The "magical week" of Justin Rose's memory had already been consigned to ancient history as he trudged, boyish face first into the driving rain and wind, through the deep, deep dunes lining Royal Birkdale's sixth fairway.

"Taylor Made 99! Taylor Made 99!" shouted an excitable marshal ahead of him, imploring the hardiest stewards in sport to help find the folk hero's ball.

And as Rose, with that trademark cap needing a woolly hat plonked over the top just to keep the gale from tossing it into the Irish Sea, wearily entered this lost world, you could almost see him thinking 'Did I really ever call this place my wonderland?'

The smiling, carefree 17-year-old of legend, arms raised aloft to a sunny sky after pitching into the hole at Birkdale's 18th and pitching himself into instant legend, was now the hard-bitten 27-year-old pro loaded down with expectation and desperately trying to rescue his latest Open challenge before it had hardly even begun.

Well, it says much about how that one-time boy wonder has grown up that, despite this most trying of starts and the irritation of picking up a warning for slow play after nines holes as the weather played havoc with his concentration, he still had the character to play the second nine in level par and come off with a 74 to share the early clubhouse lead.

Still, it was his tribulations on that monster of a sixth hole - a dog-legged 499 yard brute, into the wind, uphill, a par five preposterously masquerading as a par four - which seemed to sum up the nightmarish task facing everyone here on a morning designed to bring the world's elite to their waterproof-clad knees.

Rose had just bogeyed the fifth when a second consecutive duck hook from the tee saw his ball sail into such wild territory that he worked wonders even to extricate it only to find to his chagrin it hadn't quite clear the rough stuff.

By the time he walked off to the seventh tee, having recorded a double bogey and already three over for the Championship before the clock had even stuck 10, it was time to remember what Ernie Els had warned everyone about on the eve of the Championship. There would, the Big Easy said, be big difficulty out there if the weather got up and it would be a day for the patient, the plucky and the even-tempered.

Rose, it had to be said, fitted the bill perfectly. It is hard to give an impression of quite how wretched it was out there this morning, suffice to say that sturdy brollies, blown to smithereens by the wind, were being chucked in the bins. It was a marvel that these guys could even grip the club, let alone make a rare birdie; Rose seemed to be going through new pairs of gloves every other hole.

And on such a day, it can only have been an encouragement to have a smiling Open monument by your side. Tom Watson, at 58 years young, would have been forgiven for opening his curtains this morning, taking a peek at the deluge and then popping back under the covers, thinking to himself 'Oh well, five titles will do'.

Instead, like the fabled champion he is, he teed off at 7.36am, honestly believing he was still capable of winning number six, 25 years since he won his last here on these very links. Would you believe it, by 7.56am, he walked off the first green, actually leading the Open outright after arcing a perfect approach through the rain to about two feet of the pin. He bogeyed the second but Watson's skill in such treacherous conditions still seemed so sublime that, as he covered the first eight holes in a splendid one-over par, he was effectively giving his young playing partners, Rose and Aaron Baddeley, a bit of a masterclass.

While the pair of them agonised over every shot, taking an age to decide how to play every hole in the shifting weather patterns - at one point, just when the rain had cleared, it suddenly started bucketing down even harder - Watson just made it look all look like a gentle breeze, standing between shots with his hands in pockets and smiling benignly at everyone on a day, frankly, not designed for smilers.

Watson's sunny countenance can only have soothed Rose, who finally landed a well-deserved warning for his snail-like progress at the ninth hole. Some critics have suggested that Justin is just too nice a bloke and perhaps not imbued with enough steel to win the big ones, yet he only had to glance at his distinguished companion to know what nonsense that is.

Watson is eight years Sandy Lyle's senior but, even though the homeward stretch was clearly a trial for him as his diminutive frame kept getting battered and the shots began to leak away, there was never any way that he was going to surrender and suffer the sort of disapproving muttering which had greeted the Scot's withdrawal.

He, too, finished with a 74, but his three birdies had been more than anyone else on the course had mustered, and Rose followed his lead with an exercise in damage limitation on the homeward stretch almost ending with a birdie, just as he'd finished a decade ago. Only this time he didn't pitch in from 59 yards; instead, he missed a putt from five foot. No matter. Gloria Gayner would have approved; Rose had survived.