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      Brian Harman Romps to British Open Victory at Royal Liverpool

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      Harman, a 36-year-old American, came close to winning the 2017 U.S. Open, but his triumph on Sunday gave him his first major title.Brian Harman knew Saturday evening that sleep might be hard to come by, as much as he knew he needed it. He had been in this situation — the 54-hole leader at a major tournament — six years ago and knew the agonizing cost of a fitful night: a runner-up finish, months and then years of what-ifs, a career not on the margins but not among the ultra-elite.He slept well enough this time. Harman, nestled atop the leaderboard at Royal Liverpool Golf Club since Friday, made a methodical march on Sunday to win the British Open by six strokes, finishing at 13 under par. With a final round defined more by get-it-done grit than star-turn splash, Harman held off a band of challengers whose tournament scores wound up swarmed around each other’s instead of close to his.It was the largest margin of victory at a men’s golf major tournament since Bryson DeChambeau’s six-stroke win at the 2020 U.S. Open.“I’ve always had a self-belief that I could do something like this,” Harman said. “It’s just when it takes so much time, it’s hard not to let your mind falter, like maybe I’m not winning again.”“I’m 36 years old,” he added. “Game is getting younger. All these young guys coming out hit it a mile, and they’re all ready to win. Like, when is it going to be my turn again? It’s been hard to deal with.”Sunday ended those doubts.As the first pairing went off on Sunday, Harman had a five-stroke lead, a comfortable gap but not an insurmountable one, especially not at a tournament that in 1999 saw Paul Lawrie overcome a 10-shot, final-round deficit to win at Carnoustie in Scotland. That history aside, the greatest mystery for most of Sunday at a decidedly soggy Royal Liverpool seemed to be not whether Harman would win, but by how much.Unlike Carnoustie, Royal Liverpool, hosting the British Open for the 13th time, has long been kind to the men who climbed the leaderboard early. With his victory, Harman became the seventh player to win an Open at the course after having led after two rounds.“He won by six, so there’s nothing really any of us could have done,” said Jon Rahm, one of four players to tie for second.Harman, who played in college at Georgia and turned professional in 2009, has been a reliably talented player on the PGA Tour, mustering 50 top-10 finishes before the Open. But despite having nearly $29 million in career earnings coming into Sunday at Royal Liverpool, where his performance won him $3 million, Harman was hardly seen as a headliner.He had two career victories, the John Deere Classic in 2014 and the Wells Fargo Championship in 2017. The next month, in what had been his best showing at a major, he tied for second at the U.S. Open at Erin Hills in Wisconsin, where he lost to Brooks Koepka by four strokes. Ranked 26th in the world (and never higher than 20th) before his Royal Liverpool victory, he said he did not consider himself underrated.Asked over the weekend what he considered, before Sunday, his greatest achievement in the sport, he leaned back in his seat, crossed his arms and turned his eyes away, a subdued tour stalwart turned Open contender thinking through professional golf’s version of a workaday résumé.“This year will be the 12th straight year that I’ve made the FedEx Cup playoffs,” he replied after about five seconds.His record in this year’s majors is enormously mixed, though he has now risen to the No. 10 ranking. He missed the cut at the Masters Tournament and at the P.G.A. Championship, and tied for 43rd at the U.S. Open. Then came Royal Liverpool, the course where he played his first British Open in 2014. Back then, Rory McIlroy won, and Harman tied for 26th.He proceeded to miss the cut during his next four Opens. Coming into this one, before returning to the course in northwest England that had also found champions in players like Bobby Jones, Peter Thomson and Tiger Woods, he finished tied for 12th at the Scottish Open.Harman’s odyssey through this Open began on Thursday, when his 67 put him in fourth. On Friday, he birdied the first four holes and made eagle on the last for a 65 that gave him sole command of the leaderboard. After a pair of early bogeys, his 69 on Saturday brought him into Sunday with a five-stroke lead over Cameron Young, and a six-shot advantage over Rahm, whose Saturday round was the best at any Open at Royal Liverpool.Harman watched his shot on the 13th green on Sunday as the crowd watched him run away with the lead.Paul Childs/ReutersThe course had been overrun with hazards. Scores of bunkers that, as the 2022 Open champion Cameron Smith said, were effectively one-shot penalties. A newly crafted par-3 17th hole that so punished a U.S. Open winner that he suggested it be redesigned again. Sunday brought the most bitter dose of British Open weather: gusting winds and drenching rains, the course feeling at once like a sauna and a shower.But a five-shot lead at sunrise, visibility of the sun notwithstanding, helps.“He’s a very tough, experienced character,” Padraig Harrington, a two-time Open winner, said before Harman’s final round began. “Sometimes we see somebody leading a tournament and you kind of go, ‘Oh, is he going to hang on?’ I don’t think that’s the case with Brian Harman. Nearly every day he goes out on the golf course he’s like playing with a chip on his shoulder, like he’s fighting something. I think this is ideal for him.”The raindrops were still plummeting when Harman stepped up to the tee. With his back to the nearby claret jug, he steadied himself, took one glance after another down the fairway and unleashed his left-handed swing. He would make par on the hole, avoiding a repeat of Saturday’s bogey. But he barely missed a par putt at No. 2, where even a police officer had turned away from the crowd to watch, to shrivel his lead. Young failed to convert a 14-foot birdie putt that would have narrowed it by another stroke.Seven groups ahead, though, McIlroy was surging. He had begun the day at three under. After five holes, he was at six under and suddenly tied for second. Rahm was making pars, and Young, paired with Harman, had already bogeyed the first. By the time Harman’s ball was rolling across the third green, there were five players — McIlroy, Rahm, Young, Tommy Fleetwood and Sepp Straka — tied for second. But Harman’s margin remained as much as it was at the start.Other potential rivals were nowhere near, not after the cut had sapped the leaderboard of much of its prospective star power. Most of those who remained did not pose severe threats. Scottie Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked player, finished the Open at even par. Wyndham Clark, the victor at last month’s U.S. Open, left Hoylake at one over, as did Smith. Koepka, who won this year’s P.G.A. Championship and was the runner-up at the Masters, was eight over.At the fifth hole, a par-5 that had been the week’s easiest test, Harman’s tee shot flew 249 yards and crashed into bushes, positioning him just more than halfway to the pin.That pin was where Rahm, the reigning Masters champion, began to make headway, tapping his ball for his first Sunday birdie. Once Harman made it to the green, an eventual 12-foot try for par failed, and when the fifth hole closed for the tournament, Harman’s lead was down to three strokes.The suspense did not exactly linger.Harman, with the claret jug.Gregory Shamus/Getty ImagesHe nudged it upward again on the par-3 sixth hole, where he holed a birdie putt from about 14 feet, and then again at No. 7, where he made a birdie from 24 feet.Steadiness returned until Harman made a bogey on the par-3 13th hole that is a favorite of Royal Liverpool members. But the players closest to Harman were fast approaching the 18th green, and running out of time. McIlroy, who was looking for his first major tournament victory since 2014, missed a birdie putt there to finish at six under. Tom Kim soon left the last green, still stuck at seven under, just like Rahm, Straka and Jason Day would be, too.Elsewhere on the course, Harman himself was edging toward turning the probable into the inevitable. He birdied the 14th hole with a putt that raced about 40 feet downhill into the cup. Another birdie followed on No. 15, moving his lead to six shots.The rain kept coming. Harman maintained his march. A parade of defeated players headed toward the clubhouse. The claret jug’s engraver prepared.It would soon be time to add Harman’s name. More

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      Why Hasn’t The British Open Ever Been Played in Wales?

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      The Open is being played for the 151st time, this time at Royal Liverpool in England. It has never once been to Wales.The rain rat-a-tatted atop the umbrellas around Royal Liverpool Golf Club’s 17th green one afternoon this past week, the air so chilled that it did not feel like even an English summer. A veil of mist clouded the landscape. Still near enough to peek through, though, was the Welsh coast, a handful of long tee shots across the estuary.The British Open, scheduled to conclude on Sunday, may never come closer to Wales.First played when Queen Victoria was on the throne, the Open is a national rite that has encompassed only so much of the nation: Unlike England, Scotland and Northern Ireland, Wales has not hosted it. With sites through 2026 already selected and Wales still left out, the drought will last at least as long as the first 154 Opens. By then, Northern Ireland, which did not welcome a modern Open until 2019, will have had another.The R&A, the Open’s organizer, has explained Wales’s exclusion as rote matters of infrastructure and capability — no small subjects since the tournament requires temporarily raising a hugely guarded, hospitality-filled and championship-caliber coastal enclave for tens of thousands of people a day. The R&A’s stance, though, has invited years of questions about whether one of the country’s signature sporting events reflects Britain quite as much as it should.“Not all parts of the U.K. are being touched by the Open, and leaving an entire nation out of it doesn’t ring true to that mantra of golf being open to all,” said Ken Skates, a member of the Welsh Parliament who, when he was economy minister, lobbied the R&A to bring the Open to Wales.“It’s a little frustrating,” he politely allowed as he stood behind Royal Liverpool’s first green on Friday.Royal Liverpool Golf Club is hosting the British Open this year. But Wales, seen in the distance, never has.Jon Super/Associated PressJockeying for hosting rights is hardly new to sports, and men’s golf is an especially valuable target for the smattering of places with courses challenging enough to test the world’s best. Of the four major tournaments, three are played at different venues each year. (The exception, the Masters Tournament, is always held at Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia.)The R&A’s roster of Open-eligible courses effectively numbers just nine these days, from a clutch of Scottish properties along the North Sea to Royal St. George’s in southeast England. After this weekend’s event at Royal Liverpool, in England’s northwest, the tournament is scheduled to return next year to Royal Troon in Scotland, followed by Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland and then England’s Royal Birkdale.By just about all accounts, the R&A routinely faces a predicament over where the Open can be put on to its customary standard. A handful of past venues are no longer in the mix, including Prestwick, the original Open course that was ultimately judged too small for teeming crowds. More recently, former President Donald J. Trump’s ties to Turnberry have kept the R&A away.Wales, though, has never had a turn at all. Indeed, one of the biggest problems for Wales is that the R&A has stopped staging Opens at more courses than the country has contenders to host one. Only Royal Porthcawl is considered a possibility, and even its cheerleaders acknowledge its shortcomings.The exclusion nevertheless stings.“We have an inferiority complex,” John Hopkins, a golf writer who has been a Royal Porthcawl member since the late 1990s, said of the Welsh people, smilingly adding that they were principally renowned “for our ability to play rugby and our ability to sing.”But hosting a British Open, he said, “would show that we punched our weight in golf.”Some believe forces beyond tournament logistics are at work to keep the Open elsewhere, perhaps historical inertia or an innate tendency for the St. Andrews-based R&A to favor England and Scotland. In 2019, The Telegraph urged the R&A to “cut out the politics” and “ignore the concerns about ‘infrastructure’ and the strength of the links because they are mere smoke screens.”There is little doubt that the R&A has been warming to Royal Porthcawl for other important events, an approach some have regarded as a consolation prize. Next weekend, the Senior Open will be decided there, and the Women’s Open is scheduled to make its Royal Porthcawl debut in 2025. Although there are concerns about whether Royal Porthcawl is long enough for the powerful men’s players of today, the course itself is seen as largely suitable for an Open, in part because it is especially vulnerable to the wild weather that can define the tournament, as Bernhard Langer saw during the two Senior Opens he won there.Bernhard Langer at Royal Porthcawl at the Senior Open Championship in 2017.Phil Inglis/Getty Images“One was bone-dry: The ball was running 100 yards on the fairway,” Langer, who also won two Masters Tournaments, said in an interview. “And one was wet and windy and just as miserable as can be, and that’s links golf.”Martin Slumbers, the R&A’s chief executive, said on Wednesday that the course was “absolutely world class.”“But we need a lot of land,” he added quickly. “We need a lot of infrastructure. We need a lot of facilities for a championship of this size. At present, that is just not possible in that part of the country.”Founded in 1891, Royal Porthcawl has a hemmed-in footprint, with relatively little space to erect gates, grandstands, premium seating, scoring tents and all of the other temporary facilities required for a major. This year’s Open was expected to attract 260,000 spectators, a showing second only to the 290,000 fans who filled the Old Course at St. Andrews last year. The last time the British Open reported attendance below 150,000 was a decade ago, at Muirfield.When Langer last played a Senior Open at Royal Porthcawl, in 2017, the tournament drew about 32,000, though poor weather stalked the event.Although the course is a drive of roughly 45 minutes from Cardiff, the Welsh capital, the area around the club has few of the restaurants, hotels and transit links that make the Open among the smoothest events in international sports. During this tournament at Royal Liverpool, many restaurants and rental homes in Hoylake have hosted legions of visitors. Still more have made the short journey to and from Liverpool, a city of about a half-million people, often using a train service running every 10 minutes.Langer, who had no doubts that Royal Porthcawl could prove an adequate Open host from a golf perspective, appeared far more reluctant to say that it could manage the other challenges of a tournament he played 31 times.“It’s hard,” he said, “to build new roads and highways and 100 hotels and create the room for a tented village and 50,000 spectators.”“It’s hard to build new roads and highways and 100 hotels and create the room for a tented village and 50,000 spectators,” Langer said about staging the British Open at Royal Porthcawl. Cameron Smith/R&A, via Getty ImagesWelsh leaders have signaled a willingness to pursue public investments in exchange for the Open going to Royal Porthcawl, and some Royal Porthcawl members have tried to buy nearby farmland that, if vacated, could make an Open far more feasible. But their yearslong efforts have not yet yielded the kind of breakthrough that could overcome the R&A’s misgivings.The ascendance of Northern Ireland’s Royal Portrush, though, has given Welsh officials something of a strategy, or at least a dose of confidence, ultimately misplaced or not.Skates predicted the R&A could bend within a decade.Then he wandered off to find his brother, Wales rising in the distance. More

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      Jon Rahm Roars Up The British Open Leaderboard To Contend On Sunday

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      Jon Rahm’s 63 was a record for an Open at Royal Liverpool, but Brian Harman will enter Sunday with a five-shot lead.Every major tournament has the cruel, curt power to humble golf’s stars. Rory McIlroy at the Masters. Justin Thomas at the P.G.A. Championship. Phil Mickelson at the U.S. Open (OK, make that a lot of them).This British Open was seeming awful vengeful, more hostile and taunting to the sport’s powers than most recent majors — until Jon Rahm mounted the sort of Saturday stampede that propels a player into the record books and closer to contention.The world’s third-ranked player had stumbled to a three-over-par 74 on Thursday at Royal Liverpool Golf Club, good for all of 89th place. A 70 on Friday moved him 50 places forward. He arrived at the course a dozen shots off Brian Harman’s lead. But when Rahm finished his Saturday round with a birdie, just after Harman made a solitary, silent walk to the first tee to begin his, the gap between the men, one a two-time major winner, the other an also-ran, was down to four.Before nightfall on England’s western coast, where downpours and winds were sporadic menaces on Saturday, Harman had pushed his margin over Rahm up to six, edging him toward hoisting the freshly engraved claret jug on Sunday evening. Cameron Young was nearest to Harman, five strokes back.But Rahm’s Saturday 63 was, by two shots, a record for an Open at Royal Liverpool, which is hosting the tournament for the 13th time. It was also a forceful answer to two days of largely ho-hum play by many of the world’s marquee golfers at the Open, where the leaderboard had often felt like a glimpse into the game’s depths.“I gave up the shots at major championships that are very costly, and that’s mainly it,” Rahm said on Saturday. “That’s what I was feeling. I knew I was playing better, and I knew my swing and my game felt better than the scores I was shooting.”Saturday, a feast for imaginative shotmaking, was different.Often, Rahm noted, the world’s best visualize what they would like to happen with this shot or that one. Often, he noted, reality intrudes. But his Saturday, he suggested, had been marked by the feeling of seeing “everything the way it’s supposed to happen unfold.” On Saturday, he said at one point in Spanish, he had “felt invincible.”He made his day’s debut birdie on the fifth hole, and added another on the ninth. Another came on the 10th, and it was around then, he recalled later, that his shots started hurtling downwind. He picked up more birdies on the 11th and 12th holes, two more at Nos. 15 and 16 and the last on the 18th, the crowd worked into a thunder.On Saturday, Rahm said had the feeling of seeing “everything the way it’s supposed to happen unfold.”Jon Super/Associated PressUntil Rahm’s Saturday surge, disappointment had been running close to endemic among the sport’s top players, not because many stars would not win but because they would not even come close.The first five pairings on Saturday — the players who came nearest to missing the cut — included Scottie Scheffler (the current world No. 1), a five-time major champion (Brooks Koepka) and one of the game’s most chronically popular figures (Rickie Fowler).The last five pairings on Saturday? The players most clearly positioned to contend? Koepka alone had more major titles than the entirety of the group, which entered Saturday with an average world ranking of 59th, 40 spots lower than the mean for last summer’s third round at St. Andrews.The top of the leaderboard was soon speckled with headliners, and headliners-in-waiting. Young, who finished second at last year’s Open, finished at seven under, a stroke ahead of Rahm. Jason Day, a former world No. 1, Tommy Fleetwood and Viktor Hovland were among the players at five under. McIlroy, currently ranked second in the world, put together a 69 to go to three under.But it has still been a weird week, after a Friday cut that knocked out a head-turning array of recent major champions, including Mickelson, Thomas, Dustin Johnson and Collin Morikawa. Other top-tier players, including Scheffler, Koepka, Fowler and Patrick Cantlay, barely got to stay for the weekend.“Maybe everyone is just not quite on their stuff this week,” said Cameron Smith, the winner of last year’s Open, who brought his score to one under on Saturday when he shot a 68. “I’m not really sure of the answer there. But those bunkers, I think if you’re trying to be aggressive — and generally major winners are aggressive players — it can bite you in the bum.”Cameron Smith, who won last year’s British Open, watched his drive off the tee on No. 1 on Saturday.Phil Noble/ReutersAll many players could do was look to get through Sunday.“Win?” said Scheffler, who would be 16 strokes off the lead at the end of the third round.“A hurricane and then some I think is what it’s going to take for me,” he added on one of the few major Saturdays where he was done before the leaders even stepped up to the first tee. “I’m just going to go out tomorrow and do my best and move my way up the leaderboard and try and have a good day.”Robert MacIntyre, the runner-up at last weekend’s Scottish Open, was similarly resigned. On Saturday afternoon, his mind was already wandering toward the hours after the tournament.“Know that you’ve got 18 holes before you put your feet up,” he said.Rahm, revived, was in a far different place.“I’ve done what I’ve needed,” he said, “which is give myself an opportunity.” More

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      Harman Charges to British Open Lead as McIlroy Seeks Elusive Magic

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      Brian Harman has never won a major tournament but led the field at 10 under heading into the weekend, with Rory McIlroy nine back.It was nearly noon on Friday when the name appeared on the British Open leaderboard.Rory McIlroy was six strokes back, with 48 holes to settle whether his nine-year melodrama of major tournament heartache would last until at least next spring. By the time he walked off Royal Liverpool Golf Club’s 18th green on Friday afternoon, he trailed by nine, well behind a man without a major victory.A comeback of such scale would not be without precedent at the Open. But with every putt that rolls away a near miss instead of for birdie, the world sees another McIlroy grimace, another ambition slipping a bit farther away.“I might be nine back, but I don’t think there’s going to be a ton of players between me and the lead going into the weekend,” McIlroy said bravely after his round, which left him at one under par for the tournament.“Right now it’s not quite out of my hands,” he added. “But at the same time, I think if I can get to 3-, 4-, 5-under par tomorrow going into Sunday, I’ll have a really good chance.”There is a thicket of talent ahead of him, though, a field of contenders that took shape as England’s coastal winds strengthened and the course at Royal Liverpool toughened. Brian Harman recorded four consecutive birdies, beginning with the second hole, before turning a measure more ordinary. He made par on every hole until the 18th, where an eagle secured a 65 for the day and a tournament score of 10 under.Brian Harman made par on every hole until the 18th, where an eagle secured a 65 for the day and a tournament score of 10 under.Peter Powell/EPA, via Shutterstock“I’m around the lead a bunch,” said Harman, who last won a PGA Tour event in 2017. “It’s been hard to stay patient. I felt that after I won the tournament and had the really good chance at the U.S. Open in 2017 that I would probably pop a few more off, and it just hasn’t happened.”With a resurgent short game, though, Harman’s 36-hole score of 132 matched an Open record. Until Friday, it had belonged to Tiger Woods and McIlroy, dating to their 2006 and 2014 victories at Royal Liverpool. That 2014 tournament was Harman’s first Open, which occurred weeks before McIlroy won the P.G.A. Championship that so improbably remains his most recent major victory.In the seven majors since the start of last year, McIlroy has finished in the top eight all but once. He was the runner-up twice, and he wound up in third at last year’s Open at St. Andrews, the pressure perpetually mounting for something more than a close finish.Less than a week after a win at the Scottish Open, McIlroy arrived Friday thinking he required a second-round score in the 60s to have a chance of ending his misery. He recorded a 33 on the front nine, after beginning with a birdie on No. 1, the par-4 hole that includes a few of Royal Liverpool’s perilous bunkers. Even par on the back would be enough.That, it turned out, was too much: McIlroy bogeyed two holes, among the most forgiving at the course known as Hoylake, and finished with a 70. For the second consecutive day, he saw short birdie putts escape the cup by the narrowest of margins.“I don’t think I have to do anything differently,” McIlroy said. “I’m hitting the ball well from tee to green. I’ve missed a couple of chances on the greens. The wind got me today. It’s hard sometimes in two minds whether to play the wind or not to play the wind.”Tommy Fleetwood started Friday with a share of the lead and will go into the weekend in second place at five under.Peter Morrison/Associated PressThe conditions will not be pristine throughout the weekend. Although the Met Office, Britain’s weather service, is expecting lower wind gusts, rain is expected on Saturday. The outlook for Sunday is unclear, with the potential for “heavier bursts” of rain.That is expected to tax the 76 players remaining after the cut, which barely spared Brooks Koepka, Patrick Cantlay, Rickie Fowler and Scottie Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked player. But it still claimed a collection of stars, including the past major champions Dustin Johnson, Phil Mickelson, Collin Morikawa and Justin Thomas, who won last year’s P.G.A. Championship but missed three of four major cuts this year.“Everybody has their waves, their kind of momentum and rides and rock bottoms, whatever you want to call it,” said Thomas, whose best major finish this year was a tie for 65th at the P.G.A. Championship in May. “I just keep telling myself, ‘This is it, I’m coming out of it,’ and I unfortunately have surprised myself a couple times with some bad rounds.”Instead, far less familiar players were far closer to Harman. Shubhankar Sharma, who has never finished higher at a major than a tie for 51st, quietly assembled two rounds of par or better to stand at three under, just like Min Woo Lee. Jason Day, a former world No. 1, was tied with them after shooting a 67 on Friday.Just ahead of them was Sepp Straka, who also carded a 67.Tommy Fleetwood, the son of nearby Southport who began play on Friday with a share of the lead, finished at even par, putting him in second place and five shots behind Harman.But the others who had led at sunrise faded. Emiliano Grillo made a double-bogey on the second hole and a bogey on the third. A meager recovery on the back nine collapsed when he bogeyed the 16th and 17th holes, leaving him with a 74 for the day and eight shots off the lead. Christo Lamprecht, a 22-year-old amateur from Georgia Tech, bogeyed five of the first seven holes on Friday, shoving him so far down the leaderboard that it was not entirely certain during his round that he would make the cut.The theatrics were not limited to the golfers.Just Stop Oil protesters set off a smoke flare and spread orange powder on part of the green during play on Friday.Ross Kinnaird/Getty ImagesJust Stop Oil protesters, whose demonstrations disrupted Wimbledon earlier this month, surfaced on the 17th hole on Friday, setting off a smoke flare and spreading orange powder on part of the green. The R&A, which organizes the Open, said four people had been arrested, but that play had not been disrupted. In a separate statement, the police warned that “antisocial, criminal behavior or disorder will not be tolerated and will be dealt with robustly.”The disruption did not unfold when anyone near the tournament’s lead was on No. 17. They were elsewhere, trying to conjure enough brilliance on the links to catch Harman.McIlroy knows there are two factors at hand. The weather is one, perhaps the more predictable of the two.The other, he said, is Harman. More

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      Names Old and New Top British Open Leaderboard

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      Conditions were calm at Royal Liverpool as the final men’s golf major of the year began. Don’t expect them to stay that way.A strategy for winning one of golf’s major championships only rarely looks like this: Find your flight canceled and the next one delayed, walk about a half-mile to passport control, endure a grinding wait at baggage claim less than 48 hours before the tournament’s first tee times and stare down jet lag.It worked well enough for Stewart Cink on Thursday at the British Open.“When the gun goes off and you start in the tournament, you’ve got that adrenaline, and adrenaline does wonders for your jet lag,” Cink, 50, said. It also seemed to do plenty good for his scorecard, which reported a three-under-par 68 that positioned him high on the first-round leaderboard at northwest England’s Royal Liverpool Golf Club.It is forever a dangerous game to forecast a tournament’s fate after a single round, and it seemed particularly risky after the early going at Royal Liverpool, where the leaderboard’s top reaches blended old names and new ones and an army of formidable, familiar challengers lurked just below.There was Cink, who won the 2009 Open at Turnberry in Scotland by outlasting Tom Watson, then 59, in a playoff. But Christo Lamprecht, an amateur who plays for Georgia Tech, finished his five-under round with the lead. Tommy Fleetwood, a past Open runner-up, and Emiliano Grillo, who birdied five of his last eight holes, matched Lamprecht later in the day, letting them begin Friday with one-stroke advantages over Brian Harman, Adrián Otaegui and Antoine Rozner.Fleetwood, Grillo and Lamprecht had two-stroke leads over a group that included Cink and Wyndham Clark, the winner of last month’s U.S. Open.The amateur Christo Lamprecht finished the first round in a three-way tie for the lead.Jared C. Tilton/Getty ImagesRory McIlroy, who won the British Open in 2014, when the tournament was last played at Royal Liverpool, finished at par, and Cameron Smith, looking to defend the title he won at St. Andrews in Scotland last summer, was one over.With the weather at the course, known as Hoylake, expected to deteriorate during the tournament — the R&A’s chief executive, Martin Slumbers, listed the weekend’s options as “wet” or “very wet” — Thursday was perhaps the best chance for the 156-man field to make shots without diabolical complications. (The players certainly had better odds of shooting par or better than finishing one of the course’s soft-serve ice cream cones before seeing it melt into a sticky, spectacular mess.)Fleetwood, who is from Southport, England, just 30 miles north, is a crowd favorite nearly everywhere but especially in Britain. On Thursday, he delivered the kind of sterling play that has lately eluded him early in the major championships. He had not finished below par in a major’s first round since the 2021 Open at Royal St. George’s, where he ultimately tied for 33rd.“As first rounds go, that’s absolutely the one you wanted, and to get off to a good start feels good,” said Fleetwood, who struggled with early tees but left No. 5 emboldened by a birdie. He returned the stroke on the next hole, before picking it up again on the seventh. He birdied four holes on the back nine and started a streak of three at No. 14.England’s Tommy Fleetwood on the 14th green. He birdied four holes on the back nine.Paul Childs/ReutersLamprecht’s rise began sooner, with a birdie on the third hole. But it came only after a poor tee shot at No. 1 — when he felt probably his “only bit of nerves” all day, he said — that prompted a pep talk from Devin Stanton, his caddie and his assistant coach at Georgia Tech.“Listen, you’re playing the Open as an amateur,” Lamprecht said Stanton told him. “No need to stress.”Lamprecht, who at 6-foot-8 is among the tallest players ever to compete in the British Open, now being held for the 151st time, responded in force. He stumbled twice on the back nine but used four birdies within that stretch to finish at 66.“I think the way I played today I earned to be on the top of the leaderboard, as of now,” Lamprecht, 22, said. “It’s not a cocky thing to say. I just personally think I believe in myself, and I guess stepping onto the first tee box if you’re a professional or a competitor, you should be believing that you should be the best standing there.”Cink, a Georgia Tech alumnus who still uses the practice facility there, has gawked over Lamprecht’s talents, including his enormous power, and marveled again on Thursday afternoon.“As a 50-year-old golfer seeing a guy like him, he is pretty much like your basic nightmare, watching a guy like him coming up,” Cink said on Thursday. “He can hit it like 330 in the air and he hits those little shots around the green so soft, it’s amazing. He’s got a lot of really good potential in front of him.”Not that Cink was ready to cede the tournament to Lamprecht, not after a day when he almost entirely avoided Royal Liverpool’s 84 brutish bunkers. Their flatness, Cink observed, sends a momentum-loaded ball toward the lip, unimpeded by gravity. And despite his score, he did not regard Hoylake as particularly suited to his strengths.“But playing smart and being disciplined and patient and keeping your heart in the right place, that fits my game,” said Cink, who turned 50 in May and has been mulling whether to play more events on the PGA Tour Champions, as the senior tour is known these days.The defending champion Cameron Smith, left, with Wyndham Clark during the first round at Royal Liverpool on Thursday.Paul Childs/Reuters“It’s required on courses like this, and it comes down to execution,” said Cink, whose wife, Lisa, is his caddie this week. “Today I executed very well, and it was pretty evident in the scorecard. It was a nice clean day. Putted well from inside eight feet. That’s the kind of stuff you have to do in a major.”The cut, set at the top 70 plus ties, is expected Friday night. Headed into the second round, the past major winners Bryson DeChambeau, Dustin Johnson and Justin Thomas were all in danger of seeing their ambitions of winning the claret jug end quickly. Thomas, who won the 2017 and 2022 P.G.A. Championships, shot 11 over on Thursday, putting him in a tie for 153rd.But some other major champions, including Brooks Koepka, Hideki Matsuyama and Scottie Scheffler, were only four strokes off the lead, laying the groundwork for a jostle toward the top.Cink insisted Thursday that the tournament was hardly the exclusive dominion of the game’s younger players. Two years ago, he noted, Phil Mickelson won the P.G.A. Championship at 50, and then there was Watson’s for-the-ages performance in 2009.“I have no doubts that I can win this,” Cink said. “It’s going to take a lot. It’s going to take some really, really exceptional play on my behalf, but it’s in there.”Indeed, even a player as preternaturally confident as Clark — last month he said that his May victory at the Wells Fargo Championship had (correctly) persuaded him that he was good enough to win a major — noted the rigors of a tournament like this one.“This is just Day 1,” Clark said. “Got three more days.” More

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      The Joys of Links Golf Never Get Old

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      No matter which seaside, windswept course hosts the British Open, the final major tournament of the year puts a golfer’s imagination to work, and captures ours.Tired of the whole golf-gone-wild thing? The one that has turned the men’s professional game into a new toy for Saudi investors? The one that has U.S. senators dragging golf (minus the bag) to work? The one that has left the PGA Tour star Rory McIlroy saying he feels like a sacrificial lamb in the proposed PGA Tour-LIV Golf partnership?Rest easy. This week, links golf, the windswept and unadorned form of the game, takes its annual turn on golf’s main stage. It’s a chance for golf to tell its origin story all over again. The British Open, the fourth and last of the annual Grand Slam events, is upon us.The host course, this time around, is Royal Liverpool, also known as Hoylake to those who know the course and its bumpy fairways, which are rendered a pale khaki green by the summer sun and the brackish air.British Opens are always played, to borrow a phrase from the BBC commentator Peter Alliss, who died in 2020, “in sight and sound of the sea.” They are contested on links courses that are a century old — or much older. Royal Liverpool held its first Open in 1897 and is on Liverpool Bay, though you might think of it as the Irish Sea. The course is a mile from the train station in Hoylake — many fans will get there via Merseyrail — and about 15 miles from Penny Lane in Liverpool.The lifelong Texan Jordan Spieth, winner of the 2017 British Open, prepared for Royal Liverpool by entering last week’s Scottish Open, played on the links course at the Renaissance Club. One afternoon, Spieth slipped away and played North Berwick, an old and beloved links. Its 13th green is guarded by a stone wall because — well, why not? The wall was there first, and the course goes back to 1832.Jordan Spieth during the final round of his win at the British Open in 2017.Richard Heathcote/R&A, via Getty Images“In the British Isles,” the American golf course architect Rees Jones said recently, “they like quirky.”Promoting a course by way of its architect, a powerful marketing tool in American golf, is not much of a thing in Britain. Years ago, Jones was making a first visit to Western Gailes, a rugged course on Scotland’s rugged west coast. The club’s starchy club secretary — that is, the gatekeeper — told Jones he could play the course if he could name its architect.Jones offered a series of names.Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.“Who designed it then?” Jones asked.“God!” the secretary bellowed.Spieth’s plan was to play only a few holes at North Berwick, but he found he couldn’t quit. He played the entire course. While on it, he talked about the joys of links golf.“There’s nothing like links golf,” he said. “The turf plays totally different. The shots go shorter or farther than shots go anywhere else, depending on wind. It’s exciting. It’s fun. You use your imagination. There’s never a driving-range shot when you’re playing links golf.”In the background, somebody in Spieth’s group offered, “Good shot,” to another player. But you have to be careful with that phrase, when playing on links land.Nobody could know that better than Tom Watson, the winner of five British Opens in the 1970s and ’80s.“In 1975, I went to Carnoustie to play in my first Open,” Watson said in a recent phone interview. Carnoustie, on the east coast of Scotland, is famously difficult, bleak and tricky. Watson arrived at the course on the Sunday before the start of the tournament, but the overlords turned him away. He was too early. Good thing there are 240 traditional links courses across Britain.“So Hubert Green and John Mahaffey and I went down the road to Monifieth,” Watson said. “I hit my first shot right down the middle. Everybody says, ‘Good shot.’ We walk down the fairway. Can’t find my ball. It’s gone. I’m thinking, ‘I don’t know about this links golf.’”Watson won that 1975 British Open at Carnoustie. And he might have won in 2009 at Turnberry, but his second shot, with an 8-iron, on the 72nd hole, landed short of the green, took a wicked bounce and finished in fluffy grass. He need one simple closing par to win. Instead, his bogey meant a playoff, and Watson, 59 and spent, was doomed. Stewart Cink won.Watson came into the press tent and said, “This ain’t no funeral.” A links golfer, over time, learns to accept the good bounces and bad ones in any golfing life.Phil Mickelson with his caddie Jim “Bones” Mackay after making his birdie putt on No. 18 to win in 2013.Toby Melville/ReutersAfter Tom Doak graduated from Cornell in 1982 with the dream of becoming a golf course architect, he became a summer caddie at the Old Course at St. Andrews. Doak, now a prominent architect (and the designer of the Renaissance course), has been making a study of links golf ever since. In a recent interview, he noted that older golfers often do well in the British Open. Greg Norman was 53 when he finished in a tie for third in 2008. Darren Clarke was 42 when he won in 2011, and Phil Mickelson was 43 when he won in 2013.Links golf, Doak said, is not about smashing the driver with youthful abandon. When Tiger Woods won at Royal Liverpool in 2006, he hit driver only once over four days. Greens on British Open courses are typically flat and slow, notably so, compared with, say, the greens at Augusta National. There’s less stress over putting and the game within the game that favors young eyes and young nerves. What links golf rewards most is the ability to read the wind, the bounce and how to flight your ball with an iron.“In links golf, you have to curve the ball both ways, depending on what the wind is doing and where the pin is,” Doak said. “You have to figure out what the ball is going to do after it lands.”That takes guile and skill and earned golfing wisdom — all helpful whether you’re playing in a British Open or a casual match with a friend in the long dusk light of the British summer. Open fans will sometimes finish their golf day with a suppertime nine (or more) on a nearby seaside links. Greater Liverpool has a bunch of them. Every British Open venue does.Playing night golf on those courses, you might also see golf officials, equipment reps, sportswriters and caddies, Jim Mackay among them. Mackay, who is known as Bones and who caddies for Justin Thomas, was Mickelson’s caddie when Mickelson won at Muirfield a decade ago.Mackay, like millions of other golf nuts around the world, can’t get enough of the game. That is, the actual game, not its politics, not its business opportunities. Mackay knows, as a golfer and caddie, that success in links golf requires a certain kind of golfing magic, the ability to make the golf ball do as you wish.Playing links golf, he said recently, “is like standing 50 yards in front of a hotel and having to decide which window on which floor you want your ball to go through.”The caddie as poet. A golfer with options.Links golf, John Updike once wrote, represents “freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” On some level, the winner at Royal Liverpool will understand that. The winners of all those suppertime matches will, too. Yes, the Open champion will get $3 million this year. But he will also get one-year custody of the winner’s trophy, the claret jug, his name etched on it forever.Tiger Woods with his caddie Steve Williams after his win at Royal Liverpool in 2006.Andy Lyons/Getty ImagesDo you know how much Woods earned for winning at Hoylake in the summer of 2006? Not likely.But many of us remember Woods sobbing in his caddie’s arms. We remember Woods cradling the jug in victory. We remember the clouds of brown dirt that announced his shots, his ball soaring, his club head twirling.“Hit it, wind,” Woods would say, now and again, to his airborne ball, as if the wind could hear him, and maybe it could. More

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      Jiyai Shin Won a British Open at Royal Liverpool. She’s Got Some Advice.

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      It is easy to forget, given just how thoroughly Jiyai Shin romped to victory at the 2012 Women’s British Open, that she did not lead from start to finish. But her triumph at Royal Liverpool, the English club often known simply as Hoylake, nevertheless stands as one of the most commanding performances in the tournament’s history.Her message to the world’s top men’s golfers, who will contest their British Open at Royal Liverpool beginning on Thursday, can be summed up in two words: Look out.“Royal Liverpool has a lot of small greens, as well as small, deep bunkers,” Shin, who also won the 2008 Open at Sunningdale, wrote in Korean in response to emailed questions.“There is also wind,” warned Shin, who still plays on the L.P.G.A. of Japan Tour and tied for second at this month’s U.S. Women’s Open. “You have to be patient against the constant toil of the wind.”Jiyai Shin celebrated her victory on the 18th green during the final round of the Women’s British Open at Royal Liverpool Golf Club in 2012.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesThe wind may not be the only menace, not at a club with a record of weather headaches at its recent Opens. In 2006, when Tiger Woods won, signs warned of the risk of fires. Eight years later, before Rory McIlroy’s victory, a forecast for thunderstorms led to a two-tee start for the first time in Open history. And when Shin played there in 2012, poor weather led to the third and fourth rounds being condensed into a single day. At the time, she said Hoylake had offered up the “worst conditions I think I’ve ever played.”The coming days could pose problems, too.“My worry is now what the forecast is for Saturday and Sunday, which there’s some uncertainty about which way it will go,” Martin Slumbers, the chief executive of the tournament-organizing R&A, said on Wednesday. “But it’s going to be wet or it’s going to be very wet. We’ll see.”Weather notwithstanding, the course has a distinguished history: No club along the English shore, with the exception of Royal North Devon, is older than Royal Liverpool, which was founded in 1869 and first hosted a British Open in 1897, when the amateur Harold Hilton won. Its men’s Open champions later included Bobby Jones and Peter Thomson.The 151st Open, Shin predicted, “will be the beginning of another history.”No. 1: RoyalPar 4, 459 yardsThere are three bunkers near the green on the par 4 first hole at Royal Liverpool.David Cannon/R&A, via Getty ImagesMore often than not, Royal Liverpool’s first hole will play into the breeze, and there are fairway bunkers on both sides of the hole — right around the distances where many of this week’s players can drive their tee shots.Welcome to the British Open.“It is a dogleg hole that bends slightly to the left, and the width of the green is not wide, making it difficult to put the second shot on the green,” Shin said. “It is advantageous to aim a bit to the right to maintain the flow for the next shot when playing this hole.”There are three bunkers near the green, which hardly has Britain’s smoothest putting surface. Trouble on No. 1 does not necessarily doom a player, though: Shin had a triple bogey there during one round.No. 7: TelegraphPar 4, 481 yardsRory McIlroy on No. 7 during the final round of the British Open at Royal Liverpool in 2014.Ian Walton/R&A, via Getty ImagesWant to make it to the fairway? Hit the tee shot at least 250 yards into what could be a decidedly forbidding wind. Come up short, and you’re probably in the gorse that can be found all over Royal Liverpool. A successful tee shot, though, can position a player for an accommodating second shot toward the green, where two left bunkers lurk nearby.The green has been infused with more tricks since Shin and McIlroy won, but Shin suggested the wind was a greater challenge than the green.“It was difficult to adjust the distance from the second shot to the pin due to the back wind,” she remembered. “A strong wind had the biggest impact on the first bounce.”No. 13: AlpsPar 3, 194 yardsRickie Fowler on the 13th hole at Royal Liverpool in 2014.Stuart Franklin/Getty ImagesFew holes are more beloved among Royal Liverpool’s members than No. 13. Mounds obscure the green from the tee box, suggesting that there is not much of a green on the left side.But that’s not true, and there is actually more green on the left than the right.Shin counsels not to expect much bounce from the green, which is diagonal and runs left to right, and she remembers how she “aimed a bit harder at the back of the pin than the front.”And beware the right bunker.“It seems like the club members know a thing or two about golf if they love this difficult hole in particular,” Shin said.No. 17: Little EyePar 3, 136 yardsThere are many perils on the way to the 17th hole at Royal Liverpool.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesThe British Open has never been played in Wales, but the new 17th hole will bring the competition awfully close: just across Dee Estuary. The raised green awaits players after a spread of bunkers and other perils, so there is little room for error off the tee. There are not many favorable spots for a ball that rolls off the green, either, and the R&A is hoping the hole will infuse some drama as the tournament nears its end on Sunday.Perhaps this is the year of the par-3. At Los Angeles Country Club last month, the course included five par-3 holes for the first time at a U.S. Open since 1947.“Personally, I think par 3 makes the game more exciting,” Shin said. “I think it will be a great hole with a variety of new variables.”No. 18: DunPar 5, 609 yardsOne of five bunkers near the 18th green.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesShin arrived at the 18th tee box during the final round with virtually no chance of losing. The only question, really, was whether she’d win by a double-digit margin.“When I walked up to the hole looking at the grandstands surrounding the green,” she said, “I felt that it was my stage and that I was honored to be there.”It stands to reason that this year’s Open might not have such a runaway winner — the most recent player near Shin’s 2012 mark was Woods in 2000, when he won by eight strokes at St. Andrews — so No. 18 might be a bit more freighted. And it will assuredly be longer after the addition of a new tee, and it will also be narrower. The R&A itself is warning that the fairway can seem “just a handful of yards wide” in some spots off the tee.The hole, the 16th for members and a place where Open players have often used long irons in the past, will veer toward the right, by an extensive and expanded out-of-bounds area, for second shots. If a player can avoid the five bunkers around the green, including the three on the left side, eagle is a possibility.“Since the hole flows from the front to the back of the green, you can aim for the next shot without any worries even beyond the green,” Shin said.On Sunday, weather permitting, someone will stand on that green and hoist the claret jug freshly engraved with his name. More

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      British Open Won’t Rule Out Saudi Deal

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      The Open is not looking for a title sponsor for one of the world’s most celebrated tournaments, but other options could be on the table.The leader of the R&A, who only a year ago was among the fiercest critics of LIV Golf, did not rule out the possibility on Wednesday that the group, the British Open’s organizer, could someday accept money from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund.“The world of sport has changed dramatically in the last 12 months, and it is not feasible for the R&A or golf to just ignore what is a societal change on a global basis,” Martin Slumbers, the R&A chief executive, said at Royal Liverpool, where the Open will begin on Thursday. “We will be considering within all the parameters that we look at all the options that we have.”The wealth fund has lately surged to become one of the most prominent benefactors in sports, cumulatively spreading billions of dollars through golf and soccer and stirring speculation about where it might put its money next. Britain has been central to the wealth fund’s ambitions: In 2021, it purchased the Premier League soccer team Newcastle United.The fund and its allies have insisted that the investments are intended to broaden the Saudi economy, but they have faced skepticism and fears that Saudi leaders are partly looking to use sports to rehabilitate their kingdom’s reputation for human rights violations.Although Slumbers said last year that he was “very comfortable in golf globally growing,” he complained then that LIV’s Saudi-bankrolled model was “not in the best long-term interests of the sport” and “entirely driven by money.” Human rights abuses, he declared then, were “abhorrent and unacceptable.”He appeared far less fearsome on Wednesday, even as he placed a limit on a potential arrangement with the wealth fund, or anyone else, and insisted that he was uninterested in a so-called presenting sponsor for the Open, which will be played in the coming days for the 151st time. (Rolex is the principal sponsor for next week’s Senior Open at Royal Porthcawl in Wales. Next month, the AIG Women’s Open will be contested at Walton Heath, near London.)But asked directly during a news conference about the possibility of the wealth fund becoming “a partner,” Slumbers replied, “If I’m very open, we are and do and continue to do, talk to various potential sponsors.”Slumbers’s receptiveness reflects the swelling fears among golf executives about the financial sustainability of the sport, whose prize funds have recently soared. The purse for this year’s Open is $16.5 million, more than double that of a decade ago. On Wednesday, Slumbers said prize money was increasing far faster than he and other executives had expected.Some of the pressure swamping men’s golf could ease if the PGA Tour and LIV end what has amounted to an arms race for the world’s top players. The tour, the wealth fund and the DP World Tour took a step toward that last month, when they announced a plan to bring their golf business ventures into a new, for-profit company. The agreement, which the R&A is not a part of, may not close for months.Slumbers said that the R&A, which, along with the U.S. Golf Association, writes the sport’s rule book, would “absolutely welcome an end to the disruption in the men’s professional game.”He was much less eager for a partnership with former President Donald J. Trump, who has been one of LIV’s biggest boosters and has repeatedly asserted that the R&A is looking to return the Open to Turnberry, one of Scotland’s most spectacular courses. Trump purchased the property in 2014, five years after its most recent Open.“We will not return until we are convinced that the focus will be on the championship, the players and the course itself, and we do not believe that is achievable in the current circumstances,” Slumbers said in the days after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.Trump has nevertheless claimed since then that the R&A is looking to host another Open at Turnberry. Instead of acquiescing on Wednesday, Slumbers instead came close to repeating his 2021 statement.“We’ve been very clear,” he said. More