Darren Clarke Is Swinging Like the Year 2000 and Ready to Defend at Senior British Open

Watching Clarke at the driving range is actually quite a show, writes Alex Miceli.

PORTHCAWL, Wales - Watching Darren Clarke on the driving range, you would never believe he was 54 and tad over his fighting weight.

The ball just flies precisely how he envisions it before leaving the clubhead.

Some might call it Tigeresque, but to me it was more like Lee Trevino, maybe the best ball striker alive, who loved to call his shots before he hit them.

Almost like a NASA engineer, if Clarke wanted a shot to go low and bore through the wind, he adjusted his swing, stated what he was doing to inform both his coach Rob Watts and caddie Jeff Johnson and then executed.

It was almost like he was an autonomous golfer, everything working together. No errors.

It got to the point where Watts told him enough was enough, and Johnson started kicking the ball on the ground away from him. Clarke didn’t want to stop, he was so happy flushing shot after shot.

“Let me just hit one more low one,” Clarke said holding his driver in his hand like a little kid. “Let me hit a high draw.”

Each time he executed the shot he was ready for another challenge.

It was like a replay of his pro-am round on Tuesday, a 10-birdie performance, that seemed to surprise Clarke himself.

His low-key comment afterward: “I played nicely.”

But watching on the range Wednesday, it was a flashback to the Clarke of 2000 when he beat Tiger Woods 4 & 3 in the WGC-Match Play Championship. He just flat outperformed Woods that Sunday, all with a smile on his face. Clarke is here this week at the defending champion at the Senior British Open. Last week he missed the cut at the British Open at Royal Liverpool, but remains encouraged.

“I played really nicely on Thursday and shot 2-over and missed everything and then I made a couple of poor swings early on Friday and then was going chasing all the time, and sort of got out of sync and didn’t hit it great,” Clarke said of his Royal Liverpool experience last week. “But came here and started just doing it all week on the range.”

Clarke is hopeful that the swing he flashed on the range last week is the same swing that made the trip down from England to Wales.

With four wins, including last year’s Senior Open title at the Kings course at Gleneagles, the Ulsterman has earned more than $4 million on the Champions Tour since August 2018. He continues to play at a high level with five top 10s in 2023.

Unlike the DP World Tour or PGA Tour, the Champions Tour is a sprint at 54 holes per event. But the season is long enough to be officially called a grind, especially as it winds down and November's Charles Schwab Cup comes into focus.

“The mentality is all different, you gotta get after it quicker,” Clarke said of the sprinter mentality of the Champions Tour. “A lot of people think the Champions Tour is like we play from 6,700 yards, flags in the middle of the green and greens running on 10. Couldn't be further from the truth.”

In reality, Clarke said the course setup is more in the 7,100 range, with green speeds between 12 and 13 on the stimpmeter and flags six paces off the edge.

The biggest difference between his younger days on the PGA Tour and now is there is less rough, which accommodates the slower clubhead speed of an over-50 golfer.

At Royal Porthcawl this week, the course is set up at 7,003 yards. That's 102 yards longer than when Bernhard Langer won the Senior Open in 2017 and 318 yards longer than the setup of the 1995 Walker Cup, which played at 6,685 yards.

“The standard is ridiculously good,” Clarke said. “If you’re not shooting 18 under par you’re not going to win."