TROON, Scotland – Mother Nature has a sense of humor and on Thursday she threw the field at the 152nd British Open for a loop at Royal Troon. No one seemed ready for the wind to blow from an entirely different direction.
“Hitting driver on 1 in the practice round wasn’t really great prep for today,” said Xander Schauffele, who needed 3-iron, 6-iron instead, “but that’s just kind of how links golf is, and that’s the beauty of it.”
Playing into an opposite wind was a puzzle that few players had the answers to unless your name happened to be Daniel Brown, not the Da Vinci Code author, but the golfer making his major championship debut, who shot 65 and leads by one over 2019 Open champ Shane Lowry. PGA Championship winner Xander Schauffele (69) and Masters champ Scottie Scheffler (70) are lurking as they attempt to win a second major this season while U.S. Open champ Bryson DeChambeau struggled (76).
“It’s funny like the practice days, the course couldn’t have played any easier. Then it’s the start of the tournament, and it’s just playing, I guess, how you in some ways expect an Open to play,” said Tyrrell Hatton, who made 16 pars and two bogeys and complained about his game afterward.
Troon’s victims included 2022 Open champ Cameron Smith (80), three-time Open champ Tiger Woods (79), Rickie Fowler (79), 2023 U.S. Open champ Wyndham Clark (78) and 2014 Open champ Rory McIlroy (78).
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“It was brutal. It really was a good test of golf, and you needed to be on your A+ game to shoot under par, and I witnessed it,” said Smith, who played in the same grouping with Lowry. “He played good.”
Here are five things to know from the first round of the 2024 British Open.