It will be a Royal pain if it’s windy

Challenging Birkdale might produce yet another first-time major champion.

SOUTHPORT, England — A swirling breeze off the Irish Sea nudged ominous clouds over this resort town Wednesday, transforming what had been a balmy week into a more familiar shade of gray. The world’s best golfers worked their way around the undulations of Royal Birkdale, fine-tuning their games with a last practice round before Thursday’s start of the 146th British Open.

The forecast calls for a damp start to the tournament, followed by sunny spells, then a more steely sky Thursday night with gusts of up to 30 mph.

In other words, par for the course.

“We really haven’t played this course in good weather. ... ’98 wasn’t great, ’08 wasn’t great,” said Justin Rose, runner-up at this year’s Masters. “This week might not be great. Because it’s a fair golf course, I think it plays well in tough conditions too.”

Lately, the winds of change in professional golf have been equally fickle, with a parade of players looking unbeatable one year

and highly vulnerable the next. A year ago, Dustin Johnson was the hot hand. Before him, it was Jason Day, Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy … each briefly planting a flag at the summit of the sport.

The constant churn at the top underscores the depth of field, how difficult it is to live in that rarefied air at the top and how amazing it was that Tiger Woods stayed at the pinnacle for as long as he did. The recent results in major championships only buttress the case that no one maintains a spot at the apex for long. The last seven major winners had never before won a major championship.

“That’s sort of where golf is at the moment,” McIlroy said Wednesday. “No one is really standing out and sort of taking it by the scruff of the neck. It’s so hard these days to separate yourself.”

McIlroy said that with the evolving technology in equipment and coaching, and the fact that you can statistically know so much more about your game now than in decades past, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish yourself from the competition.

“The margins are so fine,” he said. “That’s why you’re finding all these guys so closely grouped together, because it’s so hard to find that little percent or 2% that separates you from the rest of the pack.”

Bracketed by sand dunes, Royal Birkdale has narrow fairways and 123 bunkers, an average of nearly seven per hole. In this age of better golf through technology, courses are constantly being lengthened for tournaments. But Birkdale — at 7,173 yards — is actually 17 yards shorter than when it played host to the Open in 2008.

There’s no mitigating the gusts, though, and those can howl. There are multiple sets of consecutive holes played in opposite wind directions. Scores just below or at par are typically competitive here, where in 2008, Padraig Harrington finished three over par and won the tournament by four strokes, recording the only over-par championship winning score this century.

“I got lucky in 2008; I came into the tournament, and I was injured,” Harrington recalled. “And it just took a lot of the expectations off. I was able to do all the stuff that you have to do as defending champion and have time to do it. So because I wasn’t playing practice rounds that week, I basically freed up a lot more time. So there was a lot less stress.

“The week turned out to be a grueling, tough week. And I played the least amount of golf, so [I] probably was the freshest guy on the golf course Thursday morning and happy to be there, and certainly the freshest probably come Sunday.”

The British Open isn’t always a grind-it-out affair. At Royal Troon last year, Henrik Stenson finished a record 20 under to beat Phil Mickelson by three strokes. Mickelson’s 17-under would have won all but four Opens in the storied history of the tournament, dating to 1860.

Stenson said he feels less pressure to win the British this year because he checked that box a year ago.

“I never felt it was a big problem not having won one, even though I badly wanted to win one,” Stenson said. “But I never walked around feeling like, ‘Oh, I’m one of those guys on that list that potentially are the best players not to have won a major.’

“And yet, I think once you win one, obviously that’s off your shoulder. And it’s more about putting yourself in contention again and trying to win a second one.”