Tag: 2024 British Open

Mistakes and inconsistency highlight Tiger Woods’ opening round at 2024 British Open

Thursday was a similar script to what has become the 2024 version of Tiger Woods.

One of the biggest talking points coming into the 2024 British Open surrounding Tiger Woods was whether it was time for him to retire.

The talks and conversations stemmed from a Colin Montgomerie interview last week, saying it was past time for Woods to call it a career from playing professionally. Woods responded Tuesday during his pre-tournament press conference, but while he talked the talk in the media center, he didn’t walk the walk on the golf course, only adding fuel to the fire about how this version the 15-time major champion can compete in the biggest competitions in golf.

Woods shot 8-over 79 on Thursday at Royal Troon in Scotland, and it was a similar script to what has become the 2024 version of Tiger. He had a decent start, was 1 under thru 3 holes, but he couldn’t capitalize on his good play off the tee, as poor iron shots piled up and then it got shakier once he got on and around the greens.

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Another ailment on Thursday was a nearly 15-minute wait on the par-4 11th tee box. Woods’ group, which included PGA champion Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay, had to stand around while Wyndham Clark received a ruling in the fairway and then had to wait for a TV tower to be lowered so he could hit a shot.

Tiger Woods hits out of the rough on the 12th hole during the first round of the Open Championship golf tournament at Royal Troon. Mandatory Credit: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY Sports

The cold temperatures plus standing around is about the worst thing for Woods, who has said numerous times he prefers warmer temperatures and movement to keep his body loose. When he finally hit, Woods’ tee shot nearly went out of bounds but into a bush, and he had to take an unplayable. After the wait, for the next couple holes he was constantly stretching his back and never really seemed in a groove all the way to the clubhouse.

He birdied the third and added another at the 14th, but Woods also had six bogeys and two doubles. The inconsistency of playing only five tournaments this year and 10 complete rounds showed its face again. He is a combined 39 over so far this year.

Tiger’s scores in 2024

Tournament Round 1 Round 2 Round 3 Round 4
Genesis Invitational 72 (WD)
Masters Tournament 73 72 82 77
PGA Championship 72 77
U.S. Open 74 73
Open Championship 79

There were flashes of prime Tiger, from stellar tee shots to the thundering movements of the stellar galleries parading around Royal Troon to get a glimpse of a legend. But far more often were the mistakes and blunders that he has only started to make thanks to Father Time and his body only allowing him to do so much.

If there were any positives from the opening round, it’s how Woods finished. He was 1 over in his last six holes when that number could’ve been a bit higher and should’ve been a bit lower. But he was somewhat stable coming in on an otherwise inconsistent day, and that’s perhaps what he needs to bounce back Friday and grind to make the cut.

However, a three-putt bogey on the last will leave a sour taste in his mouth before his tee time Friday morning.

Lynch: Royal Troon 1, Bryson DeChambeau 0

His opening round in the 152nd Open was, as the Scots say, dreich.

TROON, Scotland — Conventional wisdom, grounded in a data sample compiled over the past 164 years, says the key to success in the Open Championship is more about art than analytics, that links golf itself is best understood through poetry rather than pedagoguery. So it came as no surprise to learn Thursday that Bryson DeChambeau is taking the opposite tack in trying to solve a puzzle that continues to confound him.

His opening round in the 152nd Open was, as the Scots say, dreich — a word usually reserved for the dismal weather that has settled over the Ayrshire coast. Like a whiskey hangover, it began painfully and offered little respite. He was 6-over-par through eight holes. The skill for which he is most celebrated — the tee ball — was firing, but not much else. In approach play and putting, DeChambeau wasn’t close to breaking the top 120 in the 157-man field as the day wore on. He made 104 feet 5 inches of putts, but 54 feet 11 inches of that came on one stroke, an eagle putt on the 16th hole. He signed for a 5-over par round of 76.

Most Tour players would quickly dismiss a day like today, chalking up poor scores to the whipping wind, scattered rain and penal hazards on this venerable old links. Others certainly did.

“It’s tough. It’s really tough … It’s brutal.” — Brian Harman (73)

“Disappointed. Got off to a bad start. Missed every sort of important putt. Drove it pretty poor. It wasn’t the best day.” — Tommy Fleetwood (76)

“One of the worst rounds I think I’ve had this year … It wasn’t a fun experience.” — Tyrrell Hatton (73)

“I just didn’t adapt well enough to the conditions. Your misses get punished a lot more this week.” — Rory McIlroy (78)

“They cannae f——-g play!” a cantankerous old Scot of my acquaintance muttered derisively.

DeChambeau is a cause-and-effect guy, willing to ascribe only so much of his performance to the vagaries of the conditions. “It’s a completely different test. I didn’t get any practice in it, and I didn’t really play much in the rain. It’s a difficult test out here,” the U.S. Open champion said. “Something I’m not familiar with. I never grew up playing it, and not to say that that’s the reason; I finished eighth at St. Andrews. I can do it when it’s warm and not windy.”

Bryson DeChambeau hits out of the rough on the 15th hole during the first round of the Open Championship golf tournament at Royal Troon. Mandatory Credit: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY Sports

Unfortunately for him, warm and windless weather isn’t on tap this week, nor many dry spells. They seldom are at the Open.

“I’m going to go figure it out,” he announced after signing his card. His game plan for mastering the ancient linksland won’t rely on inspirational talk about art or poetry, but on Flightscopes and Trackmans.

“It’s something equipment-related. The golf ball is — look, I’m not at 190 ball speed, so particularly when I’m hitting driver or 3-wood, those clubs are built for around that speed, that 190 ball speed, and my 3-wood around 180, so colder, firmer conditions the golf ball is not compressing as much,” he said. “So it’s probably something along those lines.”

Somewhere Old Tom Morris, or even Young Tom Watson, chuckles.

“When there’s so many measurements going on in your mind — ,” a reporter began.

“There’s not that many. There’s a couple but not that many,” DeChambeau quickly replied, like a kid denying having eaten the cake he has just smeared all over his face.

The man who seldom provides stock answers seemed to be struggling to understand why his stock shots didn’t deliver stock results, while being reluctant to accept that stock shots can lose value in the crosswinds and firm conditions that prevailed Thursday at Royal Troon.

“I was trying to draw the ball and the ball was knuckling a little bit. It was a really difficult challenge, and I should have just cut the ball.”

“I was swinging it somewhat okay, just the ball wasn’t coming off in that window that I normally see, so it was a weird day.”

DeChambeau also referenced that windows theory in a press conference two days ago. “Most people try to see it through windows. I do too, but not that specific,” he said. “It’s more of, if I take it back a certain distance and go through, it will come out with a certain launch just based on the loft. So I’m really focused on accomplishing that task, just swinging the way I want to swing, and the results will speak for themselves hopefully.”

The results didn’t produce a comforting message but continued an unimpressive trend. In six previous appearances in the Open, the outlier remains a T-8 finish two years ago at the Old Course, the only venue he can bludgeon his way around. Otherwise, there are two missed cuts, no finishes inside the top 30, and two outside the top 50.

“I’m just proud of the way I persevered today. Shoot, man, I could have thrown in the towel after nine and could have been like, I’m going home. But no, I’ve got a chance tomorrow. I’m excited for the challenge,” he said. “If I have some putts go in and hit some shots the way I know how to and figure out this equipment stuff, I’ll be good.”

Who knows, DeChambeau might be proven right. He’s an inveterate problem solver. So too was Ivan Lendl, but then Lendl never quite managed to figure out his sport’s oldest and most prestigious major championship contested in the British Isles. And like the tennis great, even DeChambeau’s failure to solve the riddle is oddly compelling.

Friday at 2:48 p.m. Troon time, he gets to try again, beginning from well outside the projected cut. By the dinner hour, we’ll know whether golf fans will wait 262 days — or only 260 — before seeing him again in a tournament that matters.

Bryson DeChambeau, Rory McIlroy blown away by the wind at 2024 British Open

“It was a weird day,” DeChambeau said.

TROON, Scotland — After dueling for the U.S. Open title last month in the North Carolina Sandhills, Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy dueled for the most disappointing start at the 152nd British Open on Thursday.

DeChambeau shot 42 on the front nine at Royal Troon and posted 5-over 76 while McIlroy was even worse, slicing his tee shot on the train tracks at No. 11 and shooting 7-over 78.

“It was a weird day,” DeChambeau said.

“It was definitely tricky,” said McIlroy of the test that was Troon, the seaside links along the west coast of Ayrshire.

Despite a light rain for much of the day, the course played firm with just enough wind to wreak havoc.

“It was brutal out there,” defending champion Brian Harman said.

McIlroy, the world No. 2, said, “if anything, it was more like the conditions got the better of me, those cross-winds.”

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Oh, those fickle winds. McIlroy dropped a shot at the first but got it back with his lone birdie of the day at No. 3 after wedging to inside 4 feet. It all started to go wrong at No. 8, the Postage Stamp par 3, where his tee shot found the right bunker and he needed two tries to extricate himself. Double bogey.

“I missed the green and left it in the bunker and made a 5. Then once we turned on that back nine, it was left-to-right winds. I was sort of struggling to hole the ball in that wind a little bit, and that got me.”

So did his tee shot at No. 11, which sailed right and out of bounds and resulted in another double bogey. McIlroy, who has been stuck on four major titles for nearly a decade, didn’t respond well to conditions that perplexed the field of 157.

“You play your practice rounds, and you try to come up with a strategy that you think is going to get you around the golf course. Then when the wind is like that, you know, other options present themselves, and you start to second guess yourself a little bit,” McIlroy said. “The conditions were tough on that back nine, and I just didn’t do a good enough job.”

Neither did DeChambeau, though his travails were largely on the front nine.

2024 British Open
Bryson DeChambeau hits out of the rough on the 15th hole during the first round of the 2024 British Open at Royal Troon. (Jack Gruber-USA TODAY Sports)

He made bogeys at three of the first four holes, missing par putts of inside 5 feet at the first and just over 3 feet at the fourth. Then he made a double bogey at the sixth, spraying his tee shot right into thick rough and tried to hack a 7-iron out of trouble.

“I didn’t get it high enough,” he said. “I thinned it a little bit and caught the stuff and came out dead, and then I tried to open face a 5-wood and squirted off the left side of my face and just shot left. I’m just glad nobody got hurt. Luckily I found it.”

But it was the wind that proved to be a riddle that DeChambeau failed to solve.

“It was in and off the right and I was trying to draw the ball and the ball was knuckling a little bit,” he said. “It was a really difficult challenge, and I should have just cut the ball.”

DeChambeau finished T-6 at the Masters, second at the PGA Championship and then won the U.S. Open for the second time. But the Open Championship has typically given him fits: a T-8 in 2022 is his only finish better than T-33 in six previous starts, and the change in wind direction created a variable he said he felt unprepared for.

“It’s a completely different test. I didn’t get any practice in it, and I didn’t really play much in the rain,” he explained, calling the conditions “something I’m not familiar with.”

He added: “I never grew up playing it, and not to say that that’s the reason… I can do it when it’s warm and not windy.”

After playing his first eight holes in 6 over, DeChambeau righted the ship. He did have one highlight to remember, holing a 55-foot eagle putt at 16.

However, the driver was as erratic as it was in the final round of the U.S. Open when he managed to find just five fairways but kept drawing good lies amid the Pinehurst wiregrass and scrub brush. His luck ran out as the Scottish fescue proved more penal. DeChambeau blamed his Krank driver, which he said was designed for around 190 ball speed, for not being built for cooler conditions when the golf ball doesn’t compress as much.

“It’s probably something along those lines,” he said.

Both DeChambeau and McIlroy have dug big holes and will have their work cut out just to make the cut.

“He absolutely gutted,” Golf Channel’s Paul McGinley said of McIlroy. “His race is probably run now at this stage. As they say, you can’t win the Open or a major on the first day, but you can certainly lose it and he may well have lost it there today.”

DeChambeau, for one, wasn’t ready to throw in the towel.

“I’m going to go figure it out,” DeChambeau said.

Justin Thomas shoots 68 at 2024 British Open, or 14 strokes better than his start a year ago

“I have yet to play a links course that I dislike or I think is bad,” Thomas said.

TROON, Scotland – A year ago, Justin Thomas made a career-worst score of nine on his final hole of his opening round of the British Open at Royal Liverpool en route to another disappointing missed cut in a major. He looked lost in his game. One year later, Thomas posted 3-under 68 at Royal Troon on Thursday to sit alone in third, three strokes behind leader Daniel Brown at the 152nd Open. Asked to describe the difference in his game from a year ago, he said, “I would guess about 15 strokes better, 13 strokes? What did I shoot?”

He shot 82 a year ago so Thomas should’ve split the difference because the answer is 14 strokes.

“I couldn’t even tell you what I was thinking or how it was then,” Thomas said. “I’m just worried about how I am now, and I’m very pleased with my game and know things are continuing to work in the right direction. I’ve just got to keep trying to play well.”

Thomas, a 15-time winner on the PGA Tour and two-time major winner, has slipped to No. 29 in the world. He ranks 17th in the FedEx Cup with five top-10 finishes this season, so in comparison to last year, his game has shown signs of regaining the form that made him a world No. 1.

BRITISH OPEN: Leaderboard | Photos | How to watch

But he remains winless since the 2022 PGA Championship, and the majors mostly have been a disaster this season. He finished T-8 at the PGA Championship in his native Kentucky but missed the cut at both the Masters and U.S. Open, continuing a distressing trend. He’s missed more than half of his last nine starts in majors.

On a rainy, battleship-gray day in the first round, Thomas carded seven birdies, including the final two holes, despite tricky wind conditions that flipped in the opposite direction than the pros had faced in practice rounds or even back in 2016, the last time this championship was contested here.

“That was wild,” said Thomas, who still managed to birdie two of the first four holes. “ I remember trying to drive 1 and 3 in 2016, and I hit 7-iron into 1 today, and I hit a 3-wood up there on 3 to have a wedge in. But it just was very, very different. But it just was all very typical of an Open, just trying to make the best out of the conditions.”

Thomas, who made his Open Championship debut at Troon in 2016 and began with a 67 that year to sit T-4 through 18 holes before falling to T-53, has struggled at this major more than any other, with nary a top-10 and a T-11 in 2019 as his best showing in seven previous appearances. Yet, Thomas declared himself a fan of links golf.

“I have yet to play a links course that I dislike or I think is bad,” Thomas said. “If I had to choose one style of golf or probably even one golf course the rest of my life to play, it would be a links course.”

At the Genesis Scottish Open a week ago, Thomas raced out of the gate with a flurry of birdies to shoot 62 and assume the first-round lead. Despite taking six more shots this week, Thomas ranked his play as better at Troon.

“I felt like I had great control off the tee,” he said, “just in the sense of, I would say, the quality of play.”

Last week, Thomas tumbled down the leaderboard and finished T-62, saying he didn’t get anything out of his rounds.

“It wasn’t bad enough to shoot over par both days,” he said.

Will this week be any different? Can Thomas piece together more than one good round in a row – preferably four of them – and be a serious contender at the 152nd Open? To hear Thomas tell it, his game is trending in the right direction and as the pros like to say, he said he feels close.

“I’m just doing, I would say, everything better,” he said.

On Thursday, he was 14 strokes better than a year ago and that alone is reason for optimism.

Photos: The 152nd British Open at Royal Troon’s Old Course

Check out the scenes from Troon.

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The 2024 British Open was at Royal Troon, where the best players in the world battled both the world-class golf course and the elements.

Entering the week, world No. 1 and Masters champion Scottie Scheffler was the betting favorite at +450. He’s joined in the field by PGA Championship winner Xander Schauffele, U.S. Open winner Bryson DeChambeau and world No. 2 Rory McIlroy, among others.

Royal Troon is a par-71 golf course measuring 7,385 yards.

This week’s winner, on top of being crowned the Champion Golfer of the Year, will earn $3.1 million of the $17 million purse and 700 FedEx Cup points.

Check out some of the best photos from the British Open, where Xander Schauffele earned his second career major and second of 2024.

Where’s the Beef? Andrew Johnston is chasing a comeback nearly 5,000 miles away from the site of ‘the best week of my golfing career’

“Is it OK if I call you ‘Beef?’ ” one asks. “I’d be offended if you didn’t.”

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TROON, Scotland – Eight years ago, the last time the British Open was held at Royal Troon, Andrew Johnston was the media darling of the championship.

“You want to pick me up?” Johnston joked to a reporter who asked about his weight during a media session that week.

Of the pizza he pounded after the first round, he said, “It wasn’t like a 20-inch, ‘Win a T-shirt if you finish it’ type of thing.”

Henrik Stenson may have won the Claret Jug but the jovial Johnston, known since childhood as Beef, won the hearts and minds of golf fans everywhere, finishing eighth after a final-round 68 and entered the top 100 in the Official World Golf Ranking for the first time at No. 89.

“The best week of my golfing career,” he said this week.

Reporter Nick Lozito, who interviewed Johnston before the tournament and wrote a piece worth your time on his Substack, shared that Johnston recently stumbled on an Instagram reel from that week at Troon. It showed his entrance under the first-tee grandstands to chants of “Beef! Beef! Beef!”

“That was an amazing experience,” Johnston told Lozito. “I’m still pretty speechless. Everywhere I’ve gone since, all over the world — America, all throughout Europe, Australia, South Africa — the fans and crowds have been amazing.”

This week, the 35-year-old Englishman is a continent and nearly 5,000 miles away from the 152nd Open and trying to resurrect his career. He’s playing his trade in Truckee, California, competing in a co-sanctioned event for the PGA Tour and DP World Tour at the Barracuda Championship. After spending one season on the PGA Tour in 2017-18, he failed to keep his card and then suffered a thumb injury that required multiple surgeries and sidelined him for most of 2021-22. That sent his world ranking plummeting to No. 1,932 late in 2023.

“I didn’t know if I’d ever play golf again,” Johnston said late last year. When he finally returned, he withdrew from a tournament in South Africa citing a back injury.

According to Lozito, Johnston played with childhood friend Jess McAvoy, who caddied for him earlier in his career, at North Middlesex, their home course in London, a few months later, and convinced him to leave his job and caddie for him once again.

Andrew Johnston is 13 under through 36 holes at the Albertsons Boise Open.
Englishman Andrew Johnston slaps hands with a fan at the Albertsons Boise Open. He earned his PGA Tour card through the Korn Ferry Tour Finals in 2017.

Johnston returned to the DP World Tour in June and missed his first two cuts. His play improved over the next two events, placing in the top 40 to jump nearly 800 spots in the world rankings, to 1,245, before heading to America. It’s a long way from those peak days of Beef Mania when the golf world couldn’t get enough of him.

Lozito concluded his piece by painting the picture of Johnston sitting in the shade before his Wednesday pro-am round, when his three amateur partners rushed to shake his hand.

“Is it OK if I call you ‘Beef?’ ” one asks.

Beef gives one of his infectious chuckles, Lozito noted.

“I’d be offended if you didn’t.”

Things to know about the Claret Jug, awarded to the British Open winner

The Champion Golfer of the Year earns a big paycheck and of course the Claret Jug.

The Champion Golfer of the Year, aka the winner of the British Open, earns a large sum of money, many accolades and the historic Claret Jug. OK, not the Claret Jug. We can explain.

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There have been 151 Opens contested over the years but the trophy wasn’t yet created for the first nearly dozen tournaments.

And did you know that the Claret Jug has a lesser-known formal name of The Golf Champion Trophy?

But what about the trophy? Here are some more interesting facts about the Claret Jug.

Postage Stamp: You can watch every shot live on the shortest hole of all the British Open courses

It was once described as “a pitching surface skimmed down to the size of a postage stamp.”

It’s the shortest hole of them all in the British Open rota.

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It got its name from Willie Park Jr., who won the Open twice and later wrote about the eighth hole at Royal Troon’s Old Course for Golf Illustrated, calling the shortie “a pitching surface skimmed down to the size of a postage stamp.”

At the 152nd edition of the British Open, which gets underway Thursday, this pint-sized terror will challenge the field of 158. Overall, the par-71 course measures 7,385 yards but the offical yardage for No. 8 is 123 yards, although it can play as short as 99. The putting surface is surround by five bunkers. In 1950, amateur Hermann Tissies needed five shots to get out of one of the bunkers, leading him to post a 15.

In 2024, golf fans can watch every shot over all four days live on the R&A’s website. Called “Postage Stamp Live“, the live streaming channel will have all the shots, from the first golfer to the last.

The Royal Troon website offers this description of the hole:

“The tee is on high ground and a dropping shot is played over a gully to a long but extremely narrow green set into the side of a large sandhill. Two bunkers protect the left side of the green while a large crater bunker shields the approach. Any mistake on the right will find one of the two deep bunkers with near vertical faces. There is no safe way to play this hole, the ball must find the green with the tee-shot. Many top players have come to grief at this the shortest hole in Open Championship golf.”

Henrik Stenson, the most recent to win the Claret Jug at Royal Troon in 2016, said, “If you’re the kind of fan that wants to see carnage I can highly recommend going out to that eigth hole and sitting in that grandstand on a difficult day.”

Tiger Woods was asked about the hole during his Tuesday news conference.

“I hit 9-iron and a pitching wedge the last two times I played it. I’ve hit as much as a 7-iron,” he said. “But it’s a very simple hole; just hit the ball on the green. That’s it. Green good, miss green bad. It doesn’t get any more simple than that. You don’t need a 240-yard par-3 for it to be hard.”

NBC, USA and Peacock have live coverage of all the golf for all four rounds starting at 1:30 a.m. ET on Thursday.

Outgoing R&A CEO Martin Slumbers expresses concern for ‘financial sustainability’ in mens pro golf

“We must have a sustainable business model in the long term.”

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TROON, Scotland — Martin Slumbers, the outgoing CEO of the R&A, didn’t hold back his opinions on the state of the game on his way out the door, including voicing them on the growth of purses on Wednesday.

“I’ve expressed concern in recent years about financial sustainability in the men’s professional game,” he began during his press conference ahead of the 152nd British Open. “If we take a wider perspective on the game for a second, golf is in many ways riding on the crest of a wave.”

He noted that more than 100 million people experience the game in one form or another around the world and cited that the latest participation figures indicate 62.3 million played golf – not including the U.S. and other countries that the USGA govern, a rise of 1.1 million over the previous year.

“These are very encouraging figures, but we have to maintain this momentum. To do that, we must have a sustainable business model in the long term. If you look at golf as a pyramid, however strong the pyramid is at the top, it can only be sustained in the long term if the pyramid is equally strong at the base,” he explained. “We see that as our responsibility, and that is why we invest all of the proceeds from The Open back into the sport.”

That is why Slumbers said the rapid rise in tournament purses, which soared ever since the Saudi PIF started writing lucrative checks to renegade pros and the PGA Tour responded by jacking up its purses to prevent any more players from jumping ship, has to stop.

Nevertheless, Slumbers signed off on a purse increase of $500,000 to $17 million, with the Champion Golfer of the Year expected to earn $3.1 million. In 2016, the last time the Open was held at Troon, Henrik Stenson banked $1.5 million from a purse of $8.6 million. Asked to explain why that has increased so much, Slumbers said, “Inflation.”

Not even the price of eggs and gasoline have skyrocketed at the rate of golf tournaments. Of course, there’s an argument to be made that the players were underpaid and the governing bodies were keeping too large of a share of the record TV money they negotiated but earned off the back of the players. Competition, they say, is always a good thing.

“There’s clearly a market out there. We watch it week in and week out, throughout regular play as well as through the big events. So, yeah, we’re aware of what the numbers are, but we’re also aware of our own business model and the way we think about it, and as I keep saying, the importance to keep investing,” Slumbers said. “I look at this in a much bigger picture. It’s very easy to get binary and a little bit down a dark alley in this topic. If you think about a pie and that is the financial economic value of golf, and a part of that goes on development, a part of it goes on employing people, and a part of that goes into development of the game. What we’re really talking about in the whole of this is getting the balance between particularly the prize money and the investment into the game in a way that we can ensure that the pie grows, and if the pie grows, everybody does better. If you reallocate incorrectly within an existing pie, there’s a real danger that the pie will shrink.

“So that’s the way I think about it. That’s the way we try to model it, and I think it’s very important for the game to make sure that we think that way if we really want this game thriving 50 years from now.”

2024 British Open
Brian Harman poses with outgoing CEO of The R&A and Secretary of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, Martin Slumbers as Harman returns the Claret Jug ahead of the 152nd British Open at Royal Troon. (Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images)

When Slumbers was informed that the Open ranks as the 28th highest-paying championship in golf, he responded by saying, “A, I didn’t know 28, and B, I don’t care. That’s not what this is about. Our responsibility is for what we do and for what we run is to get that balance right and get the choices to ensure the game is thriving 50 years from now. That’s the role of the R&A.”

Brian Harman, the defending Open champion, was asked if he would play if he got paid less or nothing at all.

“I would personally,” he said. “I’m not sure everyone would, but I would.”

Asked why he sensed others take their ball and go home if the purse was trimmed, he said, “Some people care more about money than I do, I suppose. I play golf for me. Like I play golf to see how good I can get at golf. I play golf because I enjoy torturing myself with things that are really hard to do. That’s just me. Most times when I get done with a tournament, I couldn’t tell you within commas of how much that I made that week.”

Slumbers stuck to his belief that the growth in prize money will flatten as it has in other sports. He’s resolute that the R&A not lose sight of the overall pyramid and the importance of both the bottom and the top for the game’s future growth.

“Because without one or the other, it won’t,” he said, recalling that between 2006 and 2018, golf had been in decline.

“I can remember my very first meeting with the media in my office when Peter (Dawson) was still in charge, and (a reporter) over there asked me quite rightly, ‘What are you going to do about golf participation?’ And I said, ‘There’s no silver bullet, and I don’t know the answer.’

“I don’t think we’re asking that question now. The question now is how much further can it go.”

Criticism towards Rory McIlroy’s caddie after U.S. Open loss doesn’t sit well with Shane Lowry: ‘It makes my blood boil’

“They don’t see how hard Harry works and how good he is for Rory.”

After Rory McIlroy’s stunning defeat at the U.S. Open last month, several media members and hundreds of fans criticized Harry Diamond, McIlroy’s caddie, for a lack of communication down the stretch.

For example, Smylie Kaufman had this to say during an appearance on Golf’s Subpar Podcast: “I felt like (caddie) Harry Diamond really should have stepped in on the 15th hole. He did not have the right club in his hands. And I felt like Rory could have taken control of the championship on 15 if he just hits it in the middle of the green. And he hit a good shot. But it just was the wrong club.”

Hank Haney commented on the same situation via social media: “If Steve Williams was Rory’s caddie I can promise you he would have never hit a perfect flighted 7-iron that rolled over the green on 15 into a terrible lie.”

McIlroy came to his looper’s defense before last week’s Genesis Scottish Open, where he’d go on to finish T-4, and now it’s another Irishman sticking up for Diamond.

“It makes my blood boil, to be honest,” Lowry told BBC Sport NI at Royal Troon before the 152nd Open Championship. “They don’t see how hard Harry works and how good he is for Rory. Just because he’s not standing in the middle of the tee box like other caddies who want to be seen and heard doesn’t mean that his voice isn’t heard by Rory.”

The Open: Tournament hub | Thursday tee times | Photos

It’d be tough to find another Tour player who spends more time with McIlroy and Diamond than Lowry. They have been friends for years, play practice rounds together before major championships, have been Ryder Cup teammates twice (2021, 2023) and represented Ireland at the 2021 Olympics. Plus, they won the Zurich Classic as a team earlier this season.

If anyone knows how well McIlroy and Diamond work together, it’s Lowry.

For the opening round of The Open, world No. 33 Lowry tees off Thursday at 9:59 a.m. ET alongside Cameron Smith and Matt Fitzpatrick. Rory McIlroy is grouped with Max Homa and Tyrrell Hatton at 5:09 a.m.