SOUTHPORT, England — At Open Championships, the sky can be blue or grey and it doesn’t matter. The buildings might be sandstone or ivy-covered, and it’s just an aesthetic. The bunkers can be raked flat or with a slight slope, and not much is changed; they’re still hazardous.
But the fairways? They can be green or olive or yellow and the difference is everything. At the best Opens, the fairways are— pick your descriptor — brown, hazelnut, granola.
Take a lesson from up the road, at Royal Lytham & St. Annes — maybe six miles as the crow flies — where Cameron Smith and Lucas Herbert began their links prep last week. The fairway hue they encountered is best described as flapjack, for those English delicacies of golden hard-baked oatmeal. Give this area another two weeks of rainless heat, and the Women’s Open, which is just up the coast at Royal Lytham, could present a historically firm test.
It’s the men’s turn this week, of course, at Royal Birkdale, which already has the look and feel of the ’22 Open at St. Andrews, where Smith won, or the ’18 Open at Carnoustie, where high tee shots bounded like basketballs off hardwood, or the ’06 Open, where Tiger Woods’s stingers might still be rolling. At all three, the turf was like this Birkdale landscape, burnt to a crisp brown like it’s been roasting by the fire all summer. In many ways, it has. The second half of June brought virtually no precipitation to West Lancashire, and the start of July has been no different.
Players who can’t control their balls get freaked out by these beige fairways. Players who can start to salivate. Their imagination switch flicks ON. They hit chippy irons and 60-yard putts and shots they haven’t thought about in … well, about 12 months. And isn’t that what we want to reward, anyway? The most magnificently creative gents who have their balls on a string, guided by caddies calling out more yardages than usual: carry numbers and runout numbers.
These July days are long, and with 156 players in the field, Thursday and Friday’s tee sheets result in sun-up to sundown action. But when an Open has this hue, it’s extra-taxing on the golfers. Their brains are exhausted. Simply walking the pavement-firm fairways does something different to your ankles, your toes, your heels.
During these special summer trips to the U.K., golf fans are conditioned to obsess over greenness. We’re told Augusta National is the pinnacle of the sport, and every April it lives up to its trademark palette, with its pinks, purples, whites . . . and not just greens but hunter greens. You can google “Pantone 342” — that’s the dark, rich green that’s imbued in the most famous jackets in golf, the packaging of those cheap sandwiches and the painting of the crosswalks. Green is good, especially if you’re a PGA Tour fan, where it’s all green, all the time. Take last month’s Travelers Championship at TPC River Highlands, where the ball is played exclusively through the air, and compare it to the week that preceded it, at Shinnecock Hills, where what really mattered is what happened when the ball was on the ground.
That is fascinating golf. Invigorating golf. Don’t-look-away-because-it-might-run-into-the-bunker golf. That course up the road at Lytham doesn’t feel nearly long enough to test the best professionals in the world if it’s green. But with its army of bunkers surrounding grass as unyielding as your dinner table, yes, it will be sufficiently challenging when the Open visits in 2028.
Royal Birkdale will combine the best of those two tests: it’s firm as you like, andplenty long, too. Course architects who specialize in renovating these century-old tracks have contorted parts of the layouts to force players to consider their balls on the ground more than ever. Do yourself a favor and really watch the bounces on holes 5, 13, 17 and 18 this week. Then remember that if it had rained all month, this wouldn’t be nearly as much fun. With a hat-tip to Mother Nature, these fairways are as crisp as Wheat Thins and surrounded by fescue that resembles a wheat field. How lucky we are! When Englishman Aaron Rai visited Birkdale two weeks ago, he saw a green golf course.
“It was quite lush when I came here and relatively soft as well, fairways and greens,” Rai said Tuesday. “So it was quite a surprise playing a few holes on Sunday, seeing it as brown as it was in the space of, I think, 10 days.”
The forecast for the next few days is delightful. Sun, wind, no rain and, perhaps, a brown-out for the ages.
