From brown to crown: Whoever can best manage burnt-out Carnoustie will hoist Claret Jug
CARNOUSTIE, Scotland — If you’re a golf fan, love to watch the British Open and haven’t done it yet this year, eventually you’ll turn your TV sets on to check out the goings on in 147th Open Championship at Carnoustie and this is what you’ll see: Brown. A lot of brown, burnt out grass that serves as the fairways.
And you know what? It’s perfect.
Lush, meticulously manicured, emerald-green Augusta National Car- noustie is not — nor are any of the venerable courses in the British Open. And that’s OK, because this is what sets the Open apart from the other three major championships.
Mother Nature always has a more significant say in how British Opens unfold than she does in any of the other three. So bad bounce off a lump in the rock-hard fairways be damned — even if the player has piped a perfect tee shot down the middle.
Stuff happens in links golf that is never even a thought elsewhere. This is one of the charms of this championship, fair or not, and it’s something that whomever hoists the Claret Jug by Sunday evening will have handled better than the other 155 players in the field.
“With links golf, you have to adapt,’’ Rory McIlroy said Wednesday. “There’s not going to be one player in this field that has a game plan on Wednesday night and is going to stick to that game plan the whole way around for 72 holes. It’s just not going to happen with wind conditions, with pins.
“It’s amazing, you look at the last couple of weeks over here playing — the guys that have played in Ireland and then Scotland — and you plan to play the golf course a certain way, but you see guys on Saturdays and Sundays taking way more drivers, way more risks because they’ve played the course a couple more times, and they weighed it up and think this is worth it.’’
Carnoustie is brown this week because it’ s often brown, but particularly as a result of an unusually hot and dry summer. If the wind picks up, coupled with the hard-and-fast fairways, you will likely see your share of trouble this week.
“It’s going to be really interesting, I think, because the golf course is playing so firm and fast, you’ll see guys playing the golf course completely differently,’’ McIlroy said. “There’s some guys that will see it completely different than the way I see it and vice versa. It’s going to be really interesting to see how it all plays out.’’
The weather forecast does not call for any significant rain or major winds, but that doesn’t mean things won’t change. In 2002 at Muirfield, a major squall came in Saturday afternoon and wrecked the chances of a number of players, including Tiger Woods, who shot 81.
“I had won the two previous major championships that year, and I was really playing well,’’ Woods recalled. “I think I was only a few back of the lead. I hadn’t seen a weather change like that of all my years on Tour, not like that, not that quickly. Normally, if it does blow that hard or it does rain that hard, usually there’s some kind of lightning involved, and you’ve got to have stoppage of play. There was no stoppage of play. We had to play on.”
It cost Woods dearly, cost him a chance at winning the Grand Slam that year.
Will there be any surprises this week?
“It does look pretty tame,’’ Justin Thomas said of this week’s forecast . “But I remember two years ago at Troon, if you get in that wrong wave [of tee times], you’re probably not going to have a chance to win. You never know if that’s going to happen. It makes it very difficult.’’
Dustin Johnson, the No. 1 ranked player in the world, said the winner this week “all depends on the wind.’’
“If it blows, it’s going to be tough,’’ he said. “With the ball running, it runs right into the bunkers. So you’re still going to have to hit good shots, and you’re still going to have to play well. The golf course is tough.’’
Patrick Reed, who fell in love with links golf when he was playing in amateur tournaments, said he embraces the elements and their effects on play. Reed said it best when asked to assess what lies ahead this week.
“It all depends on what Mother Nature brings,’’ he said.