SOUTHPORT, England — If your landscaper saw the golf course that will serve as the center of the golf world for the next seven days, they might keel right over.
What’s brown and yellow and hard as a rock? The golf course at Royal Birkdale. The fairways and “greens.” On Monday. At this 154th Open Championship. The color has drained already — and if you’re a fan of luscious Kentucky Bluegrass and hues of green, you’re not gonna want to see it come Sunday afternoon.
And as strange as it sounds, that’s precisely why we’re excited.
It requires a little bit of effort to get to Birkdale, a tiny British seaside town on the west coast of the country, roughly an hour outside of both Manchester and Liverpool. The roads are narrow and winding, and there is more countryside than commercial development by a particularly wide margin. And yet that’s what the R&A has done repeatedly over the decades, bringing more modern Opens to this golf course than all but the Old Course at St. Andrews. The reason is the golf course, which is a rippled and gnarled brute — a true “championship test” — on the worst of days.
And on the best of days?
Well, it looks the way it did on Monday afternoon, when scores of golf fans descended upon the property for the first time, including the GOLF.com team. Here’s what we learned on Monday at the Open Championship, starting with the course.
1. Dark and tan
The reason we love links golf is because it inverts our perception of the sport as we know it. What’s bad is good here, and what’s green is brown. After a long, hot summer and a surprising bout without rain, that’s exactly where we’ve landed.
I’ve been lucky to attend the last four Open Championships for GOLF, and have seen the championship contested under all kinds of conditions. I cannot ever recall seeing a course as brown as Royal Birkdale was on Monday. And it’s Monday. The forecast isn’t calling for any rain. There’s a chance what’s brown could become yellow.
The reason why we love a strange-colored golf course is because, in the minds of ultra-refined pro golfers, bouncy, dead grass welcomes uncertainty. It requires creativity. It asks a different kind of question. New and different questions make for more interesting golf. And, well, who doesn’t love that?
2. A new kind of competition
The Open Championship held a first-of-its-kind event for a major championship on Monday: A qualifier. As scores of players in the field got their bearings of the course for the first time, several high-level pros and amateurs battled it out for one final spot in the field. The idea behind the competition — called the Last Chance Qualifier — was to give the players who came painstakingly close to a spot at the Open another chance at earning their way into the field.
On site at Royal Birkdale, the energy for the new event was surprisingly high. Galleries in the hundreds followed the players as they came up the final stretch, following along dutifully and cheering with considerable enthusiasm.
In the end, the winner was Joe Dean, a former truck driver and aspiring pro, whose two-under score topped the 12-man field. But the real winner was the R&A, which added a dose of free tournament golf to an otherwise sleepy day on the major championship calendar — and did so without overextending or impacting the rest of the field here at Royal Birkdale.
3. Practice surprises
One surprising throughline of the Open Championship rota: the driving range is a haul from the first tee box. Most of this is driven by the history of the golf courses, where land is at a premium and where practice areas are often secondary to pushing as many great golf holes into as little land as possible.
Not at this week’s Open, and for good reason: the golfers are using the range at Hillside, one of several neighboring golf clubs to Royal Birkdale, and also just a short walk from the clubhouse at Royal Birkdale. The reason for the shift is simple: It just made more logistical sense for the Open Championship. But the effect is significant: Hillside also happens to be the home course of this Open Championship’s native son, Tommy Fleetwood.
4. Speaking of the clubhouse…
There has never been a more striking host clubhouse for an Open Championship than this week’s — an Art Deco-style design that looks a bit like a 1970s approximation of a spaceship. The clubhouse sticks out against the backdrop here at Birkdale, and provides the perfect framing for the rest of the action at this week’s event.
The story with the clubhouse is equally fitting. It was designed in 1935 by architect George E. Tonge to look like an ocean liner cruising through the sand dunes of the property. It is also, famously, the third clubhouse in club history — rebuilt after the club’s initial home was discovered to be built on a neighbor’s land.
At the Open, the weirdness is part of the fun. At Royal Birkdale, the fun literally begins in the earth.
5. Duel in the sun?
It wasn’t quite Open Championship weather on Monday at Birkdale … and it won’t be Open Championship weather straight through the end of tournament week, where temps are expected to range between the mid-70s and mid-80s … and the sun is expected to shine the entire time.
There is a chance, given the state of conditions and the state of the forecast, that this week gives us the brownest Open Championship final round in many years — perhaps since Tiger Woods’ famed victory at Royal Liverpool back in 2006.
