TROON, Scotland — All that futuristic golf equipment, the pariah of those concerned about its capacity to ruin the sport, has looked like a patsy here against a force even much more capable of oomph: Mother Nature. You take your fancy-schmancy clubs, she has seemed to say at this 152nd British Open, and I’ll show you just what I think of your so-called driving distance.
She got befuddling with her wind directions Thursday. She got so volatile for much of Friday that Justin Rose said, “Nothing makes sense with the yardage book, really.” Then Saturday, after taking a breather in the morning and midday, she went for the wind-and-rain exacta until the wind came back and the rain came hard and the best players in the world started letting their words get drastic.
“I think that was probably the hardest nine holes that I’ll ever play,” top-ranked Scottie Scheffler said.
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“I mean, the back nine [are] the hardest nine holes I think you could ever play in golf right now,” two-time major winner Dustin Johnson said.
“You’re standing there on the 18th tee,” 2019 champion Shane Lowry said, “wondering if you can actually hit the fairway, if you can reach the fairway, and it’s 230 yards to the fairway.”
So what was a normal-looking Saturday — with American Sam Burns and South African Thriston Lawrence shooting 65s and with Lowry up ahead at 8 under par and Daniel Brown at 7 under — careened into a matter of attrition and retreat. By late, cold nightfall, England’s Brown led going into the par-4 No. 18 at 5 under but double-bogeyed, Ireland’s Lowry had spent the last 11 holes withering all the way to 1 under, and it figured that nobody would grab the lead but that somebody, in this case Billy Horschel, would inherit it. After Brown felt the cold wind of his closing 6, Horschel stood alone at 4 under after a 2-under 69.
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That’s the 37-year-old Floridian in his 43rd major tournament without any memorable contention, and that’s the guy who said, “I’ve just always enjoyed the toughness of anything,” and, “I get tired of golf where you’re making full swings and you lean into a certain [yardage] number and [the ball] stops.” Whatever happens with nature Sunday, he will start off with a cavalry just behind.
The six players at 3 under after Saturday included Lawrence and Burns but also Rose and PGA Championship winner and chronic contender Xander Schauffele as well as Russell Henley and the major-debuting Brown. The one player at 2 under, Scheffler, is merely the runaway king of the sport at the moment. There’s Lowry at that 1 under. Major winners Adam Scott and Justin Thomas, forgotten much of the day, wound up at even par and viable once everybody came back toward them.
Golf got a rare occasion with descriptions of insufficient equipment and stories seldom told anymore.
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Scheffler came to a microphone and told of hitting a driver and a 3-wood “really solid” on the par-4 No. 15 and coming up — come on! — shy of the green. Lowry told of playing a par-3 with a driver and of hitting “driver, driver” into No. 15. Brown, holding up well amid that 3-under crowd in his first major at 29, hit driver into the par-3 No. 17. Here’s Schauffele on that hole: “So I literally smoked a 3-wood, a little off the heel and thin into the wind and rain, and it went 218 yards or something like that. So that was pretty humbling.” Johnson, long since a long hitter, said: “It’s so long I could barely reach the par-4s. I had to smash two to get there.”
Rose, 43, said he surely had been a junior when he last “played a round of golf where I’ve hit 4-iron into 10, 2-iron short at 11, 8-iron into 12, 3-wood into 13, 4-iron into 14, 3-wood into 15 . . . 3-wood into 17, 2-iron into 18. Yeah.”
What fun, and to tack on more, Scheffler said he got distracted once because “raindrops falling off the front of the cap got me in the middle of my stroke.” The weather had not promised all it delivered, at least as the seasoned Rose had envisioned it, “and it turned into an absolute survival test out there.”
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He said, “I think I did a good job of surviving,” closing with a nervy six-foot par putt that kept him from finishing bogey-bogey and making his Saturday evening glum. He rejoiced beneath the gray skies after that, and the lingering patrons up in the grandstand sang his name in the 59-degree chill as if at some football — sorry, soccer — match on Boxing Day.
He had joined in the test of fending off agony.
“I found it really hard today to enjoy the crowds,” Rose said. “I found it really hard to enjoy the day today. I felt like it was good energy from the crowd, but obviously with everyone with umbrellas up, no one is clapping; everyone is shouting and cheering, people wanting high-fives. I normally engage in that type of stuff; today, I just had my head down. I was not interested in anything. I was just trying to get around the golf course today and hang in there.”
And so, with 11 straight pars from No. 5 to No. 16, “I kind of felt like I was hanging on by my fingernails.”
That meant the mental approach meant even more than usual. “It means everything,” Schauffele said. “It is a true test. It’s a long day, and you and your caddie are basically a team. He’s going to need an extra arm. I at times need an extra hand. We basically just plod our way around the property. You try to get lost in the process.”
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And so, “There’s times when you have to have a good attitude.”
Horschel certainly has that as he approaches his first Sunday in this situation with enough years and turns behind him to imagine being “ecstatic” if he wins or getting “back on the horse” if he doesn’t. A winner 10 times on the two tours hugging the Atlantic, he will find a Sunday with who knows what coming from way off in the ocean and over the Firth of Clyde. It has been that kind of British Open, the kind that says damn the equipment and the kind that causes Schauffele to say, “When you look at the flow of an Open Championship, this is like a classic one to me.”
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