Tiger Woods is 5 shots off pace at US Open

Tiger Woods is five shots off the pace at the U.S. Open with Steve Stricker in the early lead.

It may have been a dream threesome. It was anything but a dreamy start for Tiger Woods at the U.S. Open, though. Playing in the tournament's power pairing with Phil Mickelson and Adam Scott, Woods opened with an unsightly double bogey at Torrey Pines on Thursday, a bad start to his first competitive round since knee surgery after the Masters.

The world's top-ranked player opened with a big hook into the caked-down kikuya rough. He hacked out with a wedge, then flew his approach over the green into more tangly grass. Unable to control that shot, either, he knocked the next shot about 8 feet past the hole and two-putted to start the day at 2-over par.

He hit a shot out of a fairway bunker on No. 4 to tap-in range for a birdie to get to 1-over but was still five shots off the early pace set by Steve Stricker, who had four birdies over his first eight holes, including a winding 20-footer on No. 16 to get to 4-under. (Stricker started on the back nine.)

Mickelson was 1 over after four holes and Scott was even. Mickelson played the first round on the 7,643-yard course, longest in major championship history, without a driver in the bag _ a notable difference for a player who once carried two of them for the Masters.

Woods came to the first tee box with his game face on. He was trying to avoid a repeat of what happened the last time he took this long a break. Returning from a layoff after the death of his father in 2006, Woods missed the cut at the U.S. Open at Winged Foot _ the first and only time he failed to make it to the weekend in a major.

Scott, ranked third in the world, greeted everyone with a left-handed handshake; he recently broke his right pinkie finger.

Mickelson, second in the world behind Woods, came to the first tee box and stood behind the lecturn used by the starter to organize his scorecard and pin sheet as several in the gallery shouted "Speech, speech."

Indeed, this was no usual threesome.

The USGA manipulated the pairings to put the world's top three on the course together for the first two days. About 100 media and photographers, as crowded as anything Woods has ever seen, lined the inside of the ropes to walk with the group down the first fairway. There were thousands of fans in the stands and lining the route to the green.

That was quite a contrast to the scene D.A. Points saw about an hour earlier. He hit the first shot of the tournament to near silence _ but that shot went straight down the fairway, a far cry from where Woods ended up.

One shot behind Stricker, who has won Comeback Player of the Year for two years in a row, was Patrick Sheehan, who played in the opening group with Points. There was a big group at 1-under, including K.J. Choi, Lee Westwood and two-time champion Lee Janzen.