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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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      in Soccer

      Under the Hollywood Spotlight, a Fading Welsh Town Is Reborn

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      A former industrial hub, Wrexham had long been in decline. Now, it’s reviving as the globally famous star of a reality series about its once forlorn soccer team’s rejuvenation.In the Welsh language, the virtually untranslatable word “hiraeth” (pronounced here-ayeth) describes a blend of nostalgia and longing for a time that can never be recreated.For Wrexham, a working-class town in northern Wales, it was a feeling that came to define a postindustrial malaise that descended in the 1980s as the last remaining coal mines shuttered their rickety gates and, later, the furnaces at the nearby steelworks ran cold.Only the beloved soccer club, Wrexham A.F.C., remained: the oldest team in Wales, a perennial also-ran but still an indomitable source of local pride.“We went through so much as a town,” said Terry Richards, 56, a lifelong fan of the club as he sat at home in the team’s bright scarlet jersey. “Those were difficult times.”Wales has its legends of heroes returning to save the day, but few could have predicted that an unlikely pair of Hollywood actors, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, would waltz into town just over two years ago and buy the ailing club. That set off a chain of events that catapulted the town out of the doldrums and into the international spotlight, casting the residents as the main characters in their own Hollywood reality show based around the soccer club, “Welcome to Wrexham.”Few could have predicted that the two famous actors would walk into the town in the first place. But Mr. McElhenney, an American who had binged on sports documentaries during lockdown, conducted an exhaustive search for a down-and-out soccer team with growth potential, landing on Wrexham A.F.C., and persuaded Mr. Reynolds to join him in his pet project.Players from Wrexham A.F.C. practice at the Racecourse Ground while crews from the documentary series “Welcome to Wrexham” film them.Mary Turner for The New York TimesAfter paying the bargain sum of around $2.5 million, they moved into town (the Canadian-born Mr. Reynolds even bought a house) and began overhauling the team’s operation. They revitalized the training facilities and upgraded the roster, offering comparatively enormous salaries that attracted established players from the upper levels of English soccer.Last Saturday, that Hollywood story finally got its very own Hollywood ending — the team’s promotion after its winning season into the English Football League, the next tier of England’s multilevel soccer pyramid, after a 15-year absence. As the referee blew the final whistle, generations of teary-eyed supporters leaped from the stands onto the rain flecked field in joyous celebration.In that moment, a town was reborn, and that lingering “hiraeth” was no more. More

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      in Golf

      A Curious Golfer, a Lawn Mower and a Thousand Hours in Lockdown

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      On Friday evening, Chris Powell and 23 locals stood in a field roughly a mile from his home in the rolling hills of Rhayader in Mid Wales. All around the group, familiar features dotted the landscape — from a winding series of public footpaths to gorse bushes, patches of bracken and a centuries-old stone cottage.But among the greenery there were some new additions: flags, yardage markers, tees, bicycle tires that had been painted red and placed on the ground and a selection of golf bags.While others in Britain spent the past year or so navigating coronavirus lockdowns and picking up indoor hobbies, Powell estimated that he had spent roughly 1,000 hours roaming this land that was once his town’s local golf course — a site that closed more than five decades ago and has slowly been melding into the landscape ever since.To rebuild the course Chris Powell pored over old maps. He used a metal detector to locate original cups. Thanks to Powell’s dedication to discovery and his skills as a one-man renovation team, he managed not only to identify all of the previous tees and greens, hidden among the hills and foliage, but also to repair the course to a playable state. There were surprises along the way, too — like the discovery of ties to a certain course in Augusta, Ga. — and now he and the group were ready to tackle the Rhayader Golf Links once more.“Once I get into something, I’m very obsessive,” Powell, 63, said before teeing off, dark rain clouds rolling through the surrounding valleys.The journey to this point started more than a year ago, when Britain was facing its first lockdown and Powell and a friend decided to take to the hills as part of their permitted exercise.A quick search for Rhayader (pronounced Rei-eder, similar to Ryder Cup) reveals a quiet town, of roughly 2,000 residents, known for its trout fishing, hiking routes, nearby Elan Valley dams and one of the highest pubs per capita figures in the United Kingdom.Chris Powell placed tee marker signs along the course.But golf can be found within this DNA, too. According to the website Golf’s Missing Links, which documents more than 2,000 courses that have been lost to time and the landscape, a nine-hole course first existed in Rhayader from 1908 until its abeyance around the time of World War I. Then, in the mid-1920s, a new nine-hole course was opened on a separate site about a mile from the town center, eventually closing in 1968. Another course on a third site failed in the 1990s, shutting after a few years.Powell remembers parts of the defunct second course from his youth, when he would trek over the hills with his pony. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve always been fascinated by man-made stuff,” Powell, a farrier, said. “So if I’m walking over hills, I’m always fascinated by, say, an old house, and I always want to know, What did that used to be like? Or, Where was that room? Where was the pig sty?”On their first visit to the old links site last year, Powell and his friend, Martin Mason, 53, said they could clearly make out two greens. From there, Powell returned every few days, walking through fields and ferns in the hope of finding new features among the bracken, which, he said, was at chest height in places.Within a couple of months, Powell had unearthed around five or six greens and a similar number of tee boxes. At that point, he said, he remembers thinking, “I am going to run a charity golf day” in a year’s time.Crossing a sheep fence on the 14th. The manager of a nearby course said: “It will be rough and ragged. But that’s not the point.”“He wanted to make it playable for people who’ve not been up there,” Mason, who occasionally helped during the discovery process, said. “We didn’t know where this was leading.”In order to find the final holes, Powell turned to a local undertaker, who had played the course when he was younger and was able to give Powell rough reference points on the hillside, which is often used by mountain bikers. He and Mason were able to discover some of the original cups using a metal detector. They also worked off an old course map that they had found online, which threw up a familiar name within golfing circles: “Laid out as planned by Dr. A. MacKenzie, Golf Course Architect.”Dr. Alister MacKenzie was a British golf course architect whose work spanned four continents. Within the past 10 years, three MacKenzie courses — Cypress Point Club in California, Royal Melbourne Golf Club in Australia and Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, the home of The Masters — have been ranked in the top 10 in the world.“I was pretty surprised, I have to say,” Powell said.A player walks above an old quarry while looking for the ball from his first drive.Powell also discovered a newspaper article from 1925 that listed MacKenzie as the architect, and a roughly 90-year-old guidebook that documented the designer’s observations while at the site (“I have attempted to reduce the hill climbing to a minimum”). But various societies tied to MacKenzie’s courses show no recognition of Rhayader online — mainly because, members said, affiliation is only for active courses, and online chronologies document MacKenzie being in X location on Y date, rather than simply listing courses he may have worked on.Powell didn’t mind, though. He kept working on his antithesis of the pristine Augusta National course, hoping to one day host a round in the Welsh hills. He purchased a riding mower to tackle the remaining bracken. Some nights he walked the hills hitting balls, which, when they would become lost on the fern-covered fairways, he would retrieve using a sickle.In late April, Powell was presented with an opportunity: the previous year’s bracken had died down, giving him a few weeks when the remaining dead ferns could be cleared from key sections of the course, making it somewhat playable before the ferns grew back.On Friday evening, players found smaller touches, too. There were scorecards and directional signs that Powell and his wife had made. Holes had been given names, like “Moonshot,” where the drive was high and blind, and “Rollercoaster,” requiring players to drive into a valley and then play back up toward the green. All entry fees would be sent to causes supporting the National Health Service.Volunteers poured tea for golfers during the competition.“It will be rough and ragged,” said Ben Waters, 36, the course manager at nearby Llandrindod Wells Golf Club where Powell now plays, who had advised him during the previous months. “But that’s not the point. This has been one man working on a hillside in his spare time.”Over roughly four hours, players trekked across the countryside and, in the case of the first hole, over the outline of an abandoned quarry. They were each armed with a hand-drawn course map, made up of straight black lines and occasional red X’s, which, according to the index, meant “DEEP BRACKEN.”On blind holes, players were required to ring horseshoes that Powell had set up to alert the group behind that it was safe to hit. Greens were lumpy and the standard of “a lawn, at best,” Powell said, so hitting into a red ring around the flagstick counted as sinking a shot. One hole also required players to climb a fence to reach the tee. The first group out were soaked by a swift rain shower.By the time the final group had finished, the sun had set and it was getting dark. Players were met with homemade snacks underneath a cabana, and the Rhaeader Cup — to use the Welsh spelling, Y Rhaeader, meaning “The Waterfall” — was presented to the winning team. Powell hoped the charity round could become an annual event.“The most upsetting part is that it will be completely unplayable again in another month,” he said.Hitting into a red ring around the flagstick counted as sinking a shot. Nature will eventually reclaim the course and Powell’s labors of love. But something more lasting would come of his efforts.Neil Crafter is a golf course architect from Adelaide, Australia, who has quietly been researching and documenting MacKenzie’s work for more than 20 years.Despite Rhayader not being listed as an active MacKenzie course or in any sort of official chronology, the course map featuring his name and the newspaper article referencing Rhayader as being the designer’s work “match my guidelines” for it to be recognized, Crafter, 63, said last week.By “identifying his formula” for hole descriptions over the years, Crafter said he felt comfortable declaring that observations attributed to MacKenzie in the local guidebook read like a “classic MacKenzie course” — taking into account chosen words, references to drainage and the choice to lay out a course at one with the landscape.Crafter is nearly finished writing a series of books on the more than 250 MacKenzie courses he has studied over the years. These will include chapters on active courses, defunct courses and some that were never made — Augusta National, Royal Melbourne, Cypress Point and, yes, Rhayader Golf Links, whose biography Crafter has already written.He offered to read out the final line of that chapter.“Uniquely, the land the course was laid out on remains open farmland today and evidence of MacKenzie’s old greens, tees and bunkers can be clearly seen,” Crafter said.He paused.“I’d love to add a footnote to that: ‘In 2021, a group of local golfers played the course once more.’” More