2026 Open Championship - Early Week Coverage

Ben Griffin (via IG) breaking out the vintage Maxfli styled bag this week. If only Ben had the gall to play a retro set of Maxfli Australian blades and revolution ball along with it

Just about set to go LIVE on YouTube for this week's SGS preview episode: https://www.youtube.com/live/VjsbJmssosY?si=ahu4pxi_zFikW_4T

I know it's a major championship so excitement is generally the norm, but I would describe the vibes on the ground as incredibly high after today. The conditions certainly build into this. But I do think -- SO FAR -- there is a general curiousity-to-enthusiasm about the course changes. This, of course, can change rapidly in the next couple days, and the conditions will aid or overshadow some of the substantive changes. But I think there's mostly interest around the new routing and work done on both nines.

The biggest criticisms so far, on the record at least, have centered around the new holes/greens on the back nine sticking out significantly and not looking natural compared to the rest of the course. Both Scottie and Rory lodged these comments, and I am not sure, at least on Scottie's part, it was intended as a criticism so much as an observation.

SCOTTIE SCHEFFLER: First impressions were really good. I think it's pretty obvious -- the one thing I found interesting is it's so obvious as to which holes had been redone. They look like they're not even on the same golf course. You look at 14, 15, 16, those green complexes and the amount of slope that they have off of them are pretty severe and quite challenging. The 5th hole is kind of like that, 7th hole as well.

It was pretty obvious like, oh, these are the holes that got redone because they look like they're on a different golf course. Those are the things that stood out to me the most.

I do think it is likely that the final judgment at the end of the week on the new par-3 15th hole will not be a favorable one. None of the pros are running balls on there, and I think they might get testy about it. Paul McGinley suggested there are already plans to scrap it when The Open is over.

But so far -- from the players to the fans to the media -- there is just a very positive feeling permeating the premises of the last men's major of the year.

The 15th hole, a new par 3 that and push toward 250 yards (likely downwind), courtesy of Getty/David Cannon.

Powerful segment on Live From, bringing on 27-year-old amateur David Howard, who was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at age seven. Howard qualified for this Open via Final Qualifying at Dundonald Links.

Brandel Chamblee asked Howard about dealing with his diagnosis and that one of the first things Howard did when he received a phone was search the internet for the life expectancy of someone with cystic fibrosis. The Irishman, who is a trained mechanic, has gone through his fair share of personal struggles, but this week he'll compete head to head with the best golfers in the world.

The next time a professional golfer complains about an unfair bounce or the lack of gluten-free options at player dining, they should think about Howard taking 25-30 tablets a day to get his body through each round. An inspiring story of perseverance, courage, and the importance of Open Qualifying.

How do you deal with doubt? Do you think about death?

This might seem like an odd thing to admit, but press conferences at The Open Championship are typically my favorite press conferences of the year.

The players are usually in a good mood, but also in a reflective one. It's the last major of the year, so there is still time to salvage a poor season with a win. Most of them don't play a lot of links golf, but they have an unspoken reverence for the origins of the game, so coming to this part of the world puts them in thoughtful place. There is also a large menagerie of media on site, so you get a lot of variety in the questions.

One minute you might have someone asking Scottie Scheffler about the newly-designed 15th hole, the next minute you might have someone asking Rory McIlroy if he wants to be knighted and if he's inquired about the application process.

Those are two real things that happened Tuesday.

Asking questions in press conferences is a bit of a misunderstood part of our jobs, if I'm being frank. Context often gets stripped away when things are clipped and reshared on X, and it's inevitable that people declare we've just asked the dumbest possible question, how do we actually have jobs, what the hell could we possibly have been thinking by bringing up such a stupid inquiry.

I push back on the idea that any question in a press conference is dumb or inappropriate. Our job is to get insight for something we're working on or something we're curious about, not to perform for an audience on social media. In fact, sometimes (often, in fact) unusual questions produce the best answers. It was AP reporter Doug Ferguson who asked Scheffler last year at Royal Portrush what was the longest he'd ever celebrated something, and Scheffler gave one of the best answers of his career, opening up about the meaning of life and how golf wasn't ultimately fulfilling, something that ended up resonating with me deeply.

Scheffler couldn't resist revisiting the same subject matter on Tuesday, even though he kept joking that he'd like to steer away from big themes this year. Shane Ryan of Golf Digest (one of the best when it comes to asking good questions) wanted to know if he ever thought about legacy, if he wondered how he might be remembered when he was gone.

"There's things I would like to accomplish in the game, but at the end of the day, I have never once thought about how I'm going to be remembered," Scheffler said. "To me, it truly doesn't matter from a sense of like accomplishment. Like when I die, hey, Scottie won four majors and 20 tournaments and he won this much money. That has zero effect on me.

"When I was young, I took myself a bit too seriously. I've gotten better as I've gotten older of letting the competition be the competition, and when you're done, taking your hat off and shake hands and we're on to the next week. History for me has never been the most important thing."

Twenty mins later, Ryan decided to pose the same question to McIlroy.

"I would like to think that the people that love and care about me think a certain way of me, but yeah, I'll be long gone. I'll be dead," McIlroy said. "I don't think I'll be seeing what people say about me. I'll be six feet under. I don't think I'll be a ghost."

I've always been interested in big themes, and figure I'll let other people dig in on the minutia of golf stuff, in part because I tend to believe professional golfers are such savants when it comes to the game, a 10-handicap like me is never going to be able to relate to them in terms of golf ability. But on a human level, we process some things the same way. So when it was my turn to ask a question, I threw one of my favorites at Jon Rahm.

How do you deal with doubt?

"You're making me doubt myself right now," Rahm joked.

I laughed but I pressed on. How had he learned to deal with it?

"I think it's part of being a pro athlete," Rahm said. "I think it's a part of being a human being, right? I don't think you're ever always 100 percent convinced something is going to happen, and that's why you put the effort that you put in. I think essentially it's just part of the process where you work as hard as you can to prepare, you try to compete. If things go well or not, you learn from what you did and try to be better prepared for the next one."

Had there been any time recently when he'd learned something about himself after coming up short? Rahm thought deeply about it, then gave a really insightful answer.

"Best example I can give you from this year is Australia, being tied for the lead with Bryson and Anthony Kim in the final group and having a very lackluster Sunday, learning a lot precisely from what I witnessed Anthony Kim do," he said. "Took that to two weeks later at Hong Kong where I was tied for the lead with two other players and actually getting it done. So, yeah, there's cases and there's times where you learn from your mistakes. I think you need to be honest enough about it with yourself to maybe swallow your pride, understand what you did wrong, see what somebody else did better, and try to change that."

McIlroy didn't love the question about being knighted — I suspect it's the kind of thing you don't talk about if you have any interest in seeing it happen — but that didn't mean it was a bad question. Sometimes you shoot your shot as a reporter and strike out.

And sometimes you step in it when you're fumbling with your words, as I did when I asked McIlroy about what was his favorite venue in the "British Open" rota before correcting myself too late and saying "The Open."

"Come on, Kevin," Rory said.

At least no one will remember that faux pas when I'm gone.

I know my colleague Joseph LaMagna will back me up on this after getting his first dosage of it last year at Royal Portrush.

The Open has many great traditions. The Claret Jug. The links. The weather. The overnight watch from the USA. One of the absolute best, and you can take it to the bank every single year, is watching Geoff Shackelford mock, lambaste, and recoil at the food offerings in at the media dining station as the servers wait, within earshot of the reviews, for him to make a selection. It is high comedy, some of the best theater of Open Championship week each year. I just had an experience that ended with tears from laughter.

My personal approach is to go safe as possible -- plain breads and starches. It's not healthy and hurts in the end, but it's the safer of all roads.

By now, you've likely heard about the fiery conditions at Royal Birkdale. The area is in its third heatwave of the summer with little interluding rain. The course is indeed a golden brown, with some of that occasional grey or white creeping in spots. I had not been out before today, but I did take an early stroll with Geoff Shackleford who remarked that they had clearly put some water on it overnight to keep things alive and reasonable. It will remain fiery and the colors will pop on television in a diametric way to Augusta, Quail Hollow, and places that dot the American TV golf landscape.

https://x.com/BrendanPorath/status/2077006955844116788

What does it mean for the championship? Well, we will see! I know you come to this blog for that kind of expert analysis. But I do think we've arrived at another major this year where there is a bit of mystery on what kind of style will succeed and what kind of challenge might await. Aronimink was a bit of a mystery, a relative unknown on the recent majors rota, whose greens combined with the winds that came during that major to create a delightful and maybe not entirely anticipated challenge. Shinnecock became all about the setup in a forecasted wind that became somewhat terrifying for the setup guys like John Bodenhamer. Anticipation and the excitement that comes with uncertainty ensued.

Now we come to another major championship week where the only consensus right now is that the conditions are firm and fiery. The prevailing notion early on is that we will see a lot less drivers. Jon Rahm spoke of 6 irons nearly running into bunkers 280 yards off the tee at 11. Scottie Scheffler said, more importantly than the color, is the firmness.

I'm looking forward to getting out here on a really firm golf course. I think it's going to be very fun and interesting to play. St Andrews was really firm, but outside of that, I haven't played an extremely firm Open Championship yet, so I'm excited to get out there and see what it's like under competition as well.

Scottie also suggested that drivers will almost always run into the rough should you choose to hit them.

So there's a lot of thinking off the tee on whether or not you want to just hit driver up there somewhere and kind of play from the rough most likely, or do you want to start hitting some irons, getting it in some fairways and hitting some longer shots into the greens?

On each hole there's a good bit of strategy; there's a decent amount of thinking. If it wasn't as firm as it is now, there wouldn't be as much decision-making, but I think with the firmness, it creates a whole lot more challenges, I think, for us as players, just to try and control your ball and figure out where it's going to end up.

So we're certainly in for something different this week, which at the start of it, is great. At the end of it, if we've seen just a bunch of six iron-wedges, will that positive feeling be the same? Is removing driver as a significant part of the competition going to yield a better championship? We'll see. This is where the mystery of another major and the expectations for what we will come is a welcome refresher.

By the way, what does it say for so much of the other golf throughout the year that this major, and the preceding two majors, feel anomalous? That there is a bit of excitement because we don't know precisely what to expect. That seems suboptimal, and controllable if you're some of those other events.

Scottie might just be back. On if playing for legacy motivates him:

"I don't play for a place in history. I'm not playing for anything like that because -- this is going to sound a little morbid, but at the end of the day, I'm going to live my life and then it's going to end and when it ends I'm going somewhere else and I'm not going to be here anymore."

A great quote on links golf from Justin Rose this morning:

"I think as pros we love to be prepared. Really to answer your question, it's we love to be prepared. I think ultimately at an Open Championship, your preparation needs to be -- you can't perfect something. Play with creativity and play in the moment. Just play with a lot of flair in the moment. See a shot, bump and run. You might not have practiced it, you might not have hit that shot for a long, long time, but if you see it, go with it."