Golf

Subterms

    More stories

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in Golf

      Could a Scot Please Win the British Open One Day? Is That Too Much to Ask?

      by

      The last golfer from Scotland to win the British Open was Paul Lawrie in 1999 at Carnoustie, and his victory was somewhat of a fluke.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — They were having fun, perhaps too much fun, on the Old Course on Saturday at the British Open.With the wind and weather mild and Rory McIlroy and many more of the world’s best golfers in town, under par felt more like par during this rollicking third round brimming with birdies, clenched fists and big grins in the direction of the grandstands and fans packed behind the ropes.But local knowledge, as usual, seemed to count for little at the only men’s golf major played on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.St. Andrews, full of old stones and bones, has staged more Open Championships than any other course, but a Scottish golfer will once again not be winning it.Only three Scots were in the 156-player field, which was actually a threefold improvement over last year’s British Open at Royal St. George’s, when only one Scotsman, Robert MacIntyre, took part.That was a historic low in an event with a surplus of history. This is the 150th edition of a tournament that was first played in 1860 at Prestwick Golf Club on Scotland’s west coast. All 13 competitors were Scots that year, and until the early 20th century a majority of the participants in the Open continued to be Scots, along with quite a few naturalized Americans from Scotland.But no Scot, exported or domestic, has won the Open or any major men’s tournament since Paul Lawrie in 1999 at Carnoustie, and Lawrie’s victory, with all due respect to a fine player, was a minor miracle.Then ranked 241st in the world, Lawrie trailed by 10 shots heading into the final round and only made it into the decisive playoff because of one of the sport’s most excruciating (and memorable) meltdowns as the French golfer Jean Van de Velde blew a three-stroke lead on what really should have been the final hole.Scotland continues to wait in vain for a second lightning strike at the Open, and the two Scots who did make the cut at St. Andrews this year — MacIntyre and David Law — will not be the ones to provide it.Both are more than 12 shots off the torrid pace set by McIlroy and Viktor Hovland, who shared the lead at 16 under par heading into Sunday’s final round and who dueled from start to finish on Saturday. Both shot 66, although McIlroy had the shot of the day, holing from a bunker for eagle on the 10th hole.Robert MacIntyre of Scotland called the atmosphere at the Old Course “absolutely brilliant.”Phil Noble/ReutersMacIntyre, a promising 25-year-old from Oban who shot a 69 on Friday, found himself having to turn away from the 16th fairway at one stage during his round because there was so much commotion and emotion.“The fan support is absolutely brilliant, but I was feeling it,” he said. “There’s so many people supporting me, and it means so much to me.”“I wasn’t going to let them down,” he continued. “But I was trying almost too hard.”That has certainly been an obstacle for the Scots at home through the years. But in truth, the Scottish drought has gone on for too long to be considered a drought. Of the 33 Scottish men to win a major, only two have done so since World War II: Lawrie and Sandy Lyle, who won the 1985 British Open and the 1988 Masters.Demographics are an obstacle. Scotland, with 5.5 million people, has a much smaller talent pool than England, with its 56 million people, including Nick Faldo, who won six majors in the 1980s and 1990s, and Matt Fitzpatrick, who won this year’s U.S. Open. But Scotland has about three times as many inhabitants as Northern Ireland, which has produced three major champions in the past 12 years: Graeme McDowell, Darren Clarke and McIlroy.Bernard Gallacher, 73, a longtime European Ryder Cup player and a captain from Scotland, makes the good point that Scotland’s many great links courses are not the ideal places to grow champions.“It’s not a great training ground for great golfers to play on a seaside course every day,” Gallacher said on Saturday. “I know the wind is benign this week, but normally there’s a strong wind blowing and it’s not great developmentally to be playing your golf in strong winds all the time. So that’s why the really top golfers usually come from courses where they can develop their swings, like parkland golf courses in the U.K. Even Rory, who comes from Northern Ireland, was not brought up on a seaside course. His golf course, Holywood, is inland.”And though McIlroy did not do this, Gallacher believes Scottish golfers need to follow the prevailing winds by playing collegiate golf in the United States. “We just don’t have that system over here,” he said. “In my view, Scottish golfers stay at home too much. We have to break our way of thinking a bit.”David Law of Scotland teeing off on the fourth hole during the third round on Saturday.Warren Little/Getty ImagesLaw, a 31-year-old father of two from up the coast in Aberdeen, is making his first major championship appearance.“I’ve probably played the Old Course eight to 10 times, and first played it when I was 18,” he said. “But even if I played it 100 times, I’m sure I’d still get goose bumps.”Ranked 351st, Law has long been mentored by Lawrie, who is deeply involved in developing young Scottish talents and who hit the first tee shot here in recognition of past glories but never came close to making the cut at age 53.Lawrie is not the greatest Scottish player of the modern era. There is Lyle, as well as Colin Montgomerie, who could never quite win a major but was the longtime leader for the European Tour and European Ryder Cup team.But Lawrie is the only still-active Scottish major champion, and he may not play the Open again.“I will wait and see how I feel next year, but right now, it’s no,” Lawrie said. “I always said I wouldn’t ever take a spot if I didn’t feel as though I could certainly play OK and play four rounds.”Law struggled plenty himself in his third round on Saturday, shooting a 5-over-par 77 to drop to two over par for the tournament.“It’s not a regular tournament, but we’ve tried to make it as normal as we can,” he said earlier in the week. “I’m not just here to soak it all in.”There is, of course, plenty to absorb. St. Andrews not only has the R&A World Golf Museum, which sits just across the street from the Old Course. It is an open-air golf museum, as well, one where the American accents often outnumber the Scottish ones in the stores, pro shops and cobbled alleyways.Business and real estate are booming again after the pandemic lockdowns, and The Times of London reported this week that properties near the Old Course’s iconic 18th green are selling for up to 2,500 pounds (about $3,000) a square foot, that housing prices in St. Andrews are up 23 percent in the past year and that about 50 percent of the buyers in central St. Andrews are from abroad.It is not just the golf: St. Andrews University remains one of the most prestigious in Britain, with alumni that include John Knox, Thomas Bruce and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (better known as William and Kate). But golf certainly is at the core of the enduring attraction, and the shops on Golf Place, a road that borders the Old Course, are filled with golf trinkets and memorabilia, much of which feature Scottish golfers like James Braid, who won the Open five times in the early 1900s.Would a present-day Scottish champion really provide much of a boost in the marketing or the bottom line?“It might make a bit of difference, but being in St. Andrews, I’m not sure it would make a huge difference,” said Hamish Steedman, chairman of the St. Andrews Golf Co., which continues to manufacture traditional hickory clubs as well as the modern, metal versions. “Our visitors and customers come from all over.”They are back en masse now that travel restrictions have been lifted, and after the 2020 Open Championship was canceled, the international golfers are back in force, as well. The leaderboard on Saturday night was a mix of Europeans, Americans, Asians and Australians.What was missing were the locals. More

    • 150 Shares179 Views

      in Golf

      At the British Open, It’s the PGA Tour Faithful Against LIV Golf

      by

      “Everybody, it feels like, is against us, and that’s OK,” said Talor Gooch, a LIV golfer tied for eighth at seven under after the second round. Cameron Smith held the lead at 13 under par.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — Tiger Woods was finishing up at the Old Course on Friday, perhaps for good, and Rory McIlroy was just getting started.As they exchanged understanding glances and walked in opposite directions on parallel paths — Woods on the 18th hole, McIlroy on the first — it felt like a passing of the torch. But perhaps a passing of the lightsaber was more in order as McIlroy headed out to lead the charge against the dark side at this 150th British Open.That overstates it, of course. This is only golf, after all, and golf in a fine place, particularly in the clear and clement conditions that prevailed again for most of the afternoon, with banks of cumulus clouds standing watch over the greens and browning fairways of golf’s ancestral home.It was quite a panorama, as it has been for centuries, but the sport’s landscape is changing quickly, with new allies and enmities being created over the breakaway, mega-money LIV Golf Invitational series.Just a few months ago, there were only golfers. Now, there are golfers and LIV golfers, and though today’s rebels have a habit of becoming tomorrow’s establishment, for now the rebels are wearing the black hats because of their tour’s Saudi Arabian backing and the sense that they are grabbing the easy money no matter how uneasy it makes everyone feel.“Everybody, it feels like, is against us, and that’s OK,” said Talor Gooch, a LIV golfer who is tied for eighth at seven under par heading into Saturday’s third round. “It’s kind of banded us together, I think.”The bonding works both ways on and off the course. At the Dunvegan Hotel, the popular St. Andrews pub near the 18th hole, patrons were often booing LIV golfers on Friday when they appeared on the television coverage of the Open.There were plenty of them to jeer on the early leaderboard, and when McIlroy doffed his cap at Woods on the first hole and sallied forth, Dustin Johnson, the former No. 1 and highest-ranked LIV player, was the rebel in charge.The LIV golfer Dustin Johnson playing out of the rough on the fourth fairway Friday.Alastair Grant/Associated PressBut by the end of the second round, Johnson, at nine under par, had been reeled in by the PGA Tour (at least until the next round of defections).Cameron Smith, Australia’s top player, was on top at 13 under, followed by Cameron Young, the first-round leader from the United States, at 11 under. Tied for third at 10 under were McIlroy and Viktor Hovland of Norway who made the shot of the day by holing out from the rough from about 140 yards for eagle on the par-4 15th hole.“I was a little concerned it was going to go too far right,” he said. “But it straightened out and somehow landed on that side slope softly and just trickled in. That was unbelievable.”By such fine margins and lucky breaks are major championships won, but there will be plenty more unexpected bounces on the undulating and increasingly unforgiving fairways of the Old Course.“We had that on-and-off rain this morning, I think, which slowed us up just a touch,” said Smith, who had a middle-of-the-pack start time on Friday. “We were able to hit some shots that we weren’t able to hit yesterday, but I still think it’s going to get really firm and fast. This course bakes out so quickly. It’s going to be a challenge, for sure.”And yet Woods’s record winning score at St. Andrews of 19 under par in 2000 certainly looks under threat. He will not be the one to challenge it after shooting nine over par for two rounds and missing the cut, just as he missed it in 2015 in the most recent Open Championship at St. Andrews.But Friday was much more bittersweet: bitter because Woods at this diminished stage is nowhere near the player he once was in Scotland and beyond; sweet because he could sense the compassion and appreciation from the crowd and his colleagues.“As I walked further along the fairway, I saw Rory right there,” he said of the 18th hole. “He gave me the tip of the cap. It was pretty cool, the nods I was getting from the guys as they were going out and I was coming in, just the respect. And from a players’ fraternity level, it’s neat to see that and feel that.”Tiger Woods acknowledging fans as he crosses Swilcan Bridge on the 18th hole Friday.Paul Childs/ReutersMcIlroy, 33, grasped the symbolism but would have preferred another scenario as he embarked on what turned out to be a round of 68.“It would have been a cool moment if he was eight under par instead of eight over or whatever he was,” McIlroy said. “I just hope, everyone hopes, it’s not the end of his Old Course career. I think he deserves and we deserve for him to have another crack at it.”Woods, often grim and tight-lipped after poor performances, was expansive and forthcoming on Friday. After playing only to win for most of his career, it seemed that simply participating was enough for peace of mind after the car crash that severely damaged his right leg 17 months ago.“I’ve gotten pretty close to Tiger over these last few years,” said McIlroy, a Northern Irishman based near Woods in the golfing enclave of Jupiter, Fla. “I think we’ve all sort of rallied around him down there in Jupiter, and we all want to see him do well. He was all our hero growing up, even though I’m maybe a touch older than some of the other guys. We want to see him still out there competing, and this week was obviously a tough week for him, but we’re all behind him.”Woods said he had no immediate plans to compete again and was not sure that if and when he did return that he would be able to play a fuller schedule. In this minimalist comeback, he played in three majors and only three majors, beginning with the Masters in April.“I understand being more battle hardened, but it’s just hard to walk and play 18 holes,” Woods said. “People have no idea what I have to go through, and the hours of work on the body, pre and post, each and every single day to do what I just did. That’s what people don’t understand.”He was hardly the only golf luminary to fall short at the Old Course. Collin Morikawa, the reigning British Open champion, missed the cut by a stroke after failing to keep pace with McIlroy in their group and finishing at one over par.Louis Oosthuizen, the South African who won an Open at St. Andrews in 2010, will also miss the weekend. So will Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka, fellow members of the LIV tour and former major champions.The cards and stars have been reshuffled in a hurry, and no one knows how the game or this historic Open Championship will turn out. But what is clear is that if the final holes on Sunday come down to, say, Johnson versus McIlroy for the claret jug, it will not be perceived inside or outside the game as simply Johnson versus McIlroy.May the force be with them. More

    • 75 Shares129 Views

      in Golf

      Tiger Woods Misses British Open Cut

      by

      Tiger Woods missed the cut at the British Open, ending, he knows, what might have been his last competitive tournament on his favorite course.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The roars at last ebbed when Tiger Woods reached his ball, if only because everyone knew the clamor could start again soon enough.Woods was, perhaps for the last time as a British Open competitor, on No. 18 on the Old Course at St. Andrews. He had sealed two triumphs here, completed the career Grand Slam here, dreamed for years of being here.And now, following a tee shot beneath a familiarly granite Scottish sky, Woods knew it might be over, for good, in minutes.The cheers rumbled down from the grandstands, and not just the ones along No. 18, as ferociously as they did when Woods tipped his cap on the Swilcan Bridge a few minutes past 3 p.m. He had rubbed his eyes on the walk, tipped his cap some more, and then, at last, the spectators and even the sea gulls fell silent.It would take him three more strokes to finish the hole at par, almost — and only almost — as if he wanted just one more moment at St. Andrews instead of one more birdie. The roars began again, as if he had won a fourth Open.But he had not. At nine over par after two rounds, 17 months after the car wreck in California that nearly claimed his right leg, he missed the cut. His ritual Sunday-round red outfit would stay packed away this time, and maybe forever, from St. Andrews.“I don’t know if I’ll be physically able to play another British Open here at St. Andrews,” Woods said afterward. “I certainly feel that I’ll be able to play more British Opens, but I don’t know if I’ll be around when it comes back around here. So the warmth and the ovation at 18, it got to me.”He had seen and heard Open careers in twilight at St. Andrews. In 1995, when he was 19, headed toward the practice range and lacking any of the 15 majors he would go on to win, he saw Arnold Palmer hit a tee shot. A decade later, the noise that followed Jack Nicklaus pealed across the relatively flat confines of the world’s oldest course.It is no certainty that Friday was Woods’s final Open at St. Andrews, but it will be years before it returns to the Old Course, and Woods, broken down and rebuilt so many times over the decades, is 46. He has not committed to any tournaments for next year and said again that he had craved being at this particular Open, the 150th and the latest at St. Andrews, his favorite course.He could return, perhaps with his son, for a round on the Old Course. (“I’m able to get a tee time,” he said with a grin.) But all week long, the prospects of a Woods retirement seemed better than a Woods vow, or simply an audible aspiration, to be back in a St. Andrews field.So an even bigger thicket of spectators, probably 20-deep or more in some pockets, than usual trailed him since his start on Friday morning.“That counts as watching Tiger take a shot,” one man said as Woods merely walked past him on the 16th fairway.“Tiger, you’d better make this,” one woman said before a putt on that hole.“Oh, my God,” she piped up again after he missed.“St. Andrews loves you, Tiger!” shouted someone else.The spectators did, even if Woods’s final score suggested otherwise.His outing on Friday, a three-over-par 75, was better than Thursday’s, when he finished at six over and 14 shots off the lead. Over the two days of competition, he never quite connected with the St. Andrews greens, those vast expanses he had so dominated, with one putt after the next slowing down and then stopping too short. On Thursday, he started with a tee shot into a divot.At nine over par after two rounds, 17 months after the car wreck in California that nearly claimed his right leg, Woods missed the cut.Andrew Boyers/ReutersAnd so, by the time Woods entered the tee box at No. 18, the first in his group to arrive, any aspirations of another claret jug, even another made cut, had evaporated. Yet he was not, he would say later, thinking about anything beyond club selection: 3-wood or 5-wood.He opted for chipping with the former. He left the tee and sensed that Matt Fitzpatrick, who later confessed to goose bumps, and Max Homa had paused. He wondered where his caddie, Joe LaCava, was but soon saw he trailed behind.“That’s when I started thinking about, the next time it comes around here I might not be around,” Woods said. The tears did not come immediately, but there was Rory McIlroy tipping his cap, the players at the first tee fated to see Woods in his own twilight, maybe, at St. Andrews.Eventually, the men in Game No. 46, including a P.G.A. Championship winner and an Open victor, walked on because they had to.They kept looking back, though. Woods peered ahead, looking, at least one last time, for the 18th cup. More

    • 113 Shares109 Views

      in Golf

      Who Engraves the British Open’s Claret Jug on Sunday?

      by

      ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The good news for Garry Harvey is that almost no one in this year’s British Open field has a name quite as long as Severiano Ballesteros — Spanish master of the short game, three-time Open champion and unwitting menace to a man with minutes to engrave one of golf’s most sacred trophies.Harvey will face a foreboding stretch on Sunday anyway. Like his father, Alex, who was tasked with etching Ballesteros into history on deadline, he will have perhaps 10 minutes to add Rory McIlroy (11 letters) or Scottie Scheffler (16 letters) or someone else entirely to the claret jug.He will fret over spelling. He will fuss over spacing. For engraving efficiency as much as national pride, he would not have minded if the Scot Paul Lawrie had won again. But he began engraving when he was 14, has handled claret jug duties since Tony Blair was prime minister and has a large enough reservoir of on-demand tranquility that he played in the 1979 Open, one of three that Ballesteros won, forcing Alex Harvey to add the Spaniard’s name to the jug instead of his son’s.“When I get nervous, I remember what my father looked like and taught me,” Garry Harvey, 67 and soft-spoken, said along the Old Course at St. Andrews, the site of the 150th Open. “When I’m under pressure, I think about the old man, and then I just do it.”Harvey works with a tool he believes is at least a century old.Alastair Grant/Associated PressAnd so a letter, Harvey said, might take him eight seconds to add to a band on the jug’s base.Generations of Open winners handled the engraving of the jug, which is formally known as the Golf Champion Trophy. But after Roberto De Vicenzo, the 1967 victor at Royal Liverpool, failed to do so, the R&A, the Open’s organizer, took control and turned to Alex Harvey. Garry Harvey, born months after Peter Thomson won the first of his five Opens, began his engraving education around then.At the same time, he was emerging as one of Britain’s best young golfers, finishing as the runner-up at the boys’ amateur championship in 1971 and winning the following year. He put his own name on the trophy in the most literal sense, too.Other golf achievements followed, including a victory at the 1985 Kenya Open and a berth in an Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes, where he finished in a tie for 139th. All the while, Alex Harvey’s hands were evolving into a fixture of television coverage of the Open.Garry Harvey would often accompany his father, scrutinizing his patience and practices. Alex Harvey did not, for example, start adding Jean van de Velde’s name when he arrived at No. 18 at Carnoustie in 1999 with the three-shot lead that he soon squandered. He always waited for word from the leader of the R&A that the score was final.Now Garry Harvey, whose father died in 2008, a few years after retiring, has been around the Open so long that he cannot remember exactly whose name he was first charged with engraving.Alex Harvey, Garry’s father, engraving the jug in 1993.Phil Sheldon/Popperfoto via Getty ImagesEven if the current craftsman typically prefers to work in the background, the ritual is seen as an element of the Open’s charm. Tom Watson, whose eight major victories include five British Open wins, said that rapid engraving had grown to become “part of the whole fabric of the Open Championship.”“It really doesn’t matter whether your name is on the trophy or not, honestly — you have the trophy in hand and you get to see that beautiful claret jug — but it’s a perk,” Watson, one of the first winners to raise a freshly updated trophy, said on Friday. “It’s a great perk.”In turn, Harvey has a well-settled practice for the final round, preparing certain parts of the engraving, like the tournament’s site and year, in advance. But he also avoids venturing onto the course on Sunday, rife with hazards — crowds, nerves, fall risks — that could conspire to keep him from being at his position when the minute comes. He mutes the television, uninterested in the commentary about his hands, and does not care for the clicks of a still camera’s shutter. He hopes a floorboard does not shake and interrupt his rhythm and concentration as he works with a tool he believes is at least a century old.“There are all types of things that can go wrong, but the spelling’s important,” he said. “You don’t want to slip, and that can’t happen.” (“The spelling of Padraig, you’ve got to be very careful with that one,” he said, referring to Padraig Harrington, the Irish golfer whose name he has twice added to the jug.)“It really doesn’t matter whether your name is on the trophy or not, honestly — you have the trophy in hand and you get to see that beautiful claret jug — but it’s a perk,” Tom Watson said.Paul Childs/Action Images Via ReutersThe Open gig, of course, is a fraction of his work, which often brings other sports trophies and medals to his work area, whether it is at St. Andrews or closer to his home in Crook of Devon, a village about an hour’s drive from the Old Course. Along with his wife, Jeanette, he runs a jewelry shop in nearby Dunfermline, where it seems only a few customers know that he works on the jug.He expects to work with the R&A for as long as he can, and there is no prospect, he said, of another family member assuming the role.He will, eventually, get around to watching a replay of Sunday’s round. He has plans for Monday, though: a Senior Open qualifier. But before then, until the etching is done, he will wait and wonder what, exactly, he will need to do almost as soon as the last putt drops.“If it’s a long name — a really long name — it’s going to be tricky,” he said.He reassured himself, his voice trailing off.“If Severiano Ballesteros can get into that gap.” More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Golf

      Beauty of the Old Course Upstages LIV Golf Angst, for Now

      by

      Seven years is an unusually long gap, but the R&A, which runs the British Open, delayed a return to St. Andrews to ensure that it could host the tournament’s 150th edition, which begins Thursday.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The ruins of St. Andrews’s once-majestic cathedral are a reminder that this gray town by the sea was a pilgrimage site long before golf came along.But there is no doubt about what attracts crowds now, and it has been seven years since the golf pilgrims gathered here for a British Open in their weatherproof gear and souvenir caps.Seven years is an unusually long gap, but the R&A, which runs the tournament, decided to delay returning the British Open to St. Andrews to ensure that it could host the 150th edition of what is known on this side of the pond as the Open Championship.Originally scheduled for 2021, the St. Andrews celebration got pushed back a year because of the pandemic-induced cancellation in 2020, and now the organizers might have to wonder whether it was worth the wait.Instead of an opportunity to revel in the history and hopefully windswept charms of the Old Course, the focus has remained on the elephant in the locker room: LIV Golf, the Saudi-backed, economics-be-damned breakaway circuit that has poached PGA Tour talent like the former British Open champions Phil Mickelson and Louis Oosthuizen, and is led by another former Open champion, Greg Norman, who for his sins and pains was not invited to this year’s dinner of champions at St. Andrews.Tiger Woods’s news conference on Tuesday was dominated by the subject (Woods held firm to his position against the defectors, inspiring British tabloid headlines like “LIV and Let Die”).Im Sung-jae, a South Korean player, teeing off on the Old Course on Wednesday.Robert Ormerod for The New York TimesOn Wednesday, Martin Slumbers, the gray-haired chief executive of the R&A, tried unsuccessfully to address the topic “briefly” by making an opening statement at his news conference that made it clear that the R&A would not bar golfers from the rebel tour but could change its qualifying requirements to make it more difficult for them to play in future British Opens.Bring on the follow-up questions! “Do you think golf should be welcoming money from Saudi Arabia given when we know about sportswashing?”Evasive answer from Slumbers: “I think that’s a too simplistic way of looking at it.”The issue is not blowing away anytime soon in the Scottish breeze and could quickly resume being the dominant plotline if a LIV golfer, like Dustin Johnson or Oosthuizen, rises to the top of the two yellow scoreboards above the 18th green that are still manually operated in this otherwise digital age by students from rival private schools.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 5A new series. More

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Golf

      Tiger Woods Has a Very Bad Day at the British Open

      by

      The three-time Open champion, including two on the Old Course at St. Andrews, was six over par after the first round that started with a double bogey on the first hole.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland —Tiger Woods was walking alone again on the 18th hole of the Old Course: a yellow scoreboard in front of him and the light fading behind him as locals and American visitors shouted “Tigerrrrrr!” from behind the barricades.But this was no victory march at the British Open. This was the end of one of the worst rounds that Woods has played in a major: a six-over-par 78 that was a stark reminder of how much water has flowed under the Swilcan Bridge since his days of domination at St. Andrews.Woods, who won the Open Championship here in 2000 and 2005, reacquainted himself with the water in a hurry in his return on Thursday. After getting the loudest round of applause of the day from the crowd gathered on the first hole, he hit his opening tee shot in a normally safe space (“a perfect shot,” he said) only to land in a fresh divot that turned his approach shot to the green into an adventure.“I told myself, ‘Don’t hit it flat and don’t blade it,’” Woods said. “I didn’t do either, but I still hit it in the burn.”A burn in Scottish parlance is a water-filled trench, and the trench in this instance was the Swilcan Burn that defends the first green. Woods’s shot splashed down after one bounce, and he ended up missing a short putt and starting his tournament with a double bogey.As omens go, it was an accurate one as he continued to struggle into the wind, bogeying the third and fourth holes and making another double bogey on the par-4 seventh before making his first birdies of the round on the par-4 ninth and par-4 tenth.But that was a false dawn as he resumed leaving important chips and putts well short of their targets.Asked what was most disappointing, Woods did not hesitate.“I think just the total score,” he said. “It feels like I didn’t really hit it that bad. Yes, I did have bad speed on the green, but I didn’t really feel like I hit it that bad. But I ended up in bad spots or just had some weird things happen. And that’s just the way it goes. Links golf is like that, and this golf course is like that. And as I said, I had my chances to turn it around and get it rolling the right way, and I didn’t do it.”“Yeah, it was a lot easier today, physically, than it has been the other two events, for sure,” Woods said.Gerald Herbert/Associated PressHe certainly did not, and it will take a sensational round and turnaround on Friday for him to even make the cut and land in the top-70 golfers.“Looks like I’m going to have to shoot 66 tomorrow to have a chance,” he said. “Obviously it’s been done. Guys did it today, and that’s my responsibility tomorrow, is to go ahead and do it.”He is already 14 shots behind the leader, the 25-year-old American Cameron Young, who shot an eight-under-par 64 in his first tournament round at St. Andrews after first playing the Old Course during a visit to Scotland with his family when he was 13.Woods first came here in his teens, too, playing the 1995 Open Championship as a 19-year-old amateur who was still coming to grips with the quirks and charms of links golf. He made the cut in his debut but faded and shot 78 in the final round: his worst round at St. Andrews until Thursday.But Woods learned quickly and when he returned to the Old Course in 2000, he was playing some of the finest golf ever played and completed the career Grand Slam with an eight-shot victory that was all the more remarkable in that everyone, including his rivals, expected him to dominate.He delivered, never hitting into a bunker and setting a record for a major by finishing at 19 under par. He delivered again in 2005 when the Open returned to St. Andrews as he won by five shots and then followed that up by winning the Open in 2006 at Royal Liverpool in bone-dry conditions that turned the fairways into fast-running thoroughfares. He responded by using irons off the tee for control and maintained it beautifully until he had finished off the victory and wept on the shoulder of his caddie, Steve Williams, overcome by his feelings for his father, Earl, who had died just a few weeks before the tournament.Sixteen years later, Woods remains golf’s biggest star even if he is only a part-time competitor, still struggling to find form after the single-car crash in February 2021 that left him with serious injuries and had doctors considering amputation of his right leg.Returning to St. Andrews was one of his primary motivations when he chose to resume his career, making a late decision to take part in this year’s Masters where he shot an opening-round 71 before fading to 47th. He then played in the P.G.A. Championship in May, withdrawing in pain before the final round after shooting a 79. He chose not to play in the U.S. Open with an eye on being ready for St. Andrews.Thursday was his first competitive round in nearly two months, and he looked and felt stronger, limping only slightly, if at all, for much of the afternoon.“Yeah, it was a lot easier today, physically, than it has been the other two events, for sure,” Woods said.Though the Old Course is not the most physically demanding course with its comparatively flat layout, the round turned into an endurance test, lasting just over six hours because of backups on the course that caused Woods and his playing partners Max Homa and Matt Fitzpatrick, the U.S. Open champion, to have to wait repeatedly.Max Homa, left, called the first round the “coolest” day he’s had on a golf course.Ross Kinnaird/Getty ImagesHoma, an American who finally fulfilled a career-long goal by playing a round with Woods, made the most of the extra time, chatting at length with Woods, who actually looked less grim on the back nine than he did on the front nine.“If there was anybody else in my group, if it was probably just Matt, I would have been complaining all day,” he said, adding it was the “coolest” day he has had on a golf course.“It was a dream-come-true type day minus some of the golf,” Homa said. “It really felt like fantasy.”Woods might have opted for nightmare, but he did sound content that he had managed to get healthy enough to play“Very, very meaningful,” he said of his return to St. Andrews. Woods added, “This was always on the calendar to hopefully be well enough to play it. And I am. I just didn’t do a very good job of it.”But Woods, even diminished at 46, still has the capacity to create goose bumps. You could see it and hear it all afternoon — and there was plenty of time to see and hear it — as he navigated the Old Course and fans lined up, often four rows deep behind the ropes with their cellphones held aloft to take pictures of him, even at a distance. Many of them were parents with children far too young to have watched Woods at his best. Some held up stuffed tigers.“They were fantastic, absolutely fantastic,” Woods said of the gallery. “So supportive.”But the poignant truth is that the Woods so many were roaring for was the Woods they remember not the Woods they were watching. For now, he is what he never wanted to be: a ceremonial golfer, a major star but no longer a major threat, walking the same fairways and greens but no longer making the same birdies and eagles.As he made his way over the Swilcan Bridge and toward the 18th hole late on Thursday after a long and deflating day, a woman on a third-floor balcony overlooking the course summed up the mood and reality as she screamed from on high: “Tiger!!!!! 2000!!!! 2005!!!!!”Woods will need to have a phenomenal second round if he hopes to make the cut.Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Golf

      A British Open Green With One Last Catch: A 150-Foot Putt

      by

      The St. Andrews quirk of double greens offers thrills and aggravations whenever the world’s elite go to the Old Course.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The wind can go from negligible to middling to mighty on the Old Course. It may very well rain, or look like it will, and for how long is anyone’s guess. People dressed in layers — this is Scotland in July, after all — pass sunscreen.But for all the tricks required of a British Open at St. Andrews, a constant always looms, perilous as a pot bunker: some of the largest greens to be found anywhere in the world, often because they are shared with another hole.“You don’t ever really get used to it,” said Ernie Els, who is playing his sixth Open on the Old Course, which has seven double greens.Just on Thursday, Els, a four-time major champion, stood on a green and confronted a putt of about 150 feet. “I was on the one side,” he said, “and the flag was on the other side.”It is a signature, though, of the rugged, mendacious charm of St. Andrews, the kind of place where a player can sometimes see only sky from a bunker. The double greens — and even the enormous ones that somehow serve only one hole — routinely make just getting to the green half the par battle (and, the BBC has noted, they can demand more than seven miles of walking to mow).Gary Player, the winner of three British Opens, but never one at St. Andrews, likes to tell a story about how, with his ball perhaps 80 yards from an Old Course pin one day, he asked a caddie for a line. He received an impish reply: “I cannot give you a line, but I can give you a yardage.”“It’s so difficult to play on greens that size,” Player said in an interview in May. “It eliminates a lot of chipping. So you have a lot of long putts, and when it’s windy, to have long putts is very, very difficult to knock it up close.”John Daly, who won the 1995 Open at St. Andrews and played the course on Thursday, said the day’s greens would have been daunting no matter the weather.“I’ve never had any more 70-, 80-, 90-foot putts in my life,” Daly said. “They put the pins in good spots. Those were Sunday pins. They were brutal. It’s hard to get the ball close with wind or no wind.”Part of Daly’s 1995 strategy hinged, as many St. Andrews schemes do, on lag putting, where a player considers not just a first shot at the pin but also a second.The approach has its scornful detractors. It also has a long record of powering victories.“You’re going to have some real long putts here no matter how you hit it, and you just have to get down in two,” Tiger Woods, a specialist in the art form, said in 2010. “So many times you can three-putt, you can go around here and hit 18 greens and shoot a number — a high number — because you’re just so far away from the hole. And if the wind blows, hitting a wedge 30, 40, 50 feet happens a lot.”Rory McIlroy lined up a putt on the 11th green at the British Open on Thursday.Peter Morrison/Associated PressBut Woods was an Old Course veteran by then, and many elite players have scant experience with double greens, which are found more commonly in Japan than in North America and Europe. That did not stop Takumi Kanaya, one of Japan’s most sterling players, from saying Thursday that the St. Andrews greens had left him dazzled.Asked how he tried to play them, he laughed.Dylan Frittelli, appearing in his fifth Open but his first at St. Andrews, noted the challenge of simply directing traffic on a busy green.“It’s kind of distracting when you’re trying to putt and you’re waving: ‘You? Me? Yes? No?’” he said. But he was pleased he had avoided the traps, with only a handful of putt attempts beyond 80 feet.“It can get pretty nasty there if you have the 150-, 200-foot putts,” said Frittelli, who said he could not recall ever facing a competitive putt of more than 120 feet. “I’ve got a little system that I’m not going to tell you exactly what it is in case other guys get it, but it’s pacing it off, just trying to feel it, see it and try to get it to the hole.”Danny Willett, who tied for sixth at the 2015 Open, the previous one to be contested at St. Andrews, was a bit more forthcoming. With few exceptions, he said, he saw each huge green as having two or three clearly defined sections.“You need to section them off pretty well and hit into the sections,” he said. “Otherwise, you can see some really funky 40-, 50-footers. So they are big greens, but if you’re obviously going to try and do well and play correctly, you need to narrow your focus and try to pick out what section you’re trying to hit it into.”Indeed, there are triumphs, even when golfers have struggles elsewhere on the course. Ian Poulter, the Englishman who has joined the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf series, began his Open with jeers that he insisted he did not hear before he shanked his tee shot.He arrived later at No. 9, where the green is merely a monstrosity meant for one hole, at one under par. His tee shot put the pin within distant reach, and then he turned to, by his own description, a bizarre strategy for a putt attempt that Open officials said was at least 160 feet.“I kind of hit it two cups out to the right,” he said. “If you can ever figure a line of two cups to the right, I knew it might wander a hair right to left through the middle of the putt.”It worked, good for eagle.“Look, anything inside 6 feet from 150 feet is a hell of a putt,” said Poulter, who shot a 69, three under par. “So for it to drop is beyond lucky.” More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Golf

      Furious at LIV Golf Defections, British Open Could Change Entry Rules

      by

      The R&A’s chief executive issued a stark warning to the players and did little to disguise his disdain for the new Saudi-backed series.ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — The British Open’s organizer pointedly warned on Wednesday that it might change its entry rules for future tournaments — potentially complicating the claret jug prospects of players who defected to the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV Golf series.Although the R&A, which runs the Open, has not made a decision about how players will be able to join the 156-man field in 2023 and beyond, the organization’s chief executive, Martin Slumbers, left open the possibility that the pathway to one of golf’s most hallowed tournaments could soon shift.“We will review our exemptions and qualifications criteria for the Open,” Slumbers said at a news conference at St. Andrews on the eve of the Open’s start on the Old Course. “We absolutely reserve the right to make changes” from past years, he added.“Players have to earn their place in the Open, and that is fundamental to its ethos and its unique global appeal,” said Slumbers, who did little to disguise his disdain for the LIV series, which he condemned as “entirely driven by money” and threatening to “the merit-based culture and the spirit of open competition that makes golf so special.”Still, he signaled that a wholesale ban of players was “not on our agenda.”Slumbers denied that the R&A was coordinating with the organizers of golf’s other major tournaments to potentially exclude LIV players, whose ranks include Brooks Koepka, Sergio García, Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson and Patrick Reed. But the chief executive of the United States Golf Association, which controls the U.S. Open, said in June that the group would “re-evaluate” the criteria it uses to set that tournament’s field.A Quick Guide to the LIV Golf SeriesCard 1 of 5A new series. More