Within the scorecard holder which sits in my back pocket every time I play golf is a piece of paper. On that piece of paper are 13 different numbers, one for each club in my bag. It’s been there since last year, after I went through a relatively painstaking process of hitting 20 shots with each club, on a launch monitor, and averaging out the distances for every club in my bag (minus my putter, of course).

I’ve come to depend on it. I’d probably surrender half the clubs in my bag before that piece of paper. Knowing my exact yardages with every club has legitimately helped me — until last week.

Sneaking in a few rounds in the neighbouring links courses around Royal Liverpool with some fellow Golf Digest staffers (we call these “research rounds”), it immediately became clear how worthless that piece of paper was on those courses. For the first time since I jotted those numbers down, I played golf never bothering to consider it.

So much golf, from the PGA Tour et al. is a game of execution. Picking a spot, and trying to hit it to that number. Like throwing a dart at the centre of a dartboard, your success or failure starts and ends with you alone.

Links golf is different. A certain wind will send a driver across a fairway, rather than down it. Or float it high and away into nowhere. Links courses can turn a 9-iron into a 5-iron, and a 5-iron into the best sand wedge in your bag.

Mastering most golf courses means imposing your will as a golfer on to the layout. Links golf requires a meshing with what’s in front of you, in that current moment. Sometimes that means putting the driver away for good, as Tiger Woods did when he won at Royal Liverpool in 2006. Other times, it may mean calling upon a shot you may have never played before. Never does it require scribbling numbers on to a piece of paper.

“There are several different options to play each golf hole,” Brian Harman said of Royal Liverpool. “If you’re into the wind you can hit way more club and send it up in the air to try to stop it, or you can try to finesse something lower. I enjoy the variety of shots you have to hit.”

There’s a famous quote from the legendary British golf writer, Bernard Darwin, that the elements at Hoylake make Royal Liverpool a “breeder of great champions”. The history certainly backs it up, from Walter Hagan to Bobby Jones, to Peter Thompson, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.

Brian Harman isn’t the name you’d expect to follow on that list. But standing in the rain as the 36 year-old hoisted the claret jug, Hoylake had done it again. Brian Harman was the man who forsook the formulas and mastered his feel instead. It’s the only way to conquer the elements of links golf. And in doing so Harman proved he is, undoubtedly, a great champion.

1. Good putting is boring putting

There was a lot of talk about putting at Royal Liverpool. Scottie Scheffler couldn’t make putts. Neither could Rory McIlroy, or Tommy Fleetwood. Brian Harman could, so he won.
Harman was, indeed, a tremendous putter at Royal Liverpool. But what, exactly, does that mean?
When most of us think about “good putting”, we think of draining long putts, and walking in 20-footers for birdie. Harman’s stats tell a different story. He gained 11.57 strokes on the green last week, but the longest putt he dropped all week was just over 30 feet. Rory McIlroy dropped two putts longer than that over those same 72 holes. So did Scheffler, and 29 other players.
Harman’s elite putting performance instead was predicated on making the boring, extraordinary. He didn’t have a three putt. He missed just one putt inside 10 feet, and none inside of five feet. When you do that, no one else can stand a chance.
“I expect to make those putts,” he said.
The problem the rest of us have is that we expect to make the wrong putts. Sure, it’s fun to drop 15 and 20 footers, but missing those doesn’t really matter, in the scheme of things. Making more of those putts five and 10 feet. Missing those are the killer of good rounds, and the key to avoiding bad ones.
Good putting doesn’t mean dropping bombs. It means making lots of little ones.

Travis Smyth. The Open Twitter

2. Know how to ditch spin in a hurry

Every time a golfer hits a ball, it flies into the air with backspin. It’s backspin that keeps the ball in the air. Of course, that’s not what you want when the wind starts gusting, as it did early during Open Championship week.
Killing lots of spin in a hurry strikes me as a pretty essential skill, for all golfers. This week, most pros I talked to said they generally settle on a combination of taking more club, swinging softer, and teeing the ball slightly higher (the ball being propped up in the rough has the same effect).
“When you’re trying to hit a low one, you are coming in quite steep. It’s easier off a tee, so you’re not catching the ground instantly at impact, which will create spin, which into the wind you don’t want to do,” said Travis Smyth after his hole-in-one on the 17th hole. “I took an extra club and chipped it.”
Simple enough, and something to keep in mind the next time you find yourself facing a stiff breeze.

3. Distance varies way more than you think

Of course, reducing your spin only mitigates the effects of an into wind shot. Ultimately, if you’re into wind, the ball is going to go shorter. Same with if it’s raining. Watching the pros slog it out on Sunday made me realise that the rest of us have a woeful under-appreciation for how much the rain, or wind, will affect our shots.
The reality is a player could be capable of hitting it 320 yards one day, but put that same player in certain elements, and they may struggle to crack 250 yards — as Rory McIlroy proved.

Rory's drive on the first hole in calm weather yesterday:

316 yards, 132 yards in

Rory's drive on the first hole in pouring rain today:

250 yards, 208 yards in pic.twitter.com/WMeOLASphr

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) July 23, 2023

“If it’s raining a little heavier, an iron could easily go 20 yards shorter,” Sepp Straka, who finished T-2.
Sure, into the wind, the rest of us will take an extra club. Maybe two. Really, there should be time when we take five extra clubs, or expect a 70-yard decrease on a given drive. It’s uncomfortable to think about, but it’s half the battle when playing in the elements. And it’s something pros don’t think twice about.

4. It’s the external factors that kill you

If you’ve noticed so far, a lot of the things I learnt have to do with external factors. All the stuff that’s out there. There are lots of things out there, especially during Opens, and it’s easy to let them screw us up.
Even for pros.
For Emiliano Grillo, it was the wind on the driving range. It was blowing left-to-right most days. Perfect to counteract his draw. Then he stands up on the second hole, and for the first time, finds the wind blowing right-to-left toward out of bounds. That baby draw which was flying straight on the range is about to turn into a hook.
“It’s so hard to make the switch,” he said. “Standing on the second hole, I bailed out right both days. I probably hit my ball 100 yards right.”
For Max Homa, it was the hassle of moving everything around in the rain.
“The umbrella to the glove to the yardage book to the umbrella, it just gets tiring holding the dang thing and shuffling it around,” he said after I asked him the most difficult part of playing in the rain. “You just feel very out of sorts. It takes a few holes to get going.”
Yet both those players had their best Open Championship finish ever. As did Ben An, who says it was always unlucky bounces that would often send his rounds into a mental, downhill spiral. He said things only started to change recently, when he accepted those will happen and there’s nothing he’ll be able to do about it. The central skill in golf isn’t avoiding them altogether, but sucking them up and moving on when they do happen.
“I realised I usually get beaten by the golf course, not by other players,” he says. “I still have to work very hard on it, but I don’t lose my mind as much as I did before … It’s not perfect, but you have to learn to let it go, like what are you going to do next.”

5. Go short or long of trouble, but never around

The third hole is a quirky layout where an old racetrack used to be. A wall signifying out of bounds cuts in from the right at about 250 yards. During the previous two Opens at Royal Liverpool, players would hit a no-brainer iron miles short of it. This year, for the first time, players had introduced a third strategy: Sending a driver over the out of bounds, over the fairway, into the rough. Amateur Christo Lamprecht, who won the silver medal for low amateur after leading through 18 hole, opted for that strategy on day one. He birdied the hole.

 

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“It makes sense,” Bryson DeChambeau says. “You can take the OB out of play every time that way.”
While some players opted for ‘over it’ strategy the first two days, they abandoned it once the weekend rain came. But this was an interesting insight how they think about avoiding absolute, no-go areas like out of bounds: When trying to avoid a hazard, you need to either hit something short that has no chance of going into the hazard long, or something so long that it has no chance of catching the hazard short. Don’t flirt with it, and don’t try going around it.
On a slightly separate note, many proponents of a golf ball rollback would point to something like this as evidence the golf ball does need to get rolled back. I’m not unconvinced by that argument, but in this case, I’m just not sure that would tell the entire story.
Being able to go over everything does give this hole different shot options, which is the guiding principle for so much of the rollback debate. And because that ‘go for it’ option only requires a carry of about 260 yards, it’s a feat most long hitters could accomplish even with a persimmon driver — especially with the right wind.
Rather, this strategy exists now and not before because golfers in 2023 understand the statistical value of being in the rough, if it means being closer to the hole.
“There is typically something bad in play, constantly, so you might as well get it as close to the hole as you can,” says Scott Fawcett, the founder of Decade Golf. “Especially in major championship golf.”
Intentionally trying to hit your ball in the rough is simply not an idea which made sense until we had data that proved why it can. Wherever you may land on the rollback debate, that genie isn’t going back in the bottle.

6. Fully commit to a feeling that works

As often happens with these articles, I’m quickly approaching my word limit, so a quick note on how much I love that Adrian Otegui put this rehearsal practice backswing move into play because he liked the feeling of it in a practice round. He noticed his backswing getting too short. This helped him commit to the feeling of a full turn, in the final seconds it was time to swing.

Instead of waggles, Adrián Otaegui makes a full backswing while he’s over the ball. Then stops, resets, and swings.

“It’s new. It’s a feeling I had in practice rounds. I quite like the feeling, used it on the driving range, then introduced it into my routine.”

Practice vs real pic.twitter.com/QEBWIDHnLd

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) July 21, 2023

A good reminder, that it doesn’t matter how something looks if it helps your swing feels.

7. Trust the process

I find it increasingly weird how, whenever Rory McIlroy gets into major contention and doesn’t win, pundits immediately reach for some mental platitude. It’s always some variation of Rory not being able to handle the pressure, or wanting it too much, or not wanting it enough, or lacking the killer instinct.
But what, exactly, does that mean?
Rory isn’t standing over a golf ball, thinking about how much making this putt would mean to him. None of these guys are, and they shouldn’t be, either. They may feel nervous, but that’s natural and normal. Even when they feel the nerves, they’re not trying to do anything different. “Process” was the word Rory McIlroy kept returning to during his Hoylake victory in 2014. It’s the same process he’s focusing on in 2023.
The truth is, the whole ‘he can’t handle the heat’ mental stuff is just a thing that people say who don’t want to look at the real reasons, so they make up catchy ones instead.
As far as I can see it, in Rory’s case, he’s a very, very good player (obviously). The key reason McIlroy is so good is because of his golf swing. He’s not the biggest guy, but he can hit his ball enormous distances because of how dynamic his golf swing is. But that dynamism also leads to occasional streaky ball-striking patches, especially off the tee. That’s what we saw during the early part of this season. That’s why to some outsiders, Rory can run hot and cold from round to round. It’s worth the trade.
Other times, he’ll struggle with consistent contact on his putting — that’s what happened on Saturday. Every player has different tendencies which pop up from time to time. This is Rory’s.

 

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Occasionally Rory also has a tendency, I think, to play too safe at certain times. Some variation of all of the above can explain most of McIlroy’s recent major near-misses.
The only way to win majors in the modern era is to fire on all cylinders. The fields are just too deep not to, as Brian Harman proved this week. Rory is one of the few exceptions: A player good enough to get himself into contention, even when he’s not firing on all cylinders. Just as Jack Nicklaus did, whose record doesn’t just include 18 major wins, but 19 other major top threes.
It’s not a bad thing, so save the mental game platitudes about Rory. Any minute now things will align, and Rory will get his major. Then many more after that.

The post Seven things learnt from players at the 2023 Open Championship appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

We’ll tell you who liked the conditions, however: the players themselves. The overall scoring average on Day 1 at Hoylake was a tidy 73.250 on the par-71 layout, with 31 golfers posting under-par scores. That’s fewer than the 54 in the opening round at St Andrews a year ago, but a pretty healthy number for the Open overall.

As they say in England, though, if don’t like the weather, just wait 15 minutes. Or in this case a day or so. According to the official forecast from the R&A, the next three rounds at Royal Liverpool don’t include a lot of that sun stuff.

If nothing else on Friday, we can expect stronger winds during the day, which could make hitting the tiny green on the par-3 17th hole trickier as well as bring more into play the internal out of bounds that lurks on the third and 18th holes.

And then there’s the weekend forecast:

Here’s where the rain appears to be kicking in, turning “more persistent and briefly heavier for a time during the afternoon.” That make you golf sickos a little more happy?

And Sunday’s forecast begins with the always concerning “low confidence in detail” before suggesting that “rain may become prolonged” and the winds gusting up to 30 mph.

Long story short: It’s unlikely we’ll be getting another full day of clear skies for the rest of this major.

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A warning has been issued on the eve of the 2023 Open Championship by one of golf’s greatest coaches.

Peter Cowen, who currently works with five-time major champ Brooks Koepka among others — and has previously worked with the likes of former World No. 1s Rory McIlroy and Lee Westwood — was asked about Royal Liverpool’s new hole, the par-3 17th. And he did not hold back.

“I hate it,” Cowen told bunkered.co.uk. “I haven’t heard a player say a good thing about it. They’ll just deal with it.”

Listed as 136 yards, No. 17 with its elevated green and deep surrounding bunkers will play as the shortest hole on the course. But the par 3 named “Little Eye” is expected to be a big challenge for players this week. A potentially unfair challenge, according to Cowen.

“It could ruin somebody’s career if the wind goes in the wrong direction all of a sudden or there is bad luck rolling down from the wrong place,” Cowen added. “Why would you make a 120-130 yard par-3 impossible? It’s called an infinity green and that could be it. They could be playing infinitely backwards and forwards across the green.”

As for takes from the players? Well, Matt Fitzpatrick called the hole “interesting”. And Jordan Spieth said it could produce some “carnage”. So, yeah, better buckle up for this one.

The 17th hole replaced the par-3 15th that was in play when McIlroy captured the claret jug the last time Hoylake hosted in 2014.

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Bunkers are never easy, but at the Open Championship, they’re hazards in the truest sense of the word.

And so are the rakes.

The subject of bunker rakes may seem like a small, largely inconsequential detail, because it usually is. But players pay extra attention to small, inconsequential details during major weeks. And early in the week at Royal Liverpool, everyone is stressing out about the rakes.

“They’re the kind of rakes you’d use in a garden,” one coach said.

“It looks like we’re raking sand dunes,” added another.

The rakes aren’t the ones Royal Liverpool Golf Club usually uses, according to one member of the club. They’ve been put into play especially for Open week, and the issue specifically is that they have wide teeth.

Conventional bunker rakes have the prongs very close together — designed to quickly clean up the mess players leave behind.

But with wide-tooth rakes, you can’t get the same level of detail. Once a player has been in a bunker and his footprints have been raked away, it’s still obvious he was in there. Here’s an example from Royal Liverpool’s second hole. The right side is the untouched side; the left side is what it looks like after being raked.

The wide-tooth rakes succeed in levelling the sand, but that’s about it. The prongs are so far apart that they leave behind messy little ridges that the ball will inevitably roll into.

“The ball rolls down to the crevice,” says PGA Tour player Michael Kim. “It’s not plugged but it’s definitely not a good lie.”

It’s the bunker equivalent of hitting your ball into a divot, or some other bad lie. Once a player’s ball rolls into one of those crevices, they might struggle to generate enough spin to get the ball to stop on the green. Once it lands, it simply won’t stop rolling. That five-foot putt rolls to eight, or 12 feet. From an easy par to an easy bogey.

It’s a small but clever way of making these pot bunkers a little more penal. Late in the day, after a few different players have raked away their mess, bunker shots will be particularly difficult. Avoiding those nasty pot bunkers is a key to every Open Championship. And with these rakes, that’ll be especially true this week.

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UC Berkeley can lay claim to producing plenty of brilliant minds, but we’re most thankful to the school for churning out arguably the two best characters on Golf Twitter. Max Homa, of course, is the undisputed king in those parts, but former college teammate Michael Kim has emerged as a must-follow in recent years as well.

The 2013 Haskins Award winner as the US’s top golfer during his time as a Golden Bear, it hasn’t always been a smooth career on the PGA Tour. But no player consistently lets fans know what it’s like to be a pro golfer like the 2018 John Deere Classic champ.

Which leads us to the purpose of this post. Kim has made a habit of sharing course scouting reports ahead of tournaments. And his assessment ahead of the 2023 Open Championship is the most informative and thorough thing we’ve read about Royal Liverpool yet. See for yourself — and definitely click on the “Show more”:

My thoughts on front nine at Royal Liverpool and overall:

-I was watching highlights of 06 and 14 yesterday and it was amazing how brown it was in 06 so I’d thought I’d try and show the comparison on the 4th hole tee shot between 06, 14, 23. Right now it’s def closer to 14 and… pic.twitter.com/Sp02SDOjip

— Michael S. Kim (@Mike_kim714) July 18, 2023

Glad to see someone is getting their money’s worth with a Twitter Blue subscription. That’s 506 words!

But seriously, there’s a lot of great info packed into that tweet. Most notably, this ain’t the Royal Liverpool we saw at the 2006 Open, where Tiger Woods famously won by hitting his driver only one time all week. The course is soft and getting softer by the minute, which won’t upset the 2014 champ and pre-tournament favourite Rory McIlroy.

It’s good to know that guys can “get on a run” with some of the early holes on the easier front nine. And it’s interesting to get Kim’s thoughts on Hoylake’s much-discussed internal out of bounds.

It’s not great to hear that we probably won’t see the “firm links golf” that only comes into play on the PGA Tour a couple weeks a year. But it is good to hear that Kim doesn’t believe there will be a “huge difference” between the morning and afternoon waves due to weather.

Of course, that last part could change in an instant. And Kim’s dispatch from the UK doesn’t tell us who is going to actually lift the claret jug come Sunday evening. But we’ll take all the help we can get. Thanks, Michael.

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It was the topic of his putting struggles, which he feels are being exaggerated.

“I think I had back-to-back tournaments [recently] that I could have won where I putted poorly, and all of a sudden it became this [narrative] where I’ll watch highlights of my round, and even the announcers, any time you step over the putt it’s like: ‘Well, this is the part of the game he struggles with,’” Scheffler said. “If you say it every time and you guys [media] see me miss a 12-footer it’s like: ‘Oh, there it is. He’s struggling again.’”

Scheffler offered a reason why his putting is a target for criticism. “I think that most of what has to happen is something has to be created into a story,” he said. “For a while it didn’t really seem like there was much of a story behind the way I play golf. I think I was viewed as probably a touch boring and didn’t really show much emotion and whatever else you could think of.”

If it is a lazy take on broadcasts, there’s at least statistics to back up the analysis. Scheffler ranks first on the PGA Tour for strokes gained/off the tee and in approach, but 137th for putting.

“I don’t pay attention to it,” he said. “The things that I’m working on right now I feel very excited about. I’m hitting a lot of good putts. Pretty soon, a lot of those good putts will start falling in the middle of the hole.”

Enough putts have fallen the past nine months for last year’s Masters champion to compile a fantastic encore to his breakout 2022 season. In 19 events, Scheffler has finished outside the top 10 just four times. He’s won twice, including the Players Championship. He has not posted a result worse than T-5 in his seven starts leading into the Open.

The only reason Scheffler is flying under the radar leading into the final major of the year is professional golf has been consumed by a June 6 peace treaty that somewhat ended a long and bitter civil war between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf. Much of the attention has been on Rory McIlroy, LIV’s biggest critic and the PGA Tour’s brightest star, who won last week’s Scottish Open before returning to the site of his 2014 Open triumph.

Scottie Scheffler lines up a putt in the 2023 Scottish Open. Jared C Tilton

“I’m not really sure where the radar is,” Scheffler said with a laugh. “I do my best to not try and pay attention to things. I don’t know if I’m under, above, [or] on anybody’s radar. I don’t really try to pay attention to that stuff. I try to prepare for each event the same way.”

Scheffler couldn’t prepare for the Open the same way given he’d never seen the course known as Hoylake (after the town in which it’s located). So, he watched Woods’ victory at the 2006 Open at Hoylake on YouTube.

“It’s a pretty valuable tool, really,” he said. “I had never seen this course before. I didn’t really know anything about it, other than it was really firm and [Woods] only hit one driver for the entire week.”

Whether the homework and practice rounds pay off, only time will tell. But Scheffler insisted he won’t consider this year a disappointment if he doesn’t win a second career major.

“A year without winning a major would be pretty similar to the other 25 years of my life, I guess,” he said. “Yes, it’s so fun to win majors, but I’m not going to sit at the end of the year and look back on the year and be frustrated or upset because I didn’t win a major.

“I think if you asked me when I was in college if [by age] 27 [I’d] have six wins, a major and a Players, I’d probably say, yeah, I’m satisfied. But … you win one tournament and you want to win two, and then two turns into three. It’s just never enough.”

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Players and caddies at Royal Liverpool have been warned about Just Stop Oil, a collection of demonstrators attempting to force the British government to end fossil fuel licensing and production. The group has been targeting sporting and entertainment venues to protest, including at Wimbledon, the World Snooker Championship and rugby union’s Premiership final in recent weeks. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak recently said the “eco-zealots” are “not content with disrupting our summer and cherished sporting events, they are essentially leading us into an energy surrender”.

Sunak and his administration have given police greater latitude in their powers to quell the movement. That includes at Open, where many believe Royal Liverpool will be the next target of activism.

In response, the R&A and local authorities have increased security presence at Hoylake, including a number of plain-clothed officers. The Merseyside police issued a statement on the matter, saying “contingency plans are in place to allow visitors enjoy the Open with minimal disruption.”

Should the protesters emerge during the competition, players have been told not to tackle the demonstrators and instead allow police and security to handle the situation. This is in response to England’s Jonny Bairstow recently carrying a protester off the field during the Ashes.

Hoylake is not a stranger to protests. At the 2006 Open protesters threw dye on the 18th green as Tiger Woods approached at the end of the championship.

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More prescriptively pejorative than an Australian golf club’s sock length requirements, and nearly as inscrutable, out-of-bounds rules may be as insulting as golf’s guidelines get. One foot inside those infernal white stakes, and you are as perfect as the centre of the fairway. One foot on the other side — nay, one millimetre — and despite the fact that you may be able to not only easily find your slightly misplayed shot but in many cases can take a decent hack at it, you are instead irrevocably damned. Because unlike a regular hazard, a ball out of bounds is penalised twice, forcing the player to replay the shot from the spot where he just struck it poorly. The so-called stroke-and-distance penalty refers to adding two shots to the score, but it also could just as well reference the physical reaction to a ball that trickles OB: apoplexy.

How close is the OB right all the way up 18?

This close. pic.twitter.com/CpreXZWk7j

— Adam Kirk (@DGBetting_) July 17, 2023

This is where we find ourselves this week at the Open Championship at Hoylake, a venue known perhaps as much for its legacy of world-class winners as it is for its historically insidious holes where OB plays a somewhat outsized role. What makes Hoylake’s out-of-bounds problem so boundless may be the fact that while the demarcation line between good and dead is a kind of gravediggers mound that stretches for hundreds of yards, what’s out of bounds is exactly well within the property of the golf club itself. In non-Open weeks, the area that’s surrounded by three different holes is normally the club’s practice area and is declared out of bounds. During the Open this week, that area around the third, eight and 18th holes is reserved for the hospitality and merchandise tents and even means a shot into the grandstand right of the closing hole now forces a reload.

Some call this situation “interior out of bounds”, but to be fair, it’s not something contrived by Royal Liverpool for a major championship. The area used to be a horse racing track that was part of the club at its founding more than a century-and-a-half ago, and it’s always been played as out of bounds. But just as cruelly, it’s also been defined only by that low mound, or so-called “cops”, so a mis-hit ball might just as easily stop rolling before it gets to the white stakes as it might just barely bound over that line.The allure and the nausea of Hoylake’s OB, and really most OB, is that it stares at you like that police car you just passed doing 80. As Golf Club Atlas once spoke of Hoylake’s out-of-bounds area: “The golfer is afforded absolutely perfect visuals. Like a car wreck, he seems unable to tear his eyes away from the trouble.”

Of course, that sentiment is also the fearsome strength of OB, particularly internal OB. One of Royal Liverpool’s original architects Tom Simpson once suggested that no course could be considered great if it didn’t have out of bounds. Hoylake not only has out of bounds, it’s been fortified for this year’s Open on the final hole by having the cops jut further out into the fairway, 20 yards further than the last time the Open was played here. Add in that the hole’s been lengthened by 50 yards, and you could have a player limping home with a double-bogey 7 more often than an eagle 3. Martin Ebert, the veteran architect with multiple Open Championship venue tweaks to his credit, is eager to see how the OB might influence both tee shots and second shots this week, given the particular circumstances of a closing hole.

“I think that the out-of-bounds at both the 3rd and the 18th at Hoylake makes them great holes,” he said when I emailed him last week. “It will be interesting to see how the players take on the third and 18th. I asked one of the marshals at the third tee in 2014 how many golfers hit a driver over the corner [of the out-of-bounds], and was told only two, Darren Clarke and Tom Watson [both not coincidentally obviously former Open champions]. Are the golfers of today more aggressive? With the 18th, it will be so easy for a tee shot to end up out of bounds. Will a good proportion of the players not hit driver on a hole which is over 600 yards?”

Ebert is legitimately wondering, of course, but a more malevolent architect might be cackling at the prospect of how out-of-bounds is the next great defence against distance at the elite level. We’ve already seen this year where a parallel fairway at Oak Hill at the PGA Championship was suddenly declared out of bounds, and similar, severely internal, parallel fairway out-of-bounds has been used at the Open Championships at Royal Birkdale at Royal Portrush. Of course, at Portrush McIlroy also hit his opening tee shot out of bounds after a slight left miss landed in a perfectly fine patch of grass that was played as a stroke and distance penalty for the simple reason that the club had always done so because they originally did not own that particular piece of land. The fact that they now did and didn’t change the out-of-bounds penalty simply made the penalty more infernal.

There’s even some suggestion that venerable Oakmont should employ internal out-of-bounds when it next is home to the US Open in 2025. When it held the US Amateur in 2021, players played adjacent fairways on as many as six holes to more efficiently approach the green.

But OB rules have long been a hallmark of links in the UK where land wasn’t as plentiful as in America, and nearby houses, walls, roads and railway lines cut close to club boundaries. Never mind that the penalties have changed several times over the last 250 years. At one time it was only a stroke, and while the stroke and distance penalty was officially codified by the USGA and R&A in 1952, just seven years later, the Southern California Golf Association broke ranks and adopted a local rule reducing the “unfair penalty stroke in connection with ball out of bounds”.

Even today in order to speed up play, the ruling bodies now allow recreational golfers to take a drop with just a stroke penalty near the point where the ball left the property. But that’s not how the rules for tournament play read. The rule book even suggests internal out of bounds might be ideal for safety purposes, or mostly to avoid cutting a corner. “For example, on a dogleg hole, an internal out of bounds may be used to prevent a player from cutting the dogleg by playing a ball to the fairway of another hole,” reads model local rule A-4.

Of course, bizarre local rules are nothing new. Reservation Golf Club has been a nine-hole course by Eel Pond and Mattapoisett Harbor in Massachusetts since 1895 but when a road split the course in half, new local rules had to be adopted. Notable is the guidance for the ninth and 18th holes, which define out of bounds as the white line parallel to the hole on the right, then to the white diagonal line in the road, then to the white line on the left side of the road. Other holes use a low rock wall separating them as defining internal out of bounds for the parallel fairways.

While damaging passing cars might be the motivation at some clubs, damaging the golfer himself might be the primary motivation for unique local rules at other spots. As Cliff Schrock discovered in a Golf Digest article from 2016, some courses even invoke special rules to prevent animal attacks: “At Lake Powell National Golf Course in Page, Arizona, a ‘casual rattlesnake rule’ is used if your ball is within the vicinity of a rattler. You can gather your ball, drop without penalty — then presumably swing fast and run like hell.” Other local rules involve elephant stampedes, manure, volcanic rock and pretend water hazards.

Meanwhile, even though it’s specifically against the rules, a couple of other courses even ban players from flying their shots over a particular OB area, even if the ball doesn’t land or even stay in the area. The course’s rules cite safety, but forcing a particular ball flight seems the height of anxiety for all but the most sure golfers.

Similar OB anxiety will be on the menu at Hoylake this year, particularly at the closing hole, which might be the most claustrophobic 600-plus yard hole this side of Golden Tee. Just ask Phil Mickelson, who went for the par-5 green in two in 2014 only to hit his approach into the right-side grandstands and discover the fans weren’t home to a free drop but a stroke-and-distance penalty. What seems particularly ironic for an Open Championship, of course, is that such “internal” out of bounds isn’t how the Open’s most famous venue plays its string of holes with parallel fairway and shared greens. That inconsistency isn’t lost on Hoylake’s consulting architect.

“It could be argued that playing to different fairways is fine at St Andrews, so should be elsewhere,” Ebert said. “But it once again illustrates that the Old Course is one of a kind.”

Then again, so, too, can it be said of Royal Liverpool.

The post The Open Championship 2023: The quirky feature behind Hoylake’s greatest holes appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

The winner of The 151st Open at Royal Liverpool will receive USD3 million in prize money.

The Champion Golfer of the Year will receive the highest amount in The Open’s history as it returns to the renowned Hoylake links for the 13th time.

The R&A announced that the total prize fund for The Open played from 16-23 July 2023, will be USD16.5 million, an 18% increase on 2022.

Martin Slumbers, CEO of The R&A, said, “Our aim is to ensure The Open remains at the pinnacle of world golf and we have almost doubled the prize fund since 2016. While we are seeing substantial increases in prize money across the men’s professional game, we are fulfilling our wider obligation to the sport by elevating the AIG Women’s Open, strengthening pathways in the elite amateur game and encouraging more people around the world to play golf. We believe that getting this balance right is vital to the long-term future of the sport.”

Prize money
1: $3,000,000
2: $1,708,000
3: $1,095,000
4: $851,000
5: $684,500
6: $593,000
7: $509,500
8: $429,700
9: $377,000
10: $340,500
11: $310,000
12: $274,700
13: $258,300
14: $241,800
15: $224,800
16: $206,600
17: $196,600
18: $187,500
19: $179,600
20: $171,100
21: $163,100
22: $155,000
23: $146,700
24: $138,500
25: $133,800
26: $128,000
27: $123,300
28: $119,100
29: $113,900
30: $108,000
31: $104,500
32: $99,200
33: $95,700
34: $93,000
35: $89,800
36: $86,200
37: $82,200
38: $78,000
39: $75,200
40: $72,800
41: $69,800
42: $66,400
43: $63,400
44: $59,800
45: $56,400
46: $53,400
47: $51,300
48: $49,300
49: $47,000
50: $45,900
51: $44,900
52: $44,100
53: $43,400
54: $42,800
55: $42,100
56: $41,500
57: $41,100
58: $40,800
59: $40,500
60: $40,200
61: $40,000
62: $39,800
63: $39,600
64: $39,400
65: $39,200
66: $38,900
67: $38,600
68: $38,300
69: $38,000
70: $37,800

Prize Money shall be allocated only to professional golfers.

If more than 70 professional golfers qualify for the final two rounds, additional prize money will be added. Prize money will decrease by USD125 per qualifying place above 70 to a minimum of USD36,550.

Non-qualifiers after two rounds: Leading 10 professional golfers and ties USD12,000; next 20 professional golfers and ties USD10,000; remainder of professional golfers and ties USD8,500.

The post The R&A announces prize fund for the 151st Open at Royal Liverpool appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.