At the conclusion of the 2023 Open Championship, the wait will be back on. There will be … nine long months until the next major, which makes this a week to soak in every last possible storyline at Royal Liverpool. And they are abundant.
Rory McIlroy, fresh off a wild Scottish Open victory, is attempting to win a major for the first time in nine years. He makes that attempt at the venue that kickstarted his consecutive major wins — the most recent of his career — as he won the 2014 Open in Hoylake, England.
Scottie Scheffler is trying to somehow redeem all his strokes gained from tee to green success for a jug made of silver. Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka are each trying to win their second major of the year. Meanwhile, Jordan Spieth is trying to bookend his outrage Claret Jug triumph at Royal Birkdale five years ago.
And that’s just getting started with the narratives. Summers in Great Britain are almost always magic, and if last weekend’s Scottish Open finale is any indication, then we’re in for a special ending to what has been a fabulous major championship year.
Storylines for the 151st Open Championship
1. Five: We already saw one legend notch a fifth major championship this season. Are we about to see another match him? Brooks Koepka put away a fifth at Oak Hill in May, and now, McIlroy has what I believe is one of the handful of best chances he’s had since that 2014 PGA Championship at Valhalla to add another to his collection.
Sure, the golf has been terrific for Rory — six consecutive top 10 finishes, including the victory at the Renaissance Club on Sunday — but it’s more about two prongs of his mental game that make me believe he’s going to win this tournament by five strokes.
The first is the jolt of confidence that can come with winning any tournament. If McIlroy had not made birdie at the last two holes and beaten Bob MacIntyre by a stroke, it’s not as if he would have been playing any worse golf than he is based on the win. However, the gap between first and second is far wider in one’s head than it is on any kind of scorecard.
“It’s a great shot of confidence,” said McIlroy. “Again … having something fresh in my memory if I hopefully find myself in a similar position next week where I’ve got a chance to win with nine holes to go, I can certainly draw on what I did here today.”
The second point is what he said after losing the U.S. Open in Los Angeles. It was not a manner of speaking I had seen from him in his nearly decade-long hunt for that fifth major.
“When I do finally win this next major, it’s going to be really, really sweet,” he said.
When, not if. It’s a change in pace from what his previous rhetoric has been around winning a fifth. Perhaps it’s nothing, but when you combine that with the way that he’s playing right now and his history at Liverpool, it’s starting to smell like a four-shot win for the four-time major winner.
2. Fifteen years: That’s how long it’s been since someone went back to back at an Open. It’s a tough place to win consecutive majors because luck is more prevalent than at some other championships. The reigning Claret Jug holder, Cameron Smith, will have his hands full with both the field (obviously loaded) and the golf course (more challenging off the tee than the Old Course at St. Andrews). Still, he’s playing terrific golf and is probably a bit undervalued going into this week.
- Eight consecutive top 12s worldwide
- Made the cut at all three majors (two top 10s)
- Eighth in total strokes gained over the last three months
Smith probably won’t win, but to write him off just because he no longer plays golf on the PGA Tour would be foolish.
3. Will Scheffler cash in? The last time Scheffler finished outside the top 12 in a professional golf tournament, Mississippi State and Alabama were embroiled in a top 25 matchup during Week 8 of the 2022 college football season. And while he’s had an extremely successful 2023 with wins at the Players and the Phoenix Open, I can’t help but think he could look back on this window of extraordinary play with whom he only really has one ball-striking peer over the last 20 years (Tiger Woods) and believe he should have won more tournaments. Perhaps this is where that changes.
4. Jordan Spieth’s reign: Spieth’s kingdom might seem like it exists at Augusta National, but it is not located in Georgia. No, the place where Spieth has thrived the most is the Open Championship, and he leads all players over the last five years in total top 10s at this tournament. Yes, his play has been suspect since the RBC Heritage (four missed cuts in six starts), but you can toss all of that out the window and right into the River Dee when he tees it up on Thursday at Hoylake.
This championship brings out the best in Spieth, and I suspect that despite the poor U.S. Open play and dodgy irons and anything else that might be ailing him from returning to the top of the heap in the golf world, he will once again play well at this Open because that’s simply what he does at all Opens (since starting the 2015 Open at St. Andrews, he has just one finish outside the top 20).
5. Return to Liverpool: Golf writer Bernard Darwin once said of Royal Liverpool. “Blown upon by mighty winds, breeder of mighty champions.” It has produced some great ones, too. The list includes Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen and Peter Thomson.
It will be a different Liverpool than before, though. The old par-3 15th is gone, Nos. 16 and 17 have become Nos. 15 and 16, and a new par-3 17th has replaced the old 15th. The 17th is also known as the newest hole in Open history. In addition to all of that, the par-5 10th will now play as a par 4, which lowers the par of the golf course from 72 to 71.
Though there are a lot of numbers shifting around, the only thing that has actually changed is the addition of the new 17th, which could play as short as 100 yards on the scorecard (a delight on Saturday or Sunday with the tournament on the line).
6. Don’t sleep on Koepka: What if Brooks … gets to six? I asked Justin Ray for the keys to his database, and he informed me that Koepka would be the eighth-youngest to six majors ever. Only Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen, Gene Sarazen, Tom Watson and Arnold Palmer would have done it quicker. So there’s that, but there’s also the argument one could make that nobody has been better overall at the majors this year than Koepka.
7. Nobody’s talking about Rahm: What if I told you the player with the most wins of anyone this year (including a major), who holds the second-best strokes gained number and finished T3 and T11 in two of the last three Opens, was nearly being ignored entering the week? It’s true that Rahm’s play has dipped slightly since winning the Masters, but it’s equally true that it dipped leading into the Masters, and he had no trouble winning that one over Koepka. We are on the precipice of an all-time year with Rahm (if we’re not already there), and a win here would mean he joins the following list of golfers who have won the Masters and Open in the same year.
- Arnold Palmer (1982)
- Jack Nicklaus (1966)
- Gary Player (1974)
- Tom Watson (1977)
- Nick Faldo (1990)
- Mark O’Meara (1998)
- Tiger Woods (2005)
8. Ryder Cup implications: There are still a number of questions to be answered as it relates to both Ryder Cup teams, perhaps more on the United States side. For some players like Dustin Johnson and Talor Gooch, this is the last chance they’ll have to show captain Zach Johnson something in a PGA Tour-sanctioned tournament. For others like Max Homa and Sam Burns, they need to find a bit of momentum after looking like locks to be on the team for so long. For everyone, this is a massively important week as it represents the last four truly consequential rounds of the year and will be on the minds of both Z.J. and Luke Donald when it comes time to make picks here in about a month.
9. Is Collin Morikawa in form: The best major winning percentage of anyone in the field (minimum 10 majors played) belongs to Morikawa, who has won two of 15 majors and nearly won the last tournament he played (T2 at the Rocket Mortgage Classic). His Open record (one missed cut, one win) is emblematic of his year, in which he’s experienced loads of high highs and also some low lows. Interestingly, his overall numbers are the best they’ve ever been, which tells me that if he gets a little juiced up with the putter, he could be in the hunt for major No. 3.
10. Is it 2014 all over again? Rory, sure, but what about the co-runner up from that year, Rickie Fowler? He’s playing some of the best golf of his life — far better than in 2014 when he finished two back of McIlroy at this track with the Claret Jug on the line. I’ve long believed that his style set up best for either an Open or a U.S. Open, and if he finds his rhythm like he did at Los Angeles Country Club, we could see a 2014 redux with him and McIlroy.
11. (Bonus) Time for an Englishman: It’s now been 31 years since an Englishman won The Open. The U.S. has won a Ryder Cup in Europe more recently. Since Nick Faldo did it at Muirfield in Scotland in 1992, a Scotsman, two South Africans, two Irishman, two Northern Irishmen, a Swede, an Italian, a Zimbabwean and an Australian have all done it. But no Englishmen. England does have a nice collection coming into the week playing terrific golf, including Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton, Justin Rose and Matt Fitzpatrick. And while it’s unlikely that the eventually winner emerges from that group of four, it would be terrific for England to put a tally mark in the column in their home country, especially in a Ryder Cup year. (It’s been even longer since an Englishman won The Open in England. Tony Jacklin is the last to do that at Royal Lytham and St. Annes back in 1969.)