McIlroy is, thankfully, golf’s Speedy Gonzales

Still, to test the theory that Rory Make-It-Quick could or should be a model for golfing snails to emulate, I decided to gauge his opening round at Royal St. George’s not by the usual yardstick of birdies and bogeys, but with a stopwatch.

Over the first eight holes, I timed his tee shots and putts, but not his shots from the fairway or chips out of the rough, for the simple reason that it’s harder to establish at exactly which point the buildup to those shots — and thus the stopwatch — begins.

Nor was this exact science, because it is tough to have the precision of a lab experiment when you are kneeling in damp, deep grass under the mournful, spitting sky in southeast England.

But the results were clear nonetheless: McIlroy doesn’t hang around, and his hit-and-walk style makes him a pleasure to watch, even when his shots aren’t falling as sweetly as they did when he crushed the field at the U.S. Open. His play looks decisive because it’s rapid. That makes it exciting. It is, in short, golf as it should be.

His first eight tee shots — timed from the moment he planted his tee in the turf to him thwacking the ball — took, on average, about 19 seconds. The longest tee shot, 25 seconds, was on the par-4 first hole where he made bogey. The shortest, 14 seconds, was on the seventh where he made par.

He averaged about 23 seconds for each of his 13 putts over the first eight holes (that was at least three putts more than he would have liked). McIlroy generally doesn’t spend an eternity figuring out the lie of the green or practicing shots over and over before making them. When Ernie Els and Rickie Fowler, his partners, were playing, McIlroy seemed often to be thinking about or preparing his next shot, so that when his turn came, he was ready — as any courteous golfer should be.