Otherwise, this 152nd British Open kept acting like a classic British Open wind-wise, savaging many with scores that looked like many, and it nodded toward some wind veterans heading into the weekend: Irishman Shane Lowry leads at 7 under par, and Englishmen Justin Rose and major debutant Dan Brown are at 5 under after both came through the wilds of qualifying. Lowry, for one, won the 2019 British Open at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland as the wind sang, the skies brooded, the galleries boomed and the clouds wept heavily for joy. Scottie Scheffler, for another, lurks at 2 under with his six wins this year and his No. 1 ranking while hailing from a place prone to wind (Texas) and fielding a question about whether he thinks his name causes stress to other players by using his trademark level of bombast.

“Not really,” he said.

“I can’t wait to watch this weekend,” said McIlroy, whose triple-bogey 8 on No. 4 finished him off early, assured his major drought would reach 38 and made it the eighth time in that ludicrous span he has missed a major cut. Referring then to Lowry, he said: “He’s so creative. I think even just watching the coverage the last couple of days, that little sort of squeezy cut that he can hit, especially going out on that front nine, is going to be really helpful to him. Yeah, look, he relishes these conditions. The Open Championship is his favorite tournament in the world. He gets more up for this than anything else. I’m looking forward to cheering him on and hopefully him getting his second [claret] jug.”

He won’t have to contend with any of the people who couldn’t contend with Troon’s earnest wind off the Firth of Clyde, which reached midafternoon levels ideal — for sailing. It kept pummeling people right off the bat or at least before the turn, sending them into vegetation and agitation. It often sent people looking through wilderness for golf balls as if on treasure hunts. It dispatched Tiger Woods pretty much by No. 2, when his tee shot veered through the gray sky way left to a botanical bonanza and the 77 he piled atop his 79 seemed booked. He double bogeyed there, missed his third straight major cut and made off for five months of looking forward to that father-son event in December he dubbed “our fifth major.”

Justin Thomas, whose 68 on Thursday looked swell and contentious, slipped from third to 38th when his 78 featured this off-key chorus: bogeys on Nos. 2, 3, 4 and 6; double bogey on No. 5; triple bogey on No. 9. His cobbling of a back-nine 33 after his front-nine 45 qualified as herculean. Robert MacIntyre, the 27-year-old Scot who just won the Scottish Open with ample exhilaration and told of ample beverages thereafter, went through the first four holes at 7-5-5-8, meaning two triple bogeys and 8 over. “That was carnage,” he said. He, too, did well to hold together a 75 to make the carnage cut of 6 over by a stroke. Sahith Theegala made a triple-bogey 8 on No. 6, Elvis Smylie made a triple-bogey 8 on No. 4, David Puig made a triple-bogey 8 on No. 4, and Angel Hidalgo made a quadruple-bogey 9 on No. 4.

The front and the middle parts kicked the rear parts of a player the caliber of Wyndham Clark, 2023 U.S. Open champion and 2024 Olympian. He shot an 80, free-fell to 16 over and left. Japanese hopeful Aguri Iwasaki, 26, peppered his 91 with some numerals seldom seen in such highbrow events: consecutive 9s, a quintuple bogey on No. 13 and that rarely witnessed sextuple bogey on the par-3 No. 14, during which he had three bunker shots of four yards or shorter.

“I suppose the thing you’ve got here, you’ve got three different sixes,” the great Padraig Harrington said of the course sequences. “You’ve got six downward going out or, as we played them, into the wind. Then you have six in the middle that are really awkward. They’re really tricky. There’s blind shots. There’s gorse.”

At the famed Railway hole, No. 11, Lowry wound up making a double bogey but saying, “To be honest, I was happy enough leaving there with a 6.”

Also within that stage of the course, Joaquin Niemann’s quintuple-bogey 8 at the wee par-3 Postage Stamp, No. 8, deserves a review. He went into a green-side bunker. He went across to another green-side bunker. He went zero yards and stayed in that green-side bunker. Then he went 27 yards to another green-side bunker.

Question: “Then what was kind of going through your mind as you were going from …”

Niemann: “Bunker to bunker?”

Reporter: “Bunker to bunker.”

Niemann: “Just get it out of there.”

In a similar fate in a different place, McIlroy’s second shot from the native area somewhere near No. 4 moved two yards to portend that big-old 8 there. It left him finished in his own realistic mind, marking the second major occasion of the year when “the wind got the better of me,” as he put it of the Friday at the Masters and the Thursday and Friday here. “Yeah, I think once I made the 8 on the fourth hole, that was it,” he said. “Twenty-two holes into the event” — an event in which he figured to contend — “and I’m thinking about where I’m going to go on vacation next week.” He called it “a pretty meaningless 14 holes after that.”

The meaningful holes are left to Rose, the 2013 U.S. Open champion hoping for a big career autumn at 43, and to Brown, who said that after his opening-round lead, “I was knackered,” yet still shot a non-collapse 72. And they’re left to Lowry, who proved a grand front-runner at Portrush such that one observer asked whether the chasers should fret. “I don’t know,” the good-natured Lowry said, soon adding, “Honestly, I’m not sure Scottie Scheffler is too worried about anyone with the form he’s in.”

And the meaningful holes in a different way are left to Max Homa. His 28-foot attempt to make the cut rolled past McIlroy as it traveled, and when it plunked in, Homa, who called it “an out-of-body experience,” hollered. “I didn’t really expect to yell like I won a golf tournament,” he said. It led to a typically gracious hug thereafter from McIlroy, who walked off with that slight frown so familiar on an evening nicer than it had a right to be.