In five weeks the Open Championship returns to Royal Birkdale, and the certainty worth holding onto amid all the build-up is this: whoever lifts the Claret Jug on the 19th of July will have been beaten by nobody and nothing except the golf course. That is Birkdale’s particular reputation, and it has been earned over a century of championship play on the Southport coast. Among players, the word that follows the club around is “fair” — and at an Open venue, fair is not faint praise. It is the highest compliment the professionals know how to give.
The architecture of fairness
The reason lies in how the course uses its dunes. At many links, the sandhills are in the field of play, kicking good drives sideways and hiding pot bunkers in folds you cannot see from the tee. At Birkdale, the holes run through the valleys between the dunes, on fairways that sit relatively flat at the bottom. The towering sandhills frame each hole rather than interfere with it, which produces two happy consequences. The player who hits the fairway gets a level stance and an honest approach, and the spectator standing on the dunes gets the best natural grandstands in championship golf.
None of this makes the course gentle. The wind off the Irish Sea comes and goes as it pleases, the rough between the corridors is as penal as anywhere on the rota, and the run of holes from the first — a long par four curling left around a dune — sets a tone of patient, unglamorous work. The twelfth, a par three cut into the sandhills, is as pretty a short hole as England owns, and the closing stretch has decided more Opens than almost any in the game. The white art deco clubhouse, sitting above it all like the bridge of an ocean liner, has watched most of modern golf history sail past.
The honours board
Birkdale’s list of Open champions is a study in the course rewarding the best player of the moment. Peter Thomson won the first Open held there in 1954 and returned to win again in 1965. Lee Trevino took the 1971 championship at the height of his powers. Johnny Miller won in 1976, the same week a nineteen-year-old named Severiano Ballesteros announced himself by finishing runner-up and breaking half of England’s hearts in the process. Tom Watson collected his fifth Open at Birkdale in 1983, Ian Baker-Finch played the weekend of his life in 1991, and Mark O’Meara outlasted Brian Watts in a playoff in 1998.
The two most recent editions gave the course its modern legend. In 2008, Padraig Harrington defended his title in wind so brutal that the field seemed to be playing a different sport, his two-iron into the seventeenth on Sunday standing among the finest shots ever struck in the championship. And in 2017, Jordan Spieth produced the most extraordinary recovery in recent major history — a drive on the thirteenth so far right it ended up on the practice ground, an unplayable lie, a twenty-minute ruling, a saved bogey, and then a finish of birdie, eagle, birdie, birdie that broke Matt Kuchar entirely. That same week, Branden Grace went round in 62, the lowest single round in men’s major championship history. Fairness, it turns out, cuts both ways: when a great player has his week at Birkdale, the course lets him show it.
There is one more entry on the honours board that did not involve a Claret Jug. The 1969 Ryder Cup was played at Birkdale, and it ended with Jack Nicklaus conceding Tony Jacklin’s two-foot putt on the final green so that the match itself finished tied — the Concession, still the most graceful single act in the competition’s history. It happened here.
What July will ask
The 154th Open, the eleventh at Birkdale, runs from the 16th to the 19th of July, and the examination will be the traditional one. The course will play somewhere around 7,150 yards at par 70, which is short by modern standards and entirely beside the point. Birkdale defends itself with angles and air. The fairways at the bottom of those dune valleys are generous targets in still conditions and frighteningly small ones when the wind quarters across them, and the greens accept a running ball all day from the player willing to land it short and trust the ground.
What it will not do is produce a fluke. Look again at that list of champions — Thomson, Trevino, Miller, Watson, Spieth. Birkdale identifies the best golfer in the field with a consistency no other Open venue quite matches, and it does so without trickery, without hidden bunkers, without a single hole that asks for anything other than the correct shot, properly struck. Five weeks out, that is really all anyone needs to know. The fairest test in links golf is about to ask its questions again, and the dunes will be full of people who came to watch someone answer them.