SI:AM | Daunting Challenges Await Players at the British Open

Plus, the opening day of the Women’s World Cup.

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. Today’s one of those days where you have golf on in the background during the whole work day.

In today’s SI:AM:

🇬🇧 The beauty of links golf

🏈 Northwestern hazing update

👼 Ohtani trade packages

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Hoylake already giving players headaches

The British Open is already well underway at Royal Liverpool. Heck, if you stayed up late enough, you could have watched the first group (Matthew Jordan, Richie Ramsay and Branden Grace) tee off at 1:35 a.m. ET. But it’s a four-day tournament, so there’s still plenty left to preview.

The Open Championship might be my favorite of the four majors, mostly because it forces American players to play a style of golf they’re not accustomed to playing, which leads to unpredictable results. The links-style courses that host the Open aren’t like the courses Tour players spend the rest of the season playing. Volatile seaside weather can dramatically alter the conditions from day to day or hour to hour. These courses feature treacherously deep bunkers and gnarly rough that punish errant shots. As Bob Harig points out in his story about the vagaries of links golf, the sandy soil drains water very well, which can lead to firm and fast conditions.

“I think it takes quite a bit to figure out,” Jon Rahm explained. “Where I grew up in Spain, it’s usually colder, wet, soft, no roll out, no release, none of that. When you come play links for the first time, it’s a bit of a change.”

This year’s tournament is at Royal Liverpool (also known as Hoylake, after the town where it’s located), which is hosting for the 13th time. Last time here, in 2014, Rory McIlroy won the Open. But in the years since, the course has undergone a major overhaul, being redesigned from a par-72 to a par-71. The crown jewel of the redesign is the par-3 17th. The hole used to be No. 15 and was oriented along the shoreline toward the clubhouse. The new layout has players hitting toward the water into a small green surrounded by imposing bunkers.

Gabrielle Herzig has a breakdown of the new hole. It measures 136 yards, with a green roughly half the size of Royal Liverpool’s average putting surface. And the green plays even smaller than it looks. It’s crested like a turtle’s shell, meaning tee shots are liable to land on the green and roll off into the danger areas. This video of Padraig Harrington examining the hole on the Open’s YouTube channel illustrates how a tee shot hit on the right side of the green can easily roll into a difficult bunker.

Speaking of bunkers, sand shots are shaping up to be perhaps the most compelling part of this tournament. As Harrington explained on Twitter, organizers have flattened the bottoms of the bunkers, so a ball that rolls into the trap will not filter down into the center of it—it’ll stay right there on the edge of it. That’s why Max Homa spent part of his practice time this week working on all sorts of unorthodox sand shots—kneeling outside the bunker, putting one leg inside it and even swinging backward with one hand. Check out the preposterous position amateur Christo Lamprecht found himself in during his opening round this morning. Jordan had to jam his club into the face of the bunker and hope for the best.

This week’s winner will be the player who’s best able to navigate the challenges of rock-hard fairways and greens, cruel bunkers and stiff sea breezes. So who will it be? McIlroy was the pre-tournament favorite at SI Sportsbook, and he seems like a good pick. He won the last time the Open was here and just won the Scottish Open last week on a links course. Rahm and Scottie Scheffler—the No. 3 and No. 1 players in the world rankings, respectively—also opened with strong odds. But remember what I said about the Open being unpredictable? In the interest of full transparency, I wrote that yesterday afternoon—before Lamprecht, a 6'8" senior at Georgia Tech, shot a 5-under 66 to claim an early lead. I didn’t think the first round would be that unpredictable.

The best of Sports Illustrated

Chris Pedota/NorthJersey.com/USA TODAY Network

• Lawyers are preparing to file a third lawsuit related to hazing allegations in the Northwestern football program, Richard Johnson reports.
• It’ll take a lot to pry Shohei Ohtani from the Angels, but Will Laws has five trade packages that would be too good for Arte Moreno to pass up.
• Conor Orr argues that the Jets have every reason to try to limit HBO’s Hard Knocks access as much as possible.
• Claire Kuwana’s contribution to The MMQB’s Bad Takes Week has to be the worst proposal yet.
• Only four months into his tenure, Rick Pitino has turned St. John’s into a recruiting powerhouse, Kevin Sweeney writes.
• Australia star Sam Kerr was injured in training and missed today’s win over Ireland. She’s also expected to miss the team’s next game, against Nigeria.
• Excitement continues to build as MLS fans prepare for Lionel Messi’s U.S. debut, sending the ticket market soaring.

The top five...

… things I saw this morning:

5. Stewart Cink’s joke about one of his sponsors.

4. This slow-mo video of Cameron Smith hitting out of a deep bunker.

3. Lucas Herbert’s triple bogey on the 17th hole at Hoylake. That hole is going to ruin a lot of guys’ weekends.

2. Abraham Ancer’s hole-out from a bunker.

1. Cohost New Zealand’s first goal of the Women’s World Cup. The Football Ferns beat Norway, 1–0, for the country’s first World Cup victory (men’s or women’s).

SIQ

Who won the 2003 Open Championship despite it being his first major tournament and having entered the week at No. 396 in the world rankings?

• Matt Kuchar
• Russ Cochran
• Tom Carter
• Ben Curtis

Yesterday’s SIQ: When NFL owners voted on July 19, 1989, to launch a global spring league, the World League of American Football, the plans included teams in four European cities: London, Barcelona, Frankfurt and which other city ultimately did not get a team?

• Milan
• Paris
• Zurich
• Vienna

Answer: Milan. Before the NFL began holding regular-season games in Europe, the World League of American Football was the league’s most ambitious attempt to introduce the game across the Atlantic. The league, which was approved in a vote during a meeting of NFL owners, was planned to have 12 teams: six in the United States and six abroad.

Under the original proposal, the foreign teams would be in London, Barcelona, Frankfurt, Milan, Montreal and Mexico City, but Milan and Mexico City never got their teams. Instead, the league kicked off with only 11 teams. London, Barcelona and Frankfurt formed the league’s European division. The rest of the league was based in North America, with teams in Montreal, Columbus, Orlando, Raleigh, Birmingham, San Antonio, Sacramento and East Rutherford, N.J.

As Alex Prewitt wrote in 2021, the WLAF was a dud in the U.S., but it was a hit in the three European cities. It shut down after only two seasons but was revived as NFL Europe in 1995, with teams in the U.K., Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.