Seamus Power hits his tee shot on the 13th hole during the first round of the 2024 U.S. Open at Pinehurst Resort & C.C. (Course No. 2) in Village of Pinehurst, N.C. on Thursday, June 13, 2024. (Chris Keane/USGA)

Séamus Power might not win the US Open, but he certainly didn’t lose it on day one after battling back from a nasty four-putt to open with a one-over 71 at Pinehurst No. 2.

The West Waterford man knew he had to take advantage of an early tee time and a course that was not yet on the edge of impossible.

He was a steady level par after eight holes, but after four-putting the 18th (his ninth) from just 30 feet for a double bogey six and dropping another shot at the second to be three over, he made three birdies in a row from the third to avoid taking a standing count in round one.

“I don’t think anyone is going to get too far away, and even still, guys are going to come backwards,” said Power, who made a “big putt” from six feet at his 10th to avoid having seven putts in the space of two holes.

“I said that to (my caddie) Simon when I birdied the 11th, my second hole, ‘Jeez if I play the next 70 holes in even par, I have a good chance of winning this thing’,” Power joked. “I do think it’s going to go like that.

“Tomorrow there’s going to be a record high. It’s going to be hot. It’s getting drier and I am guessing they are not going to back away from too many pins.

"It’s going to be tough going, constantly making decisions out there. I don’t think it was unfair, just tough.”

Power’s 71 left him six shots behind Patrick Cantlay, who fired a five-under 65 to lead Sweden’s Ludvig Aberg by a shot.

With the domed greens playing half their actual size due to the myriad run-offs, players are constantly living in fear. But even when the challenge looks straightforward, the course can still jump up and bite, as Power discovered at his ninth hole.

“It was probably one of the better birdie chances I had all day,” he said of a 30-footer at the 18th he ran nine feet past. “There wasn’t much break, straight up the hill, but as soon as it goes past, then all of a sudden you’re like, ‘Oh, crap’.

“Even the putt coming back down, if you don’t give it any speed, it’s going to snap right, so you give it a fraction too much and just miss it along the top edge and then you miss again.

“That just happens in golf, and hopefully, that’s the last time it happens to me this week, and we’ll see what we can do.

“It was a pity because there are not many putts you feel you could take a run at out of here, and I thought that was one of them. I guess it wasn’t."

Inevitably, Power left a 30-footer seven feet short at the very next green, the first, but saved par.

“That one almost got me too,” Power confessed.

But after he dropped another shot at the second after sand troubles, he knocked in a five-footer at the third after an aggressive tee shot, then made a slick 20-footer with five feet of break at the fourth before rolling in a 12-footer at the par-five fifth for his third birdie in a row.

“Yeah, it was definitely my first time to do that in a US Open,” he said of his birdie hat trick, which he followed with a sand save from 15 feet at the sixth.

“I hit some really nice shots there… So it was a nice little run there right when I kind of needed it.”

As for the constant stress of a US Open and the chances you can see a chip come back to you or scuttle over the green, he pointed out the importance of the short game.

“What sums it up well is the advanced stats stuff that we get,” he said. “One of the recommendations was trying not to have two short game shots in a row.

“And that's kind of how you feel out here because you have a shot, and you're like, I can try to hit a really good shot, or I can be a little conservative and hit it six or seven feet past But then, obviously, if those putts start missing, it's tough.

“So it’s great not to be out of it. If you three or four over this morning, you really won’t be able to do what you know you should be doing this week.”

That’s the situation facing Holywood’s Tom McKibbin (21), who matched 15-time major winner Tiger Woods by carding a four-over 74 on his major debut.

His arrival moment came at the par-three sixth when there was a wait on the tee and Woods suddenly appeared just feet away on the adjoining fourth tee.

“It was the first time I ever seen him hit a shot,” McKibbin beamed. “It was pretty cool and then the crowds that go with him. Incredible. I had a bit of a wait and watched him go off. Just cool to see him around and some of the guys.

“I have never seen crowds like this, don’t get it back at home, so it was cool to hear the applause but you never quite know how good the shot is until the ball finally stops. There were a few claps that you were just praying the ball was going to stay.”

One-under after five holes, he flew the green and double-bogeyed the 15th (his sixth) and mixed further bogeys at the 17th, first and eighth with great par-saving puts at the 16th, fifth and sixth.

“Obviously, it’s a very hard golf course, very tricky, but overall, it was all right,” McKibbin said of a performance that might have resulted in a sub-par score at a regular DP World Tour event.

“You can hit so many good shots that don’t even get close to hitting the green, so that’s the difficulty. It’s definitely the hardest course I have played, definitely the hardest with the greens and the hardest challenge.

"I only really hit one bad shot into the first, and it plugged in the left bunker, so I had literally no chance to hit the green from there. Besides that, I left them all in reasonable spots. I was quite happy with that. Life can be hard around the greens.”

McKibbin added: "It was nice, I played quite solid. I got it nicely around the greens the first couple of holes and then one bad one, and after that, it was such a hard test, and you didn’t want to try and push too much to try and get some birdies back because you’d just keep racking up numbers.”

The Newtownabbey star has seen the course slowly transformed since he first saw it on Sunday, though his strategy has not changed.

"The mindset was pretty good, very similar,” he said. "Obviously the golf course changed a lot since I first saw it on Sunday but I’d sort of a very similar game plan, just a bit more to work out when hitting into the greens because on Sunday and Monday, the balls were stopping pretty quick but today you were getting eight, nine 10 yards of release on them, so you just had to be more precise.”

McKibbin is slowly becoming accustomed to a test that is far different to the challenges he regularly faces on the DP World Tour.

"I think I was a lot more comfortable,” he said. "When you see the pins, and they were so close to the edge, I think the practice rounds were quite hard because you were in the middle of the greens, and if you hit it slightly one way or the other, you missed the green no matter what.

“Knowing the pin was on the right or the left, you could aim a bit offline and still hit the green, which was quite comforting for me. But definitely a challenge."

Had he played as he did on Thursday in a regular European event, he believes he might have shot around par

“It would have been under par probably, or maybe around par,” he said. "I hit a lot of good shots that just got rejected by the greens, and I think if I played that type of golf back in Europe, it’d be a decent enough score.”