Rory McIlroy wanted to feel the heat of competition in the ZOZO Championship but ended up feeling steam shooting out of his ears after breaking a club in frustration on the final hole of an opening 73 in Los Angeles.

The world No 5 is painfully aware that he hasn’t won since last November and failed to seriously contend since the PGA Tour returned in June - a worrying combination with just three weeks to go to the Masters.

He’s hoping to complete the career Grand Slam at Augusta National and while it’s not imperative, he knows that competing to win would be the best possible preparation after a stop-start season that’s been marred by COVID-19.

Sadly for McIlroy, it appears that he has considerable work to do after another rollercoaster round left him nine strokes behind Colombia’s Sebastian Muñoz at Sherwood Country Club, tied for 64th in the 77-man field.

He went out in an encouraging three-under 33 on a day of low scoring but hit only three greens on the back nine as a result of hitting just two fairways.

After dropping shots at the 10th and 11th, the birdied the par-five 13th but then bogeyed the 14th and double-bogeyed the short 15th following a visit to water to slip to one-over.

He rebounded with birdies at the 16th and 17th but hit a fairway wood into the trees at the last and after laying up in the centre of the fairway, 135 yards from the pin, he pushed his third into greenside rough and was disgusted that he leaned hard on the shaft of the club, snapping it in half.

He ended the opening day ranked 69th for strokes gained off the tee, 77th for strokes gained from tee to green, 72nd for strokes gained on approach and tied 66th for scrambling.

He expected his game to deteriorate somewhat in the CJ Cup last week, where he bookended rounds of 69 and 66 with a 73 and a 74.

This time, he’s started poorly but at least has another three days to get things right.

“If anything, I think sometimes your game actually deteriorates as the week goes on because you've put so much work into the execution and the technical stuff and I think it's almost by Saturday, Sunday, if you're in contention, you're thinking so much more about the result rather than just the process that your game starts to maybe become a little more reactive and deteriorate a little bit more,” he said on Wednesday. 

“And then that's why it's good to use weeks in between or Mondays and Tuesdays to reset and sort of go again. That's certainly what happened to me last week. I felt like it was sort of one of those, it was like a bell curve where it sort of wasn't great the first day, it got sort of good Friday, Saturday, and then it started to go again on Sunday. You reset here and you try to go again.”

As for Muñoz, he had just five pars on the card, making two eagles and eight birdies in a 64 to lead by a shot from Tyrrell Hatton and Justin Thomas as Tiger Woods shot a lacklustre 76 in what was just his 20th competitive round this year and his first since he missed the cut in the US Open a month ago.