When the championship returns to the Scottish coast, a whopping 250,000 fans will file through the gates.
The R&A announced a multi-year agreement Monday that will see NetJets become the official private jet provider for The Open.
Golf’s oldest and perhaps most cherished major is big business. And it’s getting bigger. The last time The Open was at Royal Troon in 2016, a total of 173,000 spectators watched golfing affairs unravel.
This July, when the championship returns to the Scottish coast, a whopping 250,000 will file through the gates in the kind of mass stampede you’d get with a migration of Wildebeest.
The 152nd staging of The Open will have the third highest attendance in history, after the 290,000 that were shoehorned into St. Andrews for the 150th bonanza in 2022 and the 260,000 that descended on Hoylake last year.
“It’s a clear sign of the size of The Open,” said The R&A’s director of championship operations, Rhodri Price, who noted that some 22,500 will be under 25 while 13,000 will be part of the Kids Go Free initiative. “That’s testament to what The Open does for youngsters.”
Phil Mickelson of the United States walks next to his caddie Jim McKay on the 3rd during the second round on day two of the 145th Open Championship at Royal Troon on July 15, 2016, in Troon, Scotland. (Photo by Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images)
With the vast Open infrastructure being clattered and rattled up and transforming the Royal Troon surrounds into an officially-branded town of its own, the stage continues to be set.
The robust links will play to a total of 7,385 yards, up by 195 yards on the 2016 championship. At a formidable 623 yards, the par-5 sixth will be the longest hole in Open history.
This wheezing correspondent just about required fistfuls of Kendal Mint Cake and a sherpa to complete the great hike as we gasped and wheezed through a series of mighty blows in the media outing yesterday.
Two holes later, players will square up to the shortest hole in the championship’s history at the celebrated Postage Stamp.
The par-3 eighth, the scene of German amateur Hermann Tissies’ grisly 15 in the 1950 Open, measures just 123 yards on the scorecard but organizers can knock that down to a mere 99 yards with a front pin if they fancy.
Unsurprisingly, the Postage Stamp will be a significant feature of The Open presentation. TV cameras will be dug into all five bunkers that surround the tiny green to capture all manner of sandy escapades while a wraparound grandstand with 1,500 seats will be a much sought-after vantage point.
HOYLAKE, England — In addition to custody of the Claret Jug and the title of Champion Golfer of the Year, Brian Harman became a $30-million man on Sunday.
Harman, 36, banked $3 million, the largest winner’s check in the history of the British Open, and crossed $30 million in career earnings after winning his first major championship. Harman entered the week ranked No. 46 on the career PGA Tour money list with $28,967,672.
The R&A announced that the total prize fund for the 2023 Open was $16.5 million, an 18 percent increase from a year ago and nearly double the purse from 2016.
The top 31 finishers all made six figures for their four days of work. Even golfers who failed to make the cut didn’t go home empty-handed. The leading 10 professionals and ties made $12,000; the next 20 professional golfers and ties $10,000; and the remainder of professional golfers and ties $8,500.
HOYLAKE, England — Sunday afternoon at Royal Liverpool brought weather as persistently disagreeable as a drunk at a Saturday night bar, but only for competitors. For spectators, it was a minor annoyance. And for hardcore fans, it was a welcome 11th-hour arrival of authentic Open conditions, weather in which you’d think twice about leaving even Brandel Chamblee outdoors.
As morning mist turned to steady rain, it summoned the holy trinity of attributes that have been required on foul days at golf’s oldest major since Old Tom Morris first wrung out his tweed suit: attitude, aptitude and fortitude.
Attitude: a positive mindset before a shot is struck, a determination to push forward and not retrench.
Aptitude: learning from and adapting to varying conditions; forgetting stock shots and yardages and letting the inner artist – heck, the inner survivor – take over.
Fortitude: gut punches are coming, whether through missed putts, crappy bounces or ill-timed gusts; absorb them, move on.
Each individual trait is necessary, but useless without the other two.
If these elements were fed into Chat GPT with a request for an identikit image of someone who embodies them, it might generate a weathered face with an unmistakeable flintiness, and with a gleam in the eye. In short, you’d be looking at Tom Watson.
Watson says he didn’t truly appreciate links golf until 1981. It speaks volumes about his attitude, aptitude and fortitude that he’d already won three Claret Jugs by that time – more than the two he added after he learned to love the ground game. His resolve didn’t just show up in the British Isles. It produced one of the greatest rounds in golf history, though one often overlooked. In the rain-soaked second round of the 1979 Memorial, with a wind chill hovering at 13 degrees, 42 of 105 players didn’t break 80. One didn’t crack 90. Watson shot 69, missing only two greens and making no bogeys.
On Sunday, I reached out to Watson to ask how he approached final rounds at the Open in detestable weather. “Frankly, bad weather reduced the number of people who could win,” he said. “Some just couldn’t deal with and adjust to the bad conditions.”
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That’s the essence of a hall of famer, and the greatest links golfer of the last half-century. While others looked despairingly at the sky, his eyes never left the prize.
As the final round trudged on through growing puddles at Royal Liverpool, there was a degree of correlation between a player’s disposition and his score.
“It’s kind of sadistic to play in this kind of weather.” Thomas Pieters, 80.
“It was pretty brutal. Didn’t really have the mindset of it’s going that wet for that long.” Min Woo Lee, 75.
“These are not my conditions. I’ve always struggled a little bit in the rain. I fight grip slips and water balls off the tee.” Ryan Fox, 74.
“The umbrella to the glove to the yardage book to the umbrella, it just gets tiring holding the dang thing and shuffling it around… But if that’s the worst part of the day, it’s not so bad.” Max Homa, 69.
“I like it because a lot of people are going to complain about it, so you just have to accept it and be ready for it more mentally than physically.” Adrian Meronk, 67.
Vowing to be positive, adaptable and resolute is easy until a peg goes in the turf. Delivering on the intention is quite another. I asked Shane Lowry how he readied himself for the final round at Royal Portush in 2019, which he entered with a four-stroke lead knowing that lousy weather was coming.
“I felt going out that I had to be aggressive, that if I made four birdies I wouldn’t be beaten,” he replied. “And if I got in trouble to make bogey at worst. That’s pretty much the way it is for Harman today.” Lowry went on to win by six and Harman basically mirrored his game plan at Hoylake. A smattering of bogeys, but nothing worse, and enough birdies to offset any damage.
Harman is 5-foot-7 and on this day, in these conditions, joined an illustrious list of golfers of shorter stature who proved to be all grit. Like Gary Player, Ian Woosnam and Corey Pavin. He proved anew what all of them did before, that nothing is out of reach if you have the right attitude, not even the greatest trophy in the game.
HOYLAKE, England – Brian Harman skipped football practice one day when he was 11 years old. His mother, Nancy, drove him from their home in Savannah, Georgia, to Sea Island, Georgia, where he took an hour-long lesson from Jack Lumpkin, a fixture on every list of top golf instructors. Growing up on a golf course, Harman had picked up the game on his own and showed raw potential, but he wanted to find out what one of the best teachers thought of his ability.
“He didn’t tell me to get lost,” Harman recalled. “He told me I was doing well and come back in a few months and he’d check me again. For me, that was like a rite of passage.”
Harman passed his biggest test on Sunday, enduring a typical English summer day of a steady rain and a rocky start to shoot 1-under 70 at Royal Liverpool and win the 151st British Open by six strokes over Tom Kim (67), Sepp Straka (69), Jason Day (69) and Jon Rahm (70).
At 5-feet-7, Harman is one of the shorter players on Tour, but it hasn’t stopped him from beating competitors that are bigger and stronger. All his life he’s been told he’s too small, but Harman’s never paid attention. Instead, it served as motivation to prove them wrong. Asked once how long he’s played with a chip on his shoulder, Harman, said, “I think since my dad dropped me off at football practice and told me to not be disappointed if I didn’t get to play at all. I played a lot.”
Gifted with an all-around game and a silky-smooth putting stroke, he’ll never be confused for one of the game’s long knockers, but his hard work and bulldog mentality helped him win two previous PGA Tour titles heading into this week. He proudly noted that this will be the 12th straight year that he’s qualified for the FedEx Cup Playoffs, something only eight other players can stake claim to and only five of them are on track to do so this season. World Golf Hall of Famer Davis Love III has watched Harman blossom over the years and has been one of his biggest cheerleaders.
“He’s a lot like Jeff Sluman. He has that mentality of, I may not be the biggest guy out here, but I’m going to be the toughest,” Love said.
Harman, however, had been the leader of a dubious distinction: he’s been a top-10 machine but hasn’t won since the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship, recording 29 top-10s since the start of the 2017-18 PGA Tour season, the most of any player without a win in that span.
“It’s been hard to deal with,” he said. “That’s a lot of times where you get done, you’re like, ‘Dammit, man, I had that one.’…Like when is it going to be my turn again?”
Asked on Friday after he built a five-stroke lead with a bogey-free 65 to explain why he hasn’t won more often, Harman said he wished he knew.
“I think about it a lot, obviously,” he said. “I don’t know why it hasn’t happened, but I’m not going to quit.”
After a sluggish start on Saturday, Harman tacked on a third-round 69, his first 54-hole lead at a major since the 2017 U.S. Open, where he faltered on the final day. Harman learned from that experience, where he felt as if the day moved too quickly and he let his mind wander. Likewise, it took several years but Harman, who played his first British Open at Royal Liverpool in 2014 and then missed the cut four consecutive times, figured out how his game could translate to the linksland.
Brian Harman’s performance in his 3rd&final round of the @TheOpen , we witnessed a fantastic example of a strong @PGATOUR player breaking through his mindset barrier—staying present—not getting ahead of himself as he spoke of on Friday is not easy
On Sunday, with the sky a milky gray that made it difficult to see the Dee Estuary from the 11th hole let alone the north of Wales in the distance, Harman made an early bogey at the second and another at the fifth after he drove into a gorse bush. After Masters champ Jon Rahm made birdie ahead of him, Harman’s lead was trimmed to three.
That’s when Harman proved his toughness. A round earlier when he stumbled with his second straight bogey at the third hole, he passed a spectator who said, “Harman, you don’t have the stones for this.”
“It helped snap me back into I’m good enough to do this, I’m going to do this,” Harman said.
That he did. He settled his nerves and responded with back-to-back birdies at Nos. 6, where he struck a 5-iron to 14 feet, and 7 where he sank a 23-footer.
Harman led the field in fairways hit and avoided the dreaded pot bunkers. But thanks to using a training aid to fix his tendency to cut putts, his putter was his sword and his savior in becoming the Champion Golfer of the Year. He led the field in putting for the week, his 106 putts the fewest by a winner in the last 20 years. On one of the few occasions when he missed at No. 13 and made bogey, he buried a 37-foot birdie putt one hole later and an 8-foot birdie at 15 for good measure as his lead stretched back to five shots. He signed for a 72-hole total of 13-under 271 and his third career PGA Tour title and first in his last 168 starts.
“He’s a gritty player,” NBC’s Paul Azinger said. “The kind of guy if you handed him a pocket-knife and a book of matches and sent him off into the jungle, you’d find him a month later doing just fine.”
Harman, who hunts for elk and nine-point bucks with a bow and arrow in his spare time, detailed how after missing the cut at the Masters in April he blew off steam over the weekend by hunting for turkeys and pigs. Harman’s prowess with a bow and arrow drew the following question from a reporter on Friday: “I take it the sheep and the cows are safe around here at the moment, are they?”
“Sheep don’t taste as good as the turkeys do, I would imagine,” he said.
Harman was tabbed the “Butcher of Hoylake,” by one British tabloid, a nickname, which he said he approved.
“That made me chuckle,” he said. “Someone texted me that yesterday. That’s funny.”
The hunter became the hunted, but nobody could get him in their crosshairs. He simply carved up the field and Royal Liverpool with his combination of accuracy off the tee and a red-hot putter.
“If everything else is good, then (his game) can be pretty lethal,” Zach Johnson said.
Brian Harman celebrates after putting on the 14th green during the final round of the 151st Open at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in Hoylake, England. (Photo: Warren Little/Getty Images)
Harman began working with instructor Justin Parsons in recent years but always kept Lumpkin, who died last year at 86, involved as a member of his team.
“Brian can’t replace Jack as a friend or mentor,” said Love III, who won a major under Lumpkin’s watchful eye. “But Justin has really made a difference for him, an overall golf coach not just a swing coach.”
That initial lesson all those years ago with Harman was equally as meaningful for Lumpkin, who knew talent when he’d seen it and from Harman’s very first swing knew he’d seen something special.
“He had a look in his eyes that he wanted to be a great player,” Lumpkin told Golfweek a few years ago. “After that first lesson, I couldn’t wait to see him again. His mom used to bring him down twice a year in the early days and I used to wait to see his name in my lesson book because I just knew how good he was going to be.”
Marty Schottenheimer once circumvented Royal Troon golf secretary James Montgomerie, father of PGA and European tour star Colin Montgomerie.
Marty Schottenheimer once circumvented legendary Royal Troon golf secretary James Montgomerie, father of PGA and European tour star Colin Montgomerie, to get a tee time for himself and two team executives.
Also, in a friendly invitational golf event, Schottenheimer literally willed his ball over a creek and onto the green when he refused to lay up like everyone else.
“The ball looked like it was on a trajectory to land dead square in the middle of the creek,” former Browns executive vice president/administration Jim Bailey said Tuesday. “And Marty goes running up the fairway yelling, ‘Get over, you S.O.B!’ And it cleared! It was like the ball responded to him.”
The former NFL coach Schottenheimer, who passed away Monday at age 77 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, had that effect on people as well. The Browns have been to the playoffs 12 times since 1970 and four of those appearances came under Schottenheimer, including two consecutive AFC Championship games in 1986 and ‘87. He also coached the Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers and Washington Redskins.
Those who worked with Schottenheimer in Cleveland saw the true measure of his competitiveness when he was away from the team’s Baldwin Wallace headquarters.
Bailey laughed through a long story about Schottenheimer getting an offseason gig at a clinic in England on how to coach American football and negotiating a golf trip to Scotland as part of the deal.
He’d twice taken his assistants to coach in the Senior Bowl in Hawaii, a perk given to the staff that lost the AFC Championship. So Schottenheimer decided Bailey and Executive Vice President of Football Operations Ernie Accorsi would go with him to Scotland.
“I’m a bad golfer, Ernie’s a good golfer and of course Marty was not going to let a golf ball beat him,” Bailey, now retired, said in a phone interview from Denver.
Bailey belonged to a club at the time and said the golf pro offered to call ahead and set things up, but Schottenheimer insisted they were all set.
Sep 28, 1986; Cleveland Browns head coach Marty Schottenheimer on the sideline against the Detroit Lions at Cleveland Stadium. Manny Rubio-USA TODAY Sports
Choice morning tee times were already taken, but darkness doesn’t fall during the summer in Scotland until 11 p.m. Bailey learned just what “all set” meant in Schottenheimer’s world.
Bailey said they would get up early in the morning, Schottenheimer would put on a coat and tie, and they would drive to the course they wanted to play that day.
“Marty would go in and talk to the pro and say, ‘I’m Marty Schottenheimer, head coach of the Cleveland Browns.’ He had this whole routine lined up and he’d talk our way onto the golf course,” Bailey said.
The plan didn’t work at Troon.
“We go to Troon and the pro said, ‘I just sell golf balls, you’ve got to talk to the golf secretary,’” Bailey said. “We walk in, there’s this huge man with mutton chop sideburns, blue blazer with red lapels, glasses down on his nose. Marty goes through his whole routine and the guy looks down at his book and runs his finger down that thing and looks up and says, ‘No.’ It was Colin Montgomerie’s father.”
Of course, the stubborn Schottenheimer was undeterred by the elder Montgomerie, who worked at Troon for nearly 60 years, presided over two British Opens and eventually became the club’s president.
The trio drove into the village to seek out a shopkeeper Schottenheimer had played with at Sharon Golf Club in Sharon Center, Ohio, during the man’s buddy trip to the United States.
The 123 yard par 3, 8th hole named the ‘Postage Stamp’ at Royal Troon.
“He goes in and gets the shopkeeper to take us out as his guests to play at Troon,” Bailey said. “And as we walked by Mr. Montgomerie, Marty thumbed his nose at him.”
The threesome also played St. Andrews, Western Gailes and Prestwick, the site of the first British Open.
“It was kind of a ratty place and the caddies seemed a little sketchy,” Bailey said of Prestwick. “About the second hole, Ernie comes over and says, ‘Hey, those guys are rifling through our bags.’ Every third hole one of us didn’t play, we stayed with the caddies to protect our stuff.”
Then San Diego Chargers head coach Marty Schottenheimer has a word with wide receiver Vincent Jackson during training camp at Chargers Park. Photo By Stan Liu-USA TODAY Sports.
Bailey said he last saw Schottenheimer at former Browns owner Art Modell’s funeral in 2012. But as Schottenheimer’s family released word last week that the former Browns coach had been moved to hospice, stories came flooding back for Bailey.
He chuckled over the “friendly invitational” held by a friend of Bailey’s in the insurance business that Schottenheimer was determined to win, how the ball responded to his urging and made over the creek.
But for Bailey, the Scotland trip remains his favorite time with Schottenheimer, even if Bailey saw little of Schottenheimer on the course.
“I’d be trying to hack my way out of the gorse and I’d look up and I’d see Ernie’s head sticking out of a pot bunker and Marty would be on the green lining up his putt,” Bailey said. “We never played a shot together other than the tee shot.”
Marla Ridenour is a columnist for the Akron Beacon-Journal, part of the USA Today Network. She can be reached at mridenour@thebeaconjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MRidenourABJ.
Unrelated to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jessica Korda withdrew from AIG Women’s British Open early Thursday.
Jessica Korda will have to wait a little longer for her first major championship victory.
The 27-year-old announced early Thursday morning via her Twitter account that she would withdraw from the AIG Women’s British Open, the first women’s major championship of the year. The tournament begins Thursday at Royal Troon Golf Club in Scotland.
“Unfortunately, due to medical reasons that are not Covid-19 related, I’ve had to withdraw from the AIG Women’s Open. I’m hopeful to tee it up soon,” said Korda, who has been replaced in the field by Slovenia’s Katja Pogacar.
Korda has five LPGA wins to her name but is still seeking that elusive first major title. She’s yet to win since February 2018 at the Honda LPGA Thailand. Entering the week Korda sat at No. 20 in the Golfweek/Sagarin women’s professional rankings.
Check out the final group of qualifiers for the year’s first major, the Women’s British Open at Royal Troon.
Count rookie Haley Moore among the LPGA players who played their way into the year’s first major. Moore, who will compete in her first major as a pro, was one of 22 players who qualified for the 2020 AIG Women’s British Open via her play at the Aberdeen Standard Investments Ladies Scottish Open.
The field at Royal Troon was finalized by first taking the leading players, not already exempt, who made the cut at The Renaissance. It was then rounded out by using the Rolex Rankings. The Women’s British Open takes place Aug. 20-23.
Emily Pedersen comes in particularly hot among those on the list having lost in a playoff to Stacy Lewis at the Ladies Scottish Open.
A century after hosting for the first time, the Open Championship returns to Royal Troon for the 10th time in 2023.
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The British Open was first played at Royal Troon in 1923.
A century later, the Claret Jug is returning to South Ayrshire, Scotland for a 10th time.
The R&A announced Monday that Royal Troon will once again play host for the 152nd Open Championship, held July 16-23, 2023.
“We are very much looking forward to celebrating another milestone in the cherished history of The Open when we mark the 100th anniversary of the championship first being played at Royal Troon,” said Martin Slumbers, Chief Executive of the R&A.
Added Des Bancewicz, Captain of Royal Troon: “We are delighted to welcome the return of the world’s oldest major championship to Royal Troon and regard this as confirmation of the wonderful condition to which our historic links are maintained. The 152nd Open will also provide an excellent opportunity to celebrate 100 years of the Championship’s history at Royal Troon which commenced with Arthur Havers’ victory in 1923.”
Royal Troon last hosted the British Open in 2016, where Henrik Stenson prevailed against Phil Mickelson in one of the most exciting majors in recent memory. Troon previously hosted in 1923, 1950, 1962, 1973, 1982, 1989, 1997, 2004 and 2016.
This year’s event will be held at Royal St. George’s, followed by the Old Course at St Andrews in 2021 and Royal Liverpool in 2022.
