In a League of Its Own

It is impossible to overstate the enduring singularity of The Open Championship. Over 150 years on from its first staging on the windswept links of Royal Prestwick on the west coast of Scotland, the oldest major in golf stands out from every other tournament in the game.

Stoic mustachioed Scots may be in short supply these days, but other throwbacks remain. The links courses the event is played over all boast a number of quirks - blind tee shots, nightmarish pot bunkers and putting surfaces indented with nature’s humps and swales - that have all but vanished from modern course architecture.

The vagaries of the British weather, meanwhile, mean that extreme conditions can render an already treacherous course close to unplayable. Advances in equipment may have tamed gnarled and elemental beasts such as Carnoustie, Royal Birkdale and Royal Liverpool - the venue for this year’s staging - to a certain degree. However, they remain as far removed from the target practice displayed on golf’s most lucrative tours as Pluto is from Jupiter.

With this in mind, you might expect the millionaires of the modern game to cock a snook at such anachronisms. On the contrary, the grand old dame of the Royal and Ancient sport remains the most coveted conquest in the golfing firmament.

First held in 1860, The Open is played on one of nine links courses that make up the ‘Open rota’. Four of these courses are to be found in England, and the remaining five in Scotland. This year’s event will be played in the north of England at Royal Liverpool Golf Club, better known as Hoylake after the small town it is located in.

The links aspect is critical, with this type of golf course - built on rolling sand dunes - considered to be the closest to the original layouts of the early championships and the most difficult. You see, for one week in July, the world’s finest players are each asked to compete not only against the other 155 golfers in the field, but also against an unrelenting layout, notoriously fickle British weather and, importantly, luck.