First Look At Royal Troon
The Open Championship arrives for the tenth time. Notes on the links, key holes, ideal spectator spots, final qualifiers and much more. Plus, potential Thursday weather, pressers, This and That.
Greetings from the west coast of Scotland!
Comfortable temperatures and manageable breezes welcomed 40 or so players testing Royal Troon on Sunday ahead of The 152nd.
The course is in perfect condition with a decent bounce in the fairways. The greens, however, are softer and slower than expected thanks to a wet spring and lack of summertime temperatures. The R&A may also be holding the greens back to account for potential high winds on Thursday.
Royal Troon’s nine newly installed tees added almost 200 yards and all of them feel discreetly placed onto the landscape by Ebert & Mackenzie. Troon’s pot bunkers all received a fresh haircut in advance of the championship. Fairways feed balls toward them without interferences, creating some fun strategic decisions (particularly on the early holes heading out). The severity of the bunkers and clever placing is offset by reasonable fairway widths throughout the course. Even better, thave natural looking concave floors, preventing any redux of last year’s post-first round re-rakings as we saw last year at Hoylake.
Barring significant wind on Thursday, expect excellent scoring thanks to the healthy, receptive turf, and beautifully managed roughs. There are bad lies to be found, but after tossing balls into the tall stuff off of fairways all day I found the fescues looked more robust than they play. (There remain some low areas that are quite lush and gorse to be avoided.)
Combine all of the golf course pluses with a beautiful build-out by the R&A and a tremendous championship is in the works .
Several of the above topics are covered in the vignettes below.