Links golf may be sporting torture but it is the game at its best

“Links golf is nature in all its unforgiving force” was how the Open’s official website previewed the week at Royal Troon. The broken souls come Sunday night would testify to that. Soaked and windswept, the hermetically sealed bubbles PGA Tour players exist in for 51 weeks of the year were prised open one by one and plundered by the conspiratorial elements in Ayrshire. Those who survived all four days stumbled off the 18th green in a stupor. At times it felt like sporting torture. Boy, was it beautiful.
Of the 157 players that journeyed to Troon with dewy-eyed dreams, only nine survived the rude awakening and bettered par for the tournament. The glory of this Open was not in the suffering, though, but the vicissitudes. It trawled the wardrobe of all four seasons and stretched extremes in scoring rarely witnessed on behemoth yet benign American courses.
Justin Thomas played the front nine in 45 on Friday and 31 on Saturday. Joaquin Niemann made an eight at the 120-yard Postage Stamp, the 8th hole. Robert MacIntyre was forced to hit a full shot right-handed. It was a gripping test of golf — aside from when the club threatened to slip from players’ hands — and demanded imagination and all-round consistency in almost equal measures.
When Xander Schauffele won the US PGA Championship in May, he made only two bogeys and one double in 72 holes. It was a high-class procession of target practice into soft greens that coughed up a record-breaking low score in major championship history.
The winds were slightly milder in Troon on Sunday, only tipping 15mph as the leaders entered the closing stretch, but the brilliance of Schauffele’s round of 65 bore little resemblance to the monotony of Valhalla. It tested every aspect of his game and sinew of nerve, not least the deft pitch off a tight, hard lie over the greenside bunker at the 16th to a flag tucked just a few paces behind, that sealed his victory. Only one other player, Russell Henley, went bogey-free on Sunday.
“I don’t know if it’s true or not [that winning the Open makes you a complete player], but I’m definitely going to believe it,” Schauffele said, laughing. “It’s a completely different style of golf. It makes you play shots and have different ball positions. There’s so much risk-reward when the wind’s blowing 20 miles an hour and it starts raining. There are so many different variables that come into play. It truly is an honour to win this.”
Some will lament the vagaries of the weather as unfair, and the late-morning wave on Thursday and Friday undoubtedly bore the brunt of the gusts of winds. But as Jack Nicklaus always attested: “Golf is not a fair game” — never more so than on links courses.
There are blind shots, impossible stances and luckless bounces. Take the 18th on Saturday when Daniel Brown’s chain-smoking was inconvenienced by the need to hit a seemingly fine drive into the howling winds that had wreaked more havoc on the Englishman’s lighter than his impervious score.
His ball kicked off a small gradient in the fairway impossible to discern from a distance and defied gravity to cling to the lip of the bunker, leaving Brown to play a shot with the ball above waist-high. A double bogey meant he dropped out of the lead and the nearest corner-shop owner in Troon might have begun smacking his lips in anticipation of Brown’s latest restock.
But one of the beauties of this tournament was that it gave back what it stole, albeit minus a pound of flesh. The unheralded South African Thriston Lawrence was given an unglamorous 4.05pm start on Friday as the gusts gathered in might, but he scrambled and putted brilliantly and the sole birdie of a gritty round confirmed he would make the cut.
His reward was an early start in the initially gentle conditions on Saturday, and Lawrence played brilliantly to shoot 65 — the joint-lowest round of the tournament — and earn a place in the final group on Sunday. That might have invited a frantic uptick in visitors to the 27-year-old’s scant Wikipedia page, but it was far from an unworthy aberration.
It is not just name value but narrative that dictates the excitement of a tournament. Along with Brown and Lawrence, this final round had Justin Rose seeking a second major 11 years after his first, Billy Horschel attempting to break his torrid record in them, and Scottie Scheffler and Schauffele, both major champions already this year, vying alongside them.
Shane Lowry was there too, attempting to revive the sodden memories of Royal Portrush with four birdies on the front nine, but his grumblings about the “brutal” set-up late on Saturday evening after a round of 77 illustrated how such a maddening gauntlet could briefly relieve a good-hearted man of his warmth. What’s more, it always carried the threat not just of constant change on the leaderboard but outright capitulations, although the three putt from inside 7ft that cost Scheffler at the 9th hole was a demon all of his own.
“I think this has been a fantastically fair test this week,” Matt Fitzpatrick, who had good reason to complain after finishing nine over par for the tournament, said, before conceding it is a “fine line”. But the blips of chaos added to the viewing experience for those in the comfort of their living rooms, and the less hardy dispersed by the weather on Saturday had returned in full force. It was a 72-hole tightrope complete with thrills and spills, slumps and spats, and delivered a formidable champion about whom nothing was a fluke. Golf really gets no better.