower than initially planned. But that didn’t make Thursday’s test any easier. After a two-hour fog delay, Shinnecock greeted the players with the typical brutality that has come to define it as a U.S. Open anchor site.

“It’s just a difficult day,” Brooks Koepka, who won the U.S. Open at Shinnecock in 2018, said after shooting three over.

“I think with the conditions today, anything under par or anything around even par is a good score,” said Rory McIlroy, who posted one under. “It was a day to really just keep yourself in the tournament and not shoot yourself out of it.”

Mitchell was on the brink of ejecting himself from the tournament. Instead, he did what the U.S. Open asks those who want to stay around for the weekend and potentially have a shot at lifting the trophy — grind it out.

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