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The post How did Brian Harman distract himself during Open Championship week? A sci-fi novel appeared first on Golf.

It wasn’t because he was trying to unplug and focus or anything like that. He just couldn’t find anything to watch.

“You going to watch cricket over there? There’s nothing to do,” Harman told GOLF Subpar co-hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz on this week’s episode. “The sun never goes down and they watch cricket all night.”

Putting those shots fired at cricket aside, Harman told the guys he bided his time during the long English days by reading. His book of choice was the 1965 sci-fi novel “Dune”, by Frank Herbert. If that sounds familiar, the book was the basis of the film series of the same name starring Timothee Chalamet and Zendaya. The first part of the series came out in 2021 with the second due out later this fall.

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“I watched it somewhere and I’m like, that’s interesting,” Harman said. “I started reading the books now I’m like, ‘Oh, the sequel is coming out in November. Can’t wait!'”

Sleeping on a huge lead in a major at Royal Liverpool two weeks ago wasn’t a completely new situation for Harman. He led through three rounds at the 2017 U.S. Open before losing to Brooks Koepka. He admittedly didn’t handle it that well, saying he may have only gotten three or four hours of sleep that night.

But with a book to occupy his mind, Harman was far more comfortable with his five-shot weekend lead.

“I did a really good job,” Harman said. “I got a good 9 to 10 hours both Saturday and Sunday and Friday and Saturday night. So I felt really good. I was really comfortable over there.”

For more from Harman, including how he dealt with crowds at the Open and what he thought of a ‘Saturday Night Live’ legend predicting his win, check out the full episode below.

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The post Lessons from Hoylake: A hidden golfing gem, a contentious par-3, the next Brian Harman and more appeared first on Golf.

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Add this to your bucket list

By James Colgan

A short drive up the road from Hoylake is a course soaked in golf’s elixir of life. The shame of it all? Hardly anyone on this side of the pond has heard of it.

Wallasey Golf Club is perhaps best known to the golf world for an early 20th century member named Frank Stableford — a.k.a., the guy who invented Stableford scoring. As legend has it, Stableford was hacking his way around Wallasey one day when he figured there ought to be a more enjoyable way to score golf. He got to thinking and, after a moment, realized that assigning point values to hole scores was the perfect solution.

Today it is hard to get more than a handful of footsteps at Wallasey without a reminder of Stableford’s contributions to the game. But if we’re being honest, even that hook undersells Wallasey as a golf destination.

Early in Open week, we arrived to find the course sun-drenched and properly gusty; ideal conditions for a links golf afternoon. The round that followed was nothing shy of biblical.

The course was simply wonderful. A wide variety of funky and quirky holes weaved through a dramatic, seaside dunescape. A twisting routing (and shifting winds) kept the shot variety constantly changing. Walking paths were mowed wide enough for golfers to walk alongside one another, like green freeways. Plaques next to four of the tee boxes revealed Old Tom Morris (yes, that Old Tom Morris) had designed four of the course’s quirkiest greens.

We didn’t finish on account of an event happening on the 18th (a story for another day), but it didn’t quite matter. It was one of the rounds of my year, and a destination I’ll be recommending to golfers traveling to the UK for the Open for years to come.

‘The next Brian Harman’

By Josh Berhow

Throughout his entire 2023 Open Championship triumph, Brian Harman looked surprisingly calm. He showed little emotion until the end. Across the Atlantic, the same can’t be said for everyone.

“They are like your own kids. You are still living and dying with every shot just like I did as a coach,” said Chris Haack, the Georgia men’s golf coach, who was also leading the Bulldogs years ago when Harman and several other Tour pros (like Brendon Todd, Russell Henley and Chris Kirk) were coming through. “Every putt they make I probably fist pump more than they did.”

Haack watched nearly every shot of The Open on Sunday. He had to leave to catch a flight after Harman hit his tee shot on the par-3 17th, but the damage was already done at that point anyway. Harman two-putted for par — he did that a lot last week — and went to the 18th tee with a six-shot lead. Five shots later, he won The Open.

Haack was obviously giddy over Harmon’s victory, but he was also proud of a post-round interview he saw a day or two earlier. Harman was asked about nerves, and he admitted they were of course there — you just have to battle them and overcome them. Haack appreciated the honesty.

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While Haack and Harman don’t talk regularly, they remain close. They see each other at the occasional golf camp and are still comfortable enough to stay in touch. Not long ago, for example, a random and funny moment found Haack and one of his players discussing the size of a moose versus an elk. They were trying to figure out, for no reason in particular, which one was bigger.

“I know,” Haack thought, thinking of avid outdoorsmen he’s coached. “Let’s call Brian. He’ll know.”

When reached on Sunday night to chat about Harman, Haack was now in a rental car. His destination? The same tournament Harman won back in 2003.

“I’m going to the U.S. Junior now,” Haack said, “and I’m going to try and find the next Brian Harman.”

The joyful quirks of Open Championship week

By Dylan Dethier

My week in Wirral began at the Manchester airport, where I and my colleague Josh Berhow waged war against the system for a while in an effort to recover the golf clubs of our other colleague, Darren Riehl, who’d arrived a couple of days earlier.

The clubs were there. We knew they were there from an AirTag in the bag. But it was still nearly impossible to crack through to get to someone who could actually make them accessible. The U.K.’s insistence on separating the baggage claim area from the rest of the world only made this a thornier problem.

If you’re rolling your eyes and saying OK, Dylan, get to the point, then I agree with your instincts. There’s literally nothing more eye-rollable than media people talking about their luggage. But the two-hour acquisition of a bag that’s 30 feet away on the other side of a wall is metonymic for the Open Championship experience.

Part of the joy of the week is seeing seaside U.K. towns positively overrun with golf-mad spectators. My first Open was in Portrush in 2019 on the tip of Northern Ireland; I’m fairly sure there’d never been that many people in that town in its entire history. St. Andrews last year was my next Open; that’s a town with more complete infrastructure and better familiarity with the demands of hosting an Open, but still — it was delightfully overwhelmed. Fans streamed from the course into the streets and took over outside the pubs, soaking in the peak moments of a U.K. golfing summer.

Royal Liverpool is tucked between two towns (two train stops) with West Kirby to the south and Hoylake to its north, and its proximity to Liverpool meant there wasn’t quite the same level of system overload. But it still existed. The pubs were overrun. Fans (and players, and media) flocked to the few spots that would serve you food after 9 p.m. Everyone seems excited to have you in town — but not quite excited enough to keep their kitchen open. Fair play. (And shoutout to local hotspots Tasting Kitchen and Domino’s, each lifesaving and delicious in its own way.) There’s an energy to it that I’ve still not quite felt anywhere else in the golfing world.

It’s some cross between a golf convention and the Quidditch World Cup. There’s a shared joy in the effort it takes to get there and the world you’ve entered once you arrive. And it helps if your luggage makes it, too.

Rewinding our thoughts on “Little Eye”

By Sean Zak

It was already obvious on Monday afternoon before The Open, when the most-packed grandstand at Royal Liverpool was not the 1st, nor the 18th, but rather the stand along the 17th green. Everyone was curious how this devious little par-3 would look, feel, play, you name it.

Jon Rahm splashed bunker shots from the cavernous trap to the right of the green. The first clanked thinly off the flag and off the back of the putting surface. In a few moments, Joe Skovron, Tom Kim’s caddie, paced around the green and clarified his strategy aloud: Don’t go right, don’t go left, don’t be short. Missing on this hole was going to be chaotic.

On paper, the hole named “Little Eye” seemed like a perfect test for the best players in the world. A tiny one-shotter that makes professionals and their bag-carriers uncomfortable. But in a matter of 24 hours, a couple of caddies had already sounded off to the press about its shortcomings. A couple of players followed suit. Media picked up on the angst and poured kerosene on this idea before a single par was made in the tournament.

This isn’t a proper test. This is a horrible hole for the membership. What are they trying to accomplish here? They were all fair opinions, made in the moment. They were reactive, maybe even knee-jerk. But they were also three years too late.

Anyone who really wanted to dislike the newest hole at RLGC should have responded to it in 2020, when it was announced in a press release alongside numerous other changes to this 152-year-old golf course. The entire history of Royal Liverpool is about changes, both big and small, but this one was sneakily made in conjunction with lengthening its neighbor, the 18th hole.

Two tees were added to the 18th, in the northwest corner of the property, with nowhere to put them. Nowhere but on the ground previously owned by what was the 15th green. The goal was obvious: make the 18th longer. Make it a difficult driving hole, forcing players to hit the longest club in their bag and hit it well if they wanted a finishing birdie. But adding length to the 18th was only necessary because of golf’s most modern dilemma. How far the ball travels and how efficiently modern equipment can launch it leads to an unsustainable borrowing exercise. In order to make one hole more difficult, on a fixed amount of land, they had to steal from another hole. Flipping around a par-3 to play uphill at the Irish Sea was an attempt to create excitement, but also the most creative way of maximizing space for the 18th.

So while the 17th was marred in consternation from grumpy caddies and players, the conclusion on the 18th was quietly just fine. The 609-yard par-5 played to an average of 4.978 strokes, or 0.44 strokes higher than 2014. That’s an improvement for the course that was concerned about new scoring records being broken. Great success, right? It’s hard to deem it a total success when immediate reports this week said change would already be coming for the 17th hole.

Whether or not that will become true, it remains fascinating how we talk about golf course architecture built to test the best players in the world and how much we allow those best players to weigh in on the process themselves. We tend to get stuck where we were last week, embroiled in a discussion about course manipulation gone wrong when we should be talking about course manipulation as a last stand.

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The short answer — the most honest one — is that he lost. Rory shot four rounds at even par or better to finish T6, seven shots behind Brian Harman, who channeled four unconscious rounds to blow away the rest of the field, McIlroy included, and win his first Claret Jug. In the loss, Rory earned his 30th career major top-10 and finished his ninth straight year without a major championship victory. Of course, the former has a lot to do with us caring about the latter. And if we’re just doing short answers, nine years might be the only stat that matters at all.

But the long answer reveals something about these previous nine years that may be of interest to Mr. McIlroy. And, in this instance, the long answer is actually a question: sometime in these last seven months, has Rory lost a little bit of himself?

Something was off. That was clear to even the most passive observer of McIlroy’s early-week schedule at Royal Liverpool. First he canceled his early-week press conference the morning after a thrilling victory at the Scottish Open, leaving himself no opportunity to speak before the final major of the year at the course where he won in 2014. As the week wore on he made it a point to keep a low profile, playing a quick morning practice round and hardly sticking around for much longer after. The message was clear: the week was to be about golf, and golf only.

In the hours leading up to the tournament, his efforts seemed to have their intended effect. Nobody knew much of anything about Rory. His voice had not dominated the early-week headlines. His name appeared less on this website and on others in the industry. As the tournament’s betting favorite, he wasn’t an afterthought — but despite being the host site’s most recent champion he wasn’t the center of attention, either.

But then play began and everything seemed to fade back to normal. Rory looked distressed on the golf course. His game fell into the usual tendencies of a player pressing too hard: too cautious in some moments; too nervy in others. He looked like a Ferrari stuck in first gear — the harder he revved, the more frustration he seemed to elicit. When he spoke after his first round of even-par 71 he wore the same attentiveness, but none of the usual candor.

“Two over through twelve, to get it back to even par, I’m pretty happy,” he said on three different occasions during one five-question stint, a wall firmly placed between himself and the (sizeable) gathering of media.

The differences in his demeanor were particularly noticeable when juxtaposed with his competitors. While Rory seemed to struggle with fully engaging his enormous talent, Jon Rahm, fiery but unquestionably authentic in his first two rounds, played his way back into the tournament with one of the rounds of his life in a Saturday 63. While Rory spoke tersely and carefully, Harman, the tournament leader, spoke freely. He sounded thoroughly comfortable in his own skin and honest about the pressures of the moment. McIlroy didn’t speak after his Saturday 69, a round that advanced him slightly on the leaderboard but also left him too far back to reasonably contend.

The irony, of course, is that Rory has spent the better part of the last two decades being exactly this: thoughtful, honest, earnest, accessible, passionate. He has been the sport’s ideal ombudsman. He’s also played no shortage of rounds that showcase the full breadth of his ability, which remains in its own class in the sport.

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The strange part was not that he decided to change the way he presents himself — that much was understandable in the wake of so much turmoil in the sport and so much personal attention placed upon him. The strange part was: why now?

Perhaps he is merely trying to shut out the media and to rid himself of any distractions from tournament week. That’s a fair justification. But it doesn’t explain why he looks so tense even when he isn’t standing in front of a press gaggle, and it doesn’t seem like he’s playing with increased freedom nor joy in the last three majors, even while his media obligations have dwindled.

Rory’s awoke Sunday a safe distance off the lead and his play awoke soon thereafter. He launched a furious comeback, the same kind we’ve dozens of times over these last nine years, making birdie on three of the first five holes. He ultimately fell one shot short — of second place. Brian Harman had run away with a six-shot victory and Rory had gone another year without a major win.

As he arrived back in the scorer’s area, he looked like he couldn’t decide whether to scream or sob. But by the time he approached the public again, he offered his strangest response of the week: apathy.

“I don’t think that way,” he said when asked about his major-less streak, which will extend into its tenth year in 2024. “I think about trying to go and win a fourth FedExCup here in a couple weeks’ time, go try and win a fifth Race to Dubai, go and win a fifth Ryder Cup. I just keep looking forward.”

He smiled as he said that last part. There might have been a part of him that meant it, but even the most passive observer could see that most of him did not.

It’s a shame we didn’t see that larger part of Rory, neither in the press gallery nor on the course.

The sport is at its best when he is at his most authentic. It seems Rory is, too.

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What’s crazy is he’d also felt that way on Thursday, the day he’d hit the opening tee shot of this year’s Open Championship. Jordan is from here, out on England’s Wirral Peninsula, and he plays his golf at Royal Liverpool, this year’s Open host. So when he qualified for the Open, the R&A awarded the local kid the ceremonial position of first peg in the ground.

But then the local kid played his way onto the leaderboard. And then he played well enough to stay there. A gutty 69 on Saturday left him just outside the top 10 entering the final round, which is how Sunday became incredibly important.

“Obviously this was a completely new experience, really, in terms of the pressure from the support and from the course and everything like that,” he said.

It wasn’t until a half-hour after his round concluded that Jordan finally reached the microphone to address the assembled press at the close of the most meaningful day of his golfing life. But he still wore the same wide, toothy grin that had spread across his face on the 18th green, where he’d poured in a birdie putt in the pouring rain for a round of one-under-par 70 that secured him a top-10 finish.

“It was just the perfect finish to what has been the most unbelievable week,” he said. “I just so wanted to knock it in for everyone who’s supported me, just to have them go mental one last time. They stuck with me — even in the rain like this.”

How does anything else in his career compare?

“Oh, this has been the best. This has hands down been the best,” he said. “Apart from winning it, I can’t imagine it being much better.”

ALEX FITZPATRICK qualified for the Open at West Lancashire, some 45 minutes north of Hoylake, the same site as Jordan. He, too, had entered the week as a nice story — how cool for Matt Fitzpatrick’s kid brother to be here and the two of them playing the same field! — and then had fought his way into contention with a seven-birdie Saturday 65. He birdied the first on Sunday but bogeyed the second and couldn’t make a push. Still, on easily the biggest stage of his life he managed a T17 finish. That was undeniably impressive. In the minutes after his finish he was already bracing himself for the letdown that will come from playing in any other tournament after this.

“No disrespect to the Challenge Tour, it’s the tour I play on,” he said, referring to his home circuit, a step below the DP World Tour. “But you play against the best players in the world and it’s a major championship — I think a lot of things would be a bit of a come-down from this.”

JASON DAY hadn’t logged a top-30 finish in a major championship since 2020 and he’d missed five cuts in nine starts since then. Now he’d finished T2. It was a monumental step forward in major contention; he hit it great, chipped it great, putted it great. It was a lucrative finish that promised FedEx Cup points and OWGR points and a nice boost of confidence, too. But as he stepped to the microphone he couldn’t help but get distracted. On the television screen next to him, he watched Brian Harman stare down a six-foot par putt at No. 18 to secure a six-shot win. Harman rolled it in the middle.

“What a feeling,” Day said wistfully.

TOM KIM had success arrive at his doorstop so quickly after his arrival on the world stage that it’d been difficult to manage the expectations that came knocking soon thereafter. In the weeks after his star was born at the Presidents Cup, he won the Shriners. And he logged two top-10s to start 2023. But then came a dry spell, 11 events with just one top 20, the sort of semi-slump that feels like an eternity when you’re 21. This week wasn’t all smooth, either: when he sprained his ankle on Thursday after slipping off the patio at his rental house, he considered pulling out. He toughed it out instead, shooting 67 on Sunday, tied for low round of the day, to finish T2.

“It’s very, very satisfying,” he said with an exhale. “It’s been tough at times this year.”

CAMERON YOUNG, like Matthew Jordan, birdied the 18th. But this isn’t his home course and this isn’t his dream event and, unlike Jordan, he finished runner-up at last year’s Open plus a half-dozen other PGA Tour events since the beginning of his young PGA Tour career and he’s desperately hungry to turn those seconds into firsts. In other words, there would be no moral victory.

“I think there’s some positives to take,” he offered in an effort at optimism. Then he got real. “My level of excitement with tied for eighth is absolutely zero.

“But I mean, yet again, I put myself in a position to win a major championship and had an unfortunate day. One of these times the unfortunate day will be the next Tuesday or something and not Sunday. Yeah.”

RORY MCILROY’s Sunday wasn’t the sort of heartbreaking near-miss we saw at last month’s U.S. Open nor last year’s Open Championship. That must have made it easier to maintain perspective post-round, to talk about how well he’s been playing in these events, to express optimism about the rest of the season instead of focusing on a major drought now nearing a decade.

“Over the last two years would I have loved to have picked one of those off that I finished up there? Absolutely,” he said. “But every time I tee it up or most times I tee it up, I’m right there.”

TOMMY FLEETWOOD was destined to win this tournament, particularly after he opened with 66 to lead the field. You likely heard the rest of the story — how he grew up 20 miles from here, how his caddie still lives even closer than that — because he was the story. Fleetwood played in the final group on Saturday but was outdueled by Harman. On Sunday his charge never quite materialized and his run at the podium fell short in painful fashion with a triple-bogey 6 at the penultimate hole. His birdie at 18 only made the finish that much more heartbreaking, knowing what could have been.

Those are the stories of this week’s Open Championship. Some of the stories, at least. Jordan showed the power of positivity, Fitzpatrick showed confidence, Day showed hunger, Kim showed satisfaction, Young showed frustration, McIlroy showed optimism and Fleetwood showed the tragedy of sport. That’s a full day. When you add the firm turf and the sideways rain and the hearty fans, that’s the type of full day that could only happen at the Open.

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For more than a year now, the golf world’s attention has focused on the battle between the PGA Tour and LIV. Conversation has focused on purse sizes, on signing bonuses, on lawsuits, on new formats, on playing schedules, on teams, on defections on to what extent golfing drama can be manufactured. But that ignores the foundations of the game. That ignores the stuff people really care about. For all the commoditization of the professional game, for every soul-crushing reference to professional golf as a “product,” four stops per year still have the sort of meaning that can’t be focus-grouped, and significance follows from there.

There was an undercurrent of all that other stuff at Royal Liverpool, of course. These days there always is. Monday marked PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan’s first day back at work after an extended absence. It also marked the beginning of a new slate of rumors and musings about his future at the Tour and about the prospects, potential and profile of his proposed deal with the Saudi Public Investment Fund. Jon Rahm vouched for Monahan’s future, offering a counterpoint to other pros who admitted he’d lost their trust.

Monahan’s isn’t the only future that’s in jeopardy. While LIV-related questions are now largely confined to the early-week portions of these big-time events, Cameron Smith offered a rosy view for the league’s future, declaring that despite the uncertainty he was “optimistic that LIV will be around in the future” while endorsing Greg Norman to continue as commissioner. Brooks Koepka was asked to give a performance review for Norman but was decidedly less effusive, declaring that he’s “done fine” at the helm and then, pressed for further details, repeating himself.

“He’s done fine. Everybody else, it’s up to them. Everybody is allowed to interpret it different ways.”

That’s an appropriate line for this PGA Tour-LIV divide, or relationship, or partnership, or merger, wherever we settle. People interpreting things different ways. That’s life.

But the simplest, cruelest, most compelling test in golf remains quite black and white. That would be the binary of major championships: Did you win or did you not?

“Well, they’re the ones you want to win,” Day said, offering the simplest and best explanation of golf’s four biggest tournaments. He’s the owner of one. “At some point I’m going to get off one and get my second one.”

There are lessons beyond that binary, of course. The significance of the tournament leads to the significance of the stories. There’s more at stake than a winner and 150-odd losers. And there were lessons everywhere at the Open Championship. Lessons of hard work, of perseverance, of gratitude.

In one case the same player taught us all three.

BRIAN HARMAN has been at this a while. Before Sunday he had racked up 29 top 10s since 2017, the most of any PGA Tour player without a win in that stretch. And, some 30 minutes after he finished off an unthinkable six-stroke victory over the best golfers in the world, he told us how it felt to keep coming up short.

“You know, I’ve always had a self-belief that I could do something like this. It’s just when it takes so much time it’s hard not to let your mind falter, like maybe I’m not winning again,” he said. “I’m 36 years old. Game is getting younger. All these young guys coming out, hit it a mile, and they’re all ready to win. Like, when is it going to be my turn again?”

This didn’t seem a particularly obvious week for him to get across the line, at least not until Sunday morning, when he stepped onto the first tee with a five-shot lead. He faced boos. He was ready for them; he knows the drill.

“Everybody’s got their team they’re rooting for,” he said. But the boos spurred him on. If they’d wanted him to falter, he said, they should have been nicer to him.

Majors are career-changing tournament wins. They’re life-changing, too. But only if you let ’em.

“I’ll be in some better tee times. I’ll have to do a couple more interviews at golf tournaments,” Harman said, asked for the differences. “But I’ve got a great family. I’ve got hobbies that I really like. I have a very comfortable life that I enjoy. I wouldn’t want my life to change any.”

That’s the beauty of Harman as champion. He’s dreamt of this moment, of how it might feel to be a major champion, ever since he was a talented junior golfer. But he wanted to win because it would be cool to win, not because it might lead to something else. The only something else he’s interested in is the new tractor he ordered; it should be there when he returns.

Because golfers’ resumes are so closely aligned with their career major total, there’s extra pressure for top-performing pros to win one or two or several during their peak. But it’s tough to keep everyone happy! It’s natural to guess how many majors Scheffler and Rahm and McIlroy might win in a given year. That means it becomes easy to ignore the other talented pros, like Brian Harman, who could well win one, too.

So what’s the lesson here? The lesson is to keep your eye on the ball. We’ll spill plenty of internet ink in the coming months breaking down the latest in lawsuits and deals and personnel decisions. We’ll eagerly cover the playoffs and we’ll crown a FedEx Cup champion and a Race to Dubai champ, too. Don’t get me wrong; all this stuff matters. But the lesson is that everything non-major only matters because the majors really matter.

Majors are rare and they’re precious and there aren’t enough of them to go around. Any time you make one yours, you’d better cherish it. That’s the lesson. Jon Rahm’s 2023 was a success because he won the Masters. Brooks Koepka’s 2023 was a success because he won the PGA. Wyndham Clark’s 2023 was a success because he won the U.S. Open. Now Brian Harman’s 2023 is a success, too.

Matthew Jordan’s 2023 is a success, too, because he did something meaningful and significant. Let’s take that a step further, just to indulge ourselves: Our 2023 is a success for having watched.

Major season is over. The next eight months can’t come soon enough.

The writer welcomes your comments at dylan_dethier@golf.com.

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The crowds at the Open Championship are unlike any other in golf. They’re loud, they’re boisterous, and they’re strikingly, perhaps even strangely polite … unless you’re a journeyman American trying to win their event.

After a lifetime’s worth of golf events attended within the borders of the United States, I traveled out to Great Britain for the first time to cover this year’s Open Championship. I’d heard a lot about what to expect from those in attendance — their passion for golf, their rabid knowledge, their utmost respect for the tournament and its traditions. But when Brian Harman began his scorching run down the stretch at Royal Liverpool, I was surprised to find the fans uninhibited.

“You don’t have the stones for this!” Harman recalled being told on Saturday while he played with fan-favorite Tommy Fleetwood.

The jeers I heard from a handful of the others in crowd were even less friendly. But ultimately it didn’t matter. The 36-year-old from Savannah, Ga. took home his first major championship by a stunning six strokes on Sunday in Hoylake, and when it was time for him to win the Claret Jug, the Royal Liverpool faithful came around to celebrate him in kind.

They are where we’ll start this week’s Golfer Index, taking stock of the golf world on the heels of the final major of the year.

Open Championship stock report

The Gallery: Stock UP

Yes, they were chippy. But chippy is fun, and it’s how most of us would be in this environment. It was striking to see how passionate and knowledgeable the folks at Hoylake were. Passion is what separates a sport from a hobby, and in this instance, there was no confusing where golf stood.

The TV Ratings: Stock DOWN

You might not like the suggestion that Brian Harman’s victory was lacking juice, but the numbers do not lie. Harman’s blowout win on Sunday at Royal Liverpool was the least-watched Open Championship since 2015, when the tournament was broadcast on cable (ESPN) and resulted in a Monday finish. That’s not great for the folks at NBC, who pour millions into this tournament each year.

Jon Rahm’s fear factor: Stock UP

Jon Rahm did not win the Open, but he certainly reminded the field why he is a terrifying competitor to go up against. His Saturday 63, the lowest score at Liverpool in Open Championship history, was a reminder that few players in golf possess his raw blend of power and touch. His dominant performance at the 2021 Ryder Cup looms large as the golf world’s attention turns to Rome.

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Max Homa’s major resume: Stock UP

He’d somehow never recorded a top-10 in his major championship career prior to Sunday at Royal Liverpool. Now he heads into the PGA Tour postseason having bolstered his resume sufficiently to find himself on this year’s Ryder Cup team, which would be his first.

Rory McIlroy’s major resume: Stock NEUTRAL

Thirty top-10s in majors, including four wins, is great. But I bet he’d trade all of them if it meant one more victory on the board.

U.S. Ryder Cup clarity: Stock DOWN

Brian Harman could be a freaky-good match play competitor for the U.S. considering his blend of off-the-tee consistency and putting prowess. Still, he was on the outside looking in when last weekend started, and now he is all but entrenched on the U.S. roster. That means close to half of the group of Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Tony Finau, Sam Burns, Cam Young, and Keegan Bradley will not find themselves on the American side.

Good for Harman; bad for almost everyone else.

Justin Thomas’ roster spot: Stock TEETERING

Justin Thomas earned a lot of ink for his Thursday 82 at the Open. Now he’s down at the 3M Open attempting to prove he’s deserving of a roster spot by virtue of his Ryder Cup experience.

My guess is that his spot is pretty safe as a veteran presence on Zach Johnson’s roster. But if his game doesn’t turn around quickly, things could get very dicey, very fast.

Adrian Meronk’s roster spot: Stock LURKING

A comatose Ryder Cup sleeper for you: Adrian Meronk, the Polish pro who is 48th in the world ranking, and 11th on the European team’s Ryder Cup World Points ranking. He boosted his stock with a T23 finish at the Open, but his real prowess has to do with his course experience. Meronk won the Italian Open at Ryder Cup host Marco Simone earlier this year, and finished second at the same event at Marco Simone in 2021.

He would count as something of a surprise for European team captain Luke Donald, but players with his kind of course savvy have been winning the Europeans Ryder Cups for the better part of the last three decades.

The World Feed: Stock SOARING

The World Feed — an international broadcast staged by the R&A and distributed for international broadcasters, including NBC, to utilize — has earned a cult following in Golf Twitter circles. This weekend, though, I spent many an hour watching it from the media center, and good God it’s wonderful.

It’s golf TV for golf sickos, and a part of me wonders whether the R&A can finagle a way to offer it as a paid streaming service to golf fans worldwide during tournament week. I know I’d happily pay $20 for the privilege.

Nick Faldo: Stock REBOUNDING

Sir Nick arrived out of nowhere for his performance as part of the NBC broadcast crew at the Open, and he sounded rejuvenated in his return to the booth.

There are few players in the game with his depth of knowledge. The key is finding an environment where he’s unafraid to share it. Here’s hoping he finds that soon.

The Food: Stock NEUTRAL

British food gets a lot of flack, but I think it’s actually better than advertised (or at the very least better than their Irish neighbors to the west). The GOLF.com crew went to The Tasting Bar and Kitchen in Hoylake on three separate nights last week. The food was delicious, the menu was varied and innovative, and the service was wonderful.

That said, I’d like to volunteer to my services to the R&A as a go-between for the tournament and its local restaurants each year. I can count on my thumbs the number of restaurants that were open past 10 p.m. last week, a time when hundreds of folks in town for the tournament were still looking for a hot meal.

There’s a lot made of the economic impact that comes with hosting a major championship in a small town. Lost in that conversation is the reality that in order for some places to make money, they have to, ya know, stay open.

Layers: Stock UP

It was Mike Tirico who first chided me last week that my Open Championship attire was lacking considerably.

“Welcome to the Open,” he said with a chuckle. “You’re not properly dressed.”

He was right. By the end of the week I was wearing three and four layers to the golf course each day, including a rotation of a handful of suddenly necessary jackets. This one, from Kjus, is the best rain jacket I’ve ever owned (for golf or otherwise). While this one, from Lululemon, was stretchy and water-repellent and, for a moment on Sunday evening, saved me from hypothermia. It’s probably the best colder-weather golf gear I have in my wardrobe, and I did have to fight off my GOLF.com coworkers to keep it in my return luggage home.

The Beatles: Stock UP

John, Paul, George and Ringo had a strong week on TV broadcasts and, it turns out, this website. You can check out our video on our trip to Allerton Manor, the former Beatles home course, below. You might have grown tired of the discourse during the broadcast — and for that I can’t blame you — but it’s hard to take a trip to Liverpool without appreciating the impact the Fab Four had on the city.

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The post 10 Open Championship scenes you couldn’t have seen on TV appeared first on Golf.

Sights and sounds from England’s towns

In lieu of our typical weekly rundown — and to help with major-season withdrawal — I just wanted to run through a handful of scenes from on site at Royal Liverpool. Below you’ll find 10 of ’em.

1. These little golf-ball crates rule

Part of the charm of the Open is the little intricacies of golf across the pond. One detail I particularly enjoyed was the little crates they transported range balls around in. The below shot is from the setup next to the chipping green. Check ’em out! Like miniature grocery baskets for golf balls. User-friendly, sturdy, kinda sweet.

2. Pot-bunker practice is weird and fun.

The Open isn’t the toughest major championship for players to score. There are plenty of birdies. This week in particular presented relatively flat greens that players ate alive; Datagolf had putting outside 15 feet as the fourth-easiest of any event since 2015. But the pot bunkers? Oh man, those can make you look very stupid.

They can also make pros look clever, though, finding ways to Houdini themselves out of tight corners or steep embankments without blasting themselves with golf balls in the process. All over the place, all week, pros were practicing (and usually pulling off) awkward-but-impressive recovery shots from these little torture caves. Here was Max Homa getting creative:

3. Hoylake would have selectively destroyed you

Some weeks it’s obvious the ways in which a major-championship test would eat amateur golfers alive. Crazy-long rough, crazy-fast greens, crazy slopes you’d never be able to navigate. Royal Liverpool is on a flat piece of property, it has flat greens and they’re not overly fast. But if you’re, say, a 13-handicap reading this, a few things would have still given you fits.

There are those pot bunkers, for one thing. With the special Day 1 rake job courtesy of the R&A, balls were settling at the edges of the traps and requiring some real weirdness to escape. I’m fairly sure you don’t have the same dexterity with an open-faced wedge and, therefore, might have required either a hand wedge or a half-dozen shots for extraction.

There are the white stakes, for another thing. The pros hit over 100 balls out of bounds this week, essentially unheard of at this level. Your foursome might have approached that number on your own over four days, though. Battle a slice? Have fun on No. 3, where the clubhouse lurks left but O.B. is the real threat down the right side, not just on the tee shot but on the approach. Have fun again at No. 18, where the tee shot, the layup and the approach actually give you three different options to block-slice one directly into a two-stroke penalty.

The recoveries aren’t exactly a can of corn, either.

You’d also struggle playing in front of volunteers and fans, of course. But you might struggle worse without them. Why? Because you need spotters! And you need trampled-down lies on your misses off the tee. There’s no joy in spending extra time searching for balls and there’s no joy in chopping out of the heavy stuff. You’d have time for both.

I’m not saying Hoylake is Oakmont. I’m just saying that I haven’t even mentioned the firm greens, the sideways rain, the wind nor your lack of a Tour-level caddie and that it’s no can of corn out there.

4. Pros could hear themselves on TV.

There are benefits to showing the TV broadcast on the course; it allows on-site spectators to get a sense of what’s going on or perhaps to pause for a plate of chips and a whippy and catch up on the action. But there was a strange side-effect: on a couple holes pros could hear the real-time commentary of the shots they were about to hit.

“Yeah, that was strange,” Scottie Scheffler said after one such incident. “I was standing over my shot and they had the TV going full volume over there and it was commentating my shot.”

He said he’d never experienced that particular brand of distraction.

“It was so weird because I heard my name, and that definitely put me off for a minute there. That was weird.”

Max Homa felt it on the 18th hole on Day 1.

“You can hear the commentators on the broadcast from the big TV,” he said. “And I was over the ball and one of them said, ‘this is too much club.’ I did an absolutely awful job of not backing off.”

5. The two best shots I saw were…

First the most pivotal: Brian Harman capped off his second-round masterpiece in style. He’d gotten off to a hot start with a par at No. 1 and birdies at 2-3-4-5. But then he’d shifted into a controlled neutral with pars at the next 12 holes before uncorking a 346-yard tee shot down the fairway at 18. That’s when he cemented his spot atop the leaderboard with a perfectly controlled 244-yard approach that settled pin-high inside 15 feet. That was the shot. The eagle putt really made it count, of course. And then the rest was history.

As for the most impressive shot I saw? That was from Rory McIlroy on the par-5 5th hole on Saturday. He’d chosen to hit just 2-iron off the tee and had flared that ever-so-slightly out to the right, leaving himself 260 yards to the hole, which meant it was time for another 2-iron. I happened to be directly behind this one, hence the special appreciation. The ball was above his feet and the pin was on the left side, so I imagined he might hit some sort of high, slinging draw. Instead he hit it flat and low and perfect, sending a tight-draw missile at the center of the green. The shot kept the greenside bunker out of play and was hit with such precision that it settled pin-high 25 feet right of the hole. Those first six-and-a-half holes on Saturday McIlroy looked like he might be the man to beat; he didn’t miss a shot. But Harman wouldn’t be denied.

6. My favorite non-Hoylake moment of the week was…

From Wallasey on Wednesday evening. Because the event is so wall-to-wall it’s tough to sneak out to play any golf of our own, but on Wednesday afternoons the course is quiet, the preview coverage is in the bank and there’s generally time for twilight golf. Here’s a neat photo from a glorious night courtesy of our visual whiz Darren Riehl.

7. Proximity to victory means pain.

I was the only reporter there when Cameron Young came into the media area on Sunday evening; he’d played in the final group alongside Harman but shot two-over 73 and finished T8. He was soggy and frustrated.

“I think there’s some positives to take,” he said, but he also kept it real. “My level of excitement with tied for eighth is absolutely zero.”

8. Proximity to victory means longing.

Jason Day has one major championship; he won the 2015 PGA. Now that he’s recaptured his game he wants another. Sunday’s T2 was easily his best effort in years, but as he stepped to the microphone Brian Harman was on the 18th green finishing things out, and Day was transformed to an alternate reality as he watched Harman hole his final putt.

“What a feeling,” he said.

9. Proximity to victory means hunger.

Adam Scott has one major. He wants another, too. Just how badly?

“It’s incredible. It’s kind of the reason I still work hard at my game, thinking I could have a chance to get that other hand on the jug that I was so close to getting,” he said following his T33 on Sunday. “That’s what I’ll be working at over the next 12 months, to come back and have another crack and be in good form and maybe steal a trophy later on in my career.”

10. Proximity to victory can mean joy, too.

The weather was horrific by the time we left the media center late Sunday night. Temperatures had dropped. Wind had upped. Rain had worsened. Golf would have been comical. It was a fitting end to the major season and a reminder that after all the pomp and circumstance there remains wind and rain and darkness and mud.

But inside the Royal Liverpool clubhouse there was joy, too, not just for the winner but for the man who’d tied for 10th, whose impeccable attitude made him an easy guy to root for all week: Local hero Matthew Jordan.

Thanks for following and reading all week!

If you want more behind-the-scenes stuff I’d recommend popping over to our YouTube channel via the video below. You’ll get a different look at how things played out — even if you’ll have to put up with my mug in order to do so. Cheers, gang.

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After surprisingly pleasant tournament conditions for most of the week, the weather turned on Sunday. The wind picked up and the rain was steady and sideways. Soggy walking trails turned muddy. Spectators walked with dirt splattered on their calves. The smart ones wore rain gear.

At the other majors, these kind of conditions are miserable. But at The Open? They’re perfect. Something to embrace. The fans were in no rush, either. They were keen to settle in and find out if Harman — who at 36 had won just twice on the PGA Tour and not since the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship — was about to be remembered as Champion Golfer of the Year or, well, the next Van de Velde.

On Sunday, there was no in-between. It was the kind of round that would demand not birdies but brawn, of which Harman has an abundance.

When he teed off at 2:15 p.m. local time, Harman was at 12 under after rounds of 67-65-69 and five clear of his closest chaser. Yet, when the starter announced him, the applause was far from raucous. There were even some boos.

The crowds weren’t so much rooting against Harman as they were pulling for the players who were pursuing him.

Five back was Cameron Young, the 26-year-old reigning PGA Tour Rookie of the Year who had been the best tee-to-green player this week by a mile. He’s never won on the PGA Tour but finished solo second at last year’s Open at St. Andrews. Surely he wouldn’t want to come up oh-so close yet again.

Six back was Jon Rahm, the most accomplished, and dangerous, threat. He battled a cold putter early in the week but shot 63 on Saturday, taking advantage of an early morning tee time after a menacing weather forecast never came. He’d won four times this year, but nothing since his Masters victory.

And among the group at seven back: Tommy Fleetwood, who grew up 30 miles north of here and had literal thousands behind him. The crowds bellowed his name — “Go Tommy lad!” — and tried to will his ball into the hole. They sang his praises in Hoylake pubs and craved a Fleetwood major win so badly it hurt.

Spectators appeared more interested in Fleetwood (putting on the nearby 2nd green) or Rahm (in the 2nd fairway) than the somewhat unknown American, who was 125/1 to win at the beginning of the week. It wasn’t until Fleetwood finished and Rahm played into the green when a few more onlookers lined the ropes along the 1st fairway. Many fans were also seven groups ahead with Rory McIlroy, who was going low early. He made birdies on 3 and 4 to get to five under. The spectators are mostly respectful — and knowledgable — but there were some outliers.

There were screams for Harman’s opening tee shot to find the fairway bunker. As Harman walked onto the 1st green, someone shouted, “Rory’s gonna get ya!” The same fan added some local knowledge about the conditions, as Harman walked under his umbrella: “Just a ‘lil bit of rain, lad.”

Harman paid the heckler no attention and two-putted for par. On 2, he made a bogey when he failed to get up and down. On the next hole, where internal out of bounds runs along the entire right side, Harman hit his approach into the long, gnarly fescue right of the green, inches from out of bounds.

“Don’t choke, lad!” a fan yelled as Harman walked to his ball. He didn’t. A nifty up and down prevented another bogey.

“Everybody has got their team they’re rooting for,” Harman said on Sunday, the Claret Jug by his side. “Yeah, I heard them. If they wanted me to not play well they should have been really nice to me.”

Seems they didn’t know how easily Harman could drown out the noise.

In his second full year on Tour, Harman had his best chance yet to win his first PGA Tour title. He shot 65 in the third round of the John Deere Classic and took a one-shot lead over Steve Stricker heading into the final round. They were in the final pairing together on Sunday, and Harman, playing against a Midwest fan favorite who grew up and lived a state away, knew what he was in for. His then-girlfriend Kelly Van Slyke (now his wife) flew in for the finish.

“Look, tomorrow, you are going to be walking around and everybody is going to be rooting for Stricker,” he told Kelly. “He’s the guy here. And just don’t let that get under your skin, because if I see the frustration on you, I’ll feel that.”

Harman shot 66, Stricker 72. Harman won by one.

The grit of golf’s newest major champion manifested, even before he turned professional. He wasn’t a competitive golfer until he was about 15 or 16, despite living on a golf course, Southbridge Golf Club, in Savannah, Ga. He focused on baseball and football, but one day in 1997 he was home sick from school and tuned in to the Phoenix Open. Steve Jones won that week, although it’s better known for Tiger Woods’ hole-in-one on 16. Harman watched. And watched. And kept watching. He was hooked.

He started hitting more golf balls and rode his bike to the nearby range. He devoured golf magazines. He signed up for tournaments and soon started winning them. In 2003, he won the U.S Junior Amateur.

His competitive fire stems from a conversation he once had with a football coach. Despite never being the biggest player on the field — Harman’s now 5-foot-7, 155 pounds — he enjoyed hitting. A coach noticed, and he offered some advice.

“You are never going to be able to control how big you are, but you can control how mean you are,” the coach said. “If you are the meanest guy out there, you’ll be fine.”

Since then, Harmon said, that was his goal. Be the meanest guy out there.

He was a three-time Second Team All-American at Georgia, and in author Shane Ryan’s book, Slaying the Tiger, there’s a now well-known story from the 2009 NCAA Championships, in which the Bulldogs were facing top-ranked Oklahoma State in the quarterfinals. Harman’s match-play opponent was Rickie Fowler. As the story goes, on one hole Fowler neglected to replace the flagstick, a breach of etiquette that irked Harman.

“You motherf—–,” Harman thought to himself, according to Ryan. Down one with three to play, Harman, furious, put the flagstick in and told Georgia coach Chris Haack, “I’m going to kick this guy in the teeth.”

Harman finished birdie-birdie-birdie to win 1 up. The victory ended Fowler’s season, and his team’s.

At 3:15 p.m., Harman had to prepare for his biggest test. He hit his tee shot into the gorse left of the fairway on the par-5 5th and had to take a penalty stroke for an unplayable lie. He made bogey on a hole many were birdieing.

The lead was just three over Rahm, but Harman rebounded again. He stuck an approach to 14 feet on the par-3 6th and made birdie. Then he rolled in a 24-footer to steal a birdie on 7. Twenty-five minutes earlier, doubt had begun spreading on the grounds. Now? Harman’s lead was back to five over Rahm and Sepp Straka.

The pressure, it seemed, was now on everyone else. The pursuers had to make birdies, and in challenging conditions. Harman was asked how he responded so well to those bogeys.

“After I made the second bogey yesterday, a guy, when I was passing him, he said, ‘Harman, you don’t have the stones for this,'” Harman said. “It helped snap me back into I’m good enough to do this. I’m going to do this. I’m going to go through my process, and the next shot is going to be good.”

You might have noticed a theme developing here: Don’t make Harman mad.

“He’s got a pretty intense way of just getting ultra-focused,” said Haack, his college coach, when reached by phone on Sunday night. “He probably embraced that out there. I just think he’s one of those guys that can block all that out and have it motivate him more than distract him.”

Harman entered the week with 29 top 10s since 2017, the most of any player without a win in that span. He’d been here before, too, having held the 54-hole lead at the 2017 U.S. Open at Erin Hills. He tied for second. Maybe this was his time.

“I’ve always had a self-belief that I could do something like this. It’s just when it takes so much time it’s hard not to let your mind falter, like, maybe I’m not winning again,” Harman said. “I’m 36 years old. Game is getting younger. All these young guys coming out hit it a mile, and they’re all ready to win. Like, when is it going to be my turn again?”

After his back-to-back birdies on 6 and 7, Harman did exactly what he needed to: protect his lead. On five straight holes, Nos. 8-12, he two-putted for par. No one had played the par-3s better than Harman this week, but he gave one back on 13. He missed the green and couldn’t save his seven-footer for par. Minutes later, Straka birdied the 16th to get to eight under, cutting the lead to three.

No matter. Harman, who led the field in putting, rolled in a 40-footer for birdie on 14 to reclaim a four-shot lead. He doesn’t show much emotion, but he offered a little fist-pump and snatched his ball out of the hole quickly, a la something you might have seen from Tiger Woods back in the day.

“I think Brian Harman is a very dogged person,” said Padraig Harrington. “He’s the right person to hold a lead like that. Clearly he hasn’t won a major, but he’s a very tough, experienced character. Sometimes we see somebody leading a tournament and you kind of go, Oh, is he going to hang on? I don’t think that’s the case with Brian Harman. Nearly every day he goes out on the golf course he’s like playing with a chip on his shoulder like he’s fighting something.”

Harman made only six bogeys all week. Four were followed by birdies.

“I figured at some point that I was going to hit bad shots,” said Harman, who shot one-under 70 in the final round, finishing at 13 under overall. “Just with the weather and the scenario, you’re going to hit bad shots. I knew that the way I responded to that would determine whether I’d be sitting here or not.”

At 6:15 p.m. local, the rain was still falling as Harman paced up the 18th fairway. His lead was six. Tom Kim, Jason Day, Straka and Rahm were all in at seven under, but they had little reason to hang around.

“He won by six,” Rahm said later. “It’s not like he won by two or three. He won by six, so there’s nothing really any of us could have done. There’s nothing any of us could have done.”

Turns out, it’s difficult to hunt a hunter. Harman lives in Sea Island, Ga., and is an avid outdoorsman. Before he got really into golf — and even after — he was shooting arrows at life-size deer targets in his backyard. His dad, Eric, taught him to skin a deer at 8. He built a duck-hunting boat with his brother, Scott. Some of his favorite trips have been to Southern Colorado, where they’ll hunt elk for days at a time. He doesn’t use rifles, only bow hunts. (How good is he? “You wouldn’t want to be standing in front of me,” he quipped.) He also loves to mow his property (a man with $32 million in career earnings!), and just spend time on his hunting land. He recently bought a new tractor — a 105-horse orange Kubota — which he’s excited to test out.

The crowd roared as Harman walked onto the 72nd green. A few “Go Dawgs!” chants echoed in the background. It was a warm welcome. No, Tommy lad or Rahm or Rory or local boy Matthew Jordan did not win this Open — Harman did. Maybe some observers were bummed with the runaway winner, but in this moment, you couldn’t tell.

Harman had eight feet for par at the last. In the iconic Open grandstands — among the best seats in all of golf — rain-drenched fans huddled under those umbrellas. Harman stood over his putt, and the crowd came to a hush. In the quiet, a man whispered under his breath: “Five putts to win.”

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There was the rip-roaring finish to his Saturday round, four birdies in his finishing five holes, racing into Sunday’s last few tee times. He really wanted that. There was the starter calling out his name first Thursday morning at 6:45, commencing the 151st Open Championship, and the nerviest first round tee shot you could imagine. There was his 36-hole craic on July 4 at West Lancashire Golf Club, up the coast, qualifying for this Open with a career day of 65-69, 10 under.

If we really want to dial it back, we can go to February 2019, when the R&A announced Royal Liverpool, his home club, would host the 2023 Open. Jordan was 23 years old at the time and had just finished T34 in a pro-am tournament on the Sunshine Tour in South Africa. He was ranked 983rd in the world, but golfers have to dream big. They have no choice.

Jordan is the 329th-ranked player in the world for just a few more hours, until his T10 finish in this home Open registers with the OWGR Monday morning, and sends him soaring into the top 200. He’s now exempt into next year’s Open, too. He’ll have made more than $300,000 dollars, though he probably counts his money in British pounds or even the euro, as he traipses the continent on the DP World Tour. He’ll shoot up the Race to Dubai rankings and finish this season in a career-high there, too, which is all just another way of saying things are going really well right now. Obviously. 

The Jordan story this week was always going to be more emotional than logical. Bets were placed on him simply because he was the local lad. He knows this course better than anyone in the field, carving out a 62 on the men’s championship tees a couple weeks ago. He’s won more club championships than he cares to keep track of. But as we saw too many times this weekend, it all makes sense in golf until it doesn’t. The sport is imbalanced in its forgiveness. You never know if you’ll have it during the week you want to have it most.

Jordan didn’t know he’d have it this week. Didn’t have a clue how he’d score when the strokes counted and the grandstands shield the wind and the best players in the world are tearing up your home track. “As long as the occasion didn’t affect me…” he said Friday afternoon after checking the first box: a made cut. 

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But you just never know. The wind gets up and the rain pours down and golf swings start to feel a bit foreign. Tommy Fleetwood, a superior player with just as many local vibes, was in second place, in the final pairing Saturday, and even he felt like he lost his swing for a bit. It happens.

“To be able to play and perform under kind of the pressure that I felt all week,” Jordan said, “like I haven’t felt calm or normal really the whole time. Which is great because it lets me focus and it kind of makes every shot mean something.”

It started with a two-under 69, wavered through a one-over 72, bounced into relevance with another 69 and then, of course, found him with a chance for birdie on the last. Who knows how many times he’s birdied the last. Hundreds? The crowd serenaded his every step and erupted when the 7-footer dropped.

“It was just the perfect finish to what has been the most unbelievable week,” Jordan said during his final press session. “Just rolling that in, I just so wanted to knock it in just for everyone who’s supported me, just to go mental one last time and crazy. They stuck with me even in the rain like this.”

The mud that accumulated from all that rain mixing with hundreds of thousands of fans will make Royal Liverpool a stinky place for a number of days. The stands will stay up Monday afternoon as corporate sponsors usher guests around RLGC, but workers had already begun breaking down scoreboards on the course Sunday evening. The build-up to these Opens is immense, but the tear-down is rather immediate. The golf world shows up on your doorstep in a hurry and then leaves just as quickly. Jordan gets to bask in it for a bit, at least until his next DP World Tour start. Next weekend, he has a tee time scheduled for ‘Royal Liverpool, host of the 2023 Open Championship’ alongside his girlfriend’s father and her sister’s fiancé. The idea of it brought a chuckle Sunday evening.

“I haven’t even thought of that,” he said. “How weird it’s going to be just going around just as practice because I’m probably going to remember everything I’ve done beforehand.

“Yeah, it’s going to be a strange feeling.”

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The Open Championship is the oldest major in professional golf, dating back to 1860, and for many across the globe, it is golf’s greatest title.

The list of those who have won the Open is a who’s who of golf’s greatest champions. Harry Vardon leads the way with six Claret Jugs to his name, while a quartet of greats (including Tom Watson) has etched their names in the trophy five times apiece. Other greats, such as Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus, are further down the list with three a piece.

No golfer has won the Open Championship seven times, and it’s a feat that will likely never come. In today’s golf climate, parity is at an all-time high, and dominating for a long stretch is nearly impossible.

Twenty-seven players have won multiple Open Championships, with a list of those below.

Players with multiple Open Championship wins

6: Harry Vardon

5: James Braid, John Henry Tyler, Peter Thomson, Tom Watson

4: Tom Morris Sr., Tom Morris Jr., Willie Park Sr., Walter Hagen, Bobby Locke

3: Jamie Anderson, Bob Ferguson, Bobby Jones, Henry Cotton, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Tiger

2: Bob Martin, Willie Park Jr., Harold Hilton, Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, Greg Norman, Padraig Harrington, Ernie Els

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The post Here are the last 30 Open Championship winners appeared first on Golf.

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On Sunday at Royal Liverpool, one lucky golfer will add their name to the list.

Brian Harman leads the way with a five-stroke lead at 12 under, but there is plenty of firepower in chase. Cameron Young will play alongside him in the final pairing, while Jon Rahm and Viktor Hovland tee off in the penultimate pairing.

Who will be the next golf star to add their name to the Claret Jug? Here’s who’s done it over the last 30 years.

Last 30 Open Championship winners

2022 – Cameron Smith (-20)
2021 – Collin Morikawa (-15)
2020 – No tournament held due to Covid-19
2019 – Shane Lowry (-15)
2018 – Francesco Molinari (-15)
2017 – Jordan Spieth (-12)
2016 – Henrik Stenson (-20)
2015 – Zach Johnson (-15)
2014 – Rory McIlroy (-17)
2013 – Phil Mickelson (-3)
2012 – Ernie Els (-7)
2011 – Darren Clarke (-5)
2010 – Louis Oosthuizen (-16)
2009 – Stewart Cink (-2)
2008 – Padraig Harrington (+3)
2007 – Padraig Harrington (-7)
2006 – Tiger Woods (-18)
2005 – Tiger Woods (-14)
2004 – Todd Hamilton (-10)
2003 – Ben Curtis (-1)
2002 – Ernie Els (-6)
2001 – David Duval (-10)
2000 – Tiger Woods (-19)
1999 – Paul Lawrie (+6)
1998 – Mark O’Meara (E)
1997 – Justin Leonard (-12)
1996 – Tom Lehman (-13)
1995 – John Daly (-6)
1994 – Nick Price (-12)
1993 – Greg Norman (-13)
1992 – Nick Faldo (-12)

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