Ryo Ishikawa started out to go aggressive to claim his first Japan Golf Open Championship title and add another to his Major victory which he has won in July's Japan PGA. But he couldn't make a pleasing start and marked 5 over for the day to settle at 72T.
"The score is 5 over, but the game itself wasn't that bad. As for my game, it is around 1 or 2 over play. At the hole I wanted to be aggressive with my 1W, I couldn't keep it on the fairways. I tried to control the distance and that made my body motion stop and pulled the shot to left."

As Ryo analyzed, he knows what to fix for tomorrow. But some bad luck made things worse for him on the last 2 holes. On Par 3, 238 yards 17th hole, his tee shot got caught in the bunker and the ball was buried. He managed to get it out, but it flew over the green in to the thick rough. His 3rd shot didn't make it to the green, and his 4th shot finally got close to the pin but he missed that short bogey putt to end up with double bogey.

Then on the 18th, his 2nd shot from the right-side roughs banged onto the tree right in front of him and bounced out to the left-side rough. His 3rd shot then got to the rough on the right side of the green, which led to 4 on 1 putt bogey. His 5 over par finish made Ryo do all the way down to 72T for the day.

"If you start to make mistakes here, it easily leads to bogey and double bogey. My score for today make it difficult for me to fight through tomorrow and on, but I will try to keep my mistakes to minimum and challenge whatever I could do in situation like this. I won't give up and still play aggressive."

Well known difficult course is being harsh on him, but his fighting spirit is not defeated yet.