Birkdale: “If the ducks are walking,” observed Dave Stockton, the former US Ryder Cup captain, “you know it’s too windy to be playing golf.”
Conditions here on Friday were, to be sure, propitious for the local mallard population: heavy, glowering, saturating. At times, Jordan Spieth must have felt like he had just stepped inside a car wash. Billowing gusts, then a cloudburst — such are the dubious pleasures of a trip to the Southport seaside in July.
Not that this discouraged the punters, who lined the 11th fairway eight-deep in ghoulish anticipation of the mayhem to come. It is on days like these that the Open’s essence is distilled. For all that Tiger Woods’ three triumphs are inscribed in the memory, the image of him thrashing around in the Muirfield cabbage in 2002, face scrunched up in torment, lingers just as stubbornly.
Golf fans typically do not congregate out of tribal loyalty. They unite in the act of being drenched as one, with the added sweetener of seeing the best in the world made mortal. By Birkdale standards, the wind that whipped against the flags was a mere zephyr, but brisk enough to throw the unwary off-kilter.
Bubba Watson, who has had always had a zany quality to his game with his pink driver and neon yellow ball, was routinely hitting banana-shots that moved 50 yards laterally through the air. Matt Kuchar, likewise, wore the astonished look of a man who had never encountered such a tempest. “At the 12th, I must have aimed 30 yards left of the pin, and it ended up in the middle of the green,” he said.
“You have to allow a huge amount of push from the wind.”
This is a course that favours those accustomed to the upper reaches of the Beaufort Scale. In 1971, back when runner-up Lu Liang-Huan’s homeland was still referred to as Formosa, Lee Trevino, a born showman, channelled all his wiles in the wind to prevail. His swing was crafted by year upon year of hitting balls off the hard-baked black clay of Texas, where he would gird his loins for the harshest weather by donning scuba goggles and firing one-irons into the teeth of a gale.
“If you are caught up on a golf course during a storm, hold up a one-iron,” he once said. Here in rain-lashed Merseyside, where bedraggled competitors at the 146th Open looked out for a few missing creatures from the Ark, lightning was about the one element missing from the maelstrom. At 5.30pm, an amber weather warning was issued, which sounded ominous, even if nobody seemed quite sure how to interpret it. Moments later, play was suspended, as greenkeepers with squeegees mopped puddles from the fairway while Spieth huddled dolefully beneath an umbrella, perhaps mindful that back in his native Dallas it was hot enough to fry an egg on his car bonnet.
And yet Spieth, as a proud son of the Lone Star State, knew how to hang tough. “Don’t mess with Texas,” the saying goes. It is a fallacy to suggest that weather of this grisliness serves as some form of leveller. On the contrary, it separates the cussed from the weak of heart.
Rory McIlroy is not normally a byword for obduracy, but given that he shot 61 as a 16-year-old at Royal Portrush, where the Open heads in two years’ time, he understands how to handle the vagaries of the links. His round on Friday was a real-time study in adaptation.
In the rare interludes when the wind dropped, he struck his trademark soaring irons, but otherwise he sought to fly the ball close to the ground with a truncated follow-through. There is a nuanced art to successful golf in the wind, and none of it involves trying to play the hero.
According to Butch Harmon, the perfect technique is to swing at 75 per cent, resist any temptation to impart backspin and instead to hit down on the ball, effectively trapping it against the turf. Spieth, thus far, has offered a masterclass in the genre, quelling any urge to throw himself at the shots full-bore.
How some of his compatriots, less enamoured of this wet rag of a summer’s day, could have learned from his example.
Kevin Na, chastened by a round of 75, described his experience thus: “Awful. It was a good day to sit at home and watch a movie.”
Why do they not make them like Mark O’Meara any longer? The avuncular American, for so long a paternal figure to Woods, belongs to the pantheon of Birkdale champions through his triumph in 1998 and he marked this, his final appearance in the championship, with a palpable sense of relish.
“The reason why this is the greatest tournament is that the conditions are ever-changing,” he said, smiling broadly.
