Nine years ago Royal Birkdale played soft enough that Jordan Spieth could throw darts at flags from the rough and watch them stop, the kind of Open that let a supremely gifted short game paper over a wayward driver. This week’s version of the course wants nothing to do with that memory. Two days before the 154th Open teed off on Thursday, the players who walked it in practice kept reaching for the same word to describe what a rainless forecast and a firmer set of fairways had done to a course usually praised as the fairest test on the rota: unprecedented.
A course that has forgotten how to hold water
Merseyside has spent the past few weeks under an unseasonable heatwave, and the forecast for all four rounds calls for little to no rain and temperatures easing into the low 70s by the weekend, a rarity for this stretch of Lancashire coast in July. Add a 2024 renovation that narrowed fairways already unforgiving by modern standards, and Royal Birkdale arrives at this Open playing closer to a baked-out links than the wet, chewed-up course Spieth conquered in 2017.
Scottie Scheffler, bidding to become the first player to win back-to-back Opens since Padraig Harrington in 2008 and 2009, compared the conditions to the 2022 Championship at the Old Course, where Cameron Smith finished twenty under par on a course playing about as fast as St Andrews gets. Birkdale will not yield scores like that, but the ground game Scheffler described sounded familiar all the same.
“The ball’s just going to run for forever pretty much,” he said. “On each hole, there’s a good bit of strategy, there’s a decent amount of thinking.”
Jon Rahm put a number on just how far that run-out could stretch. With the wind gusting off the Irish Sea and behind a player, he reckoned a 6-iron could travel 280 yards on some holes this week, a distance that would embarrass a driver on a still day. “It’s unprecedented for sure,” he said, and it was hard to find anyone in the locker room disagreeing with him.
The double-edged sword McIlroy is trying to hold
Not every reaction to a burnt-out golf course was cautious. Rory McIlroy, chasing a first Claret Jug since 2014, called the conditions a “double-edged sword” and pointed out that the same heat drying the fairways has thinned the rough considerably from when he last saw the course a fortnight ago. His read was that some players will take driver more often than the fairway bunkers might normally invite, on the logic that a wayward tee shot now finds burnt-out, playable rough rather than the thick stuff that used to swallow a ball whole.
“OK, it might be in the rough, but it’s not that penal, so you get a wedge in your hand and you can figure it out from there,” McIlroy said. He drew a comparison to last month’s US Open at Shinnecock Hills, where the USGA’s setup created doubt in players’ minds about which shot to hit rather than simply punishing anything off line. “When you give professional golfers options and you can create a little bit of doubt in their minds in terms of should I play this shot or that shot, that’s when things start to get fun, especially for the viewer,” he said. “Not so much for us.”
Justin Rose, who has watched Birkdale’s new holes take shape over repeated visits, expects the firm turf to reward a proper links game rather than an aerial one. Several of the redesigned greens, including the par-5 14th and the par-3 15th, sit elevated with steep run-offs that punish anything flown in too aggressively.
“I feel it’s playing like a classic links, where you try to run it up as close as you can to the pot bunkers and play mid to short irons into the greens,” Rose said. “You might see a varied bunch of strategies.”
What actually decides it
None of this changes what wins an Open. Whoever drives it best off tees now framed by mounding rather than rough will still be the one signing for the low numbers, home favourite or not. But a golf course that has stopped absorbing golf shots asks different questions of the field than the one that flooded in 2017, and by Sunday evening the leaderboard should tell us plenty about who actually enjoyed answering them. Scheffler, Rahm and McIlroy all sounded, in their different ways, like players who had decided that answering with aggression beats answering with caution. Whether Royal Birkdale agrees with them is the whole tournament.