The Open leaderboard https://www.theopen.com/
In the wee hours of this morning this year's Open got underway at Royal Birkdale on England's NW coast at Southport in a driving rain and a testing wind and a result scoring is at a premium so far.
The very early leaders, Ian Poulter and Alex Noren are at -1. Remember Southport is 5 hours ahead of EST, so as I pen this at 5am EST, it is 10am there, and the rain has now blown through, but the wind will be around all day.
Henrik Stenson is the defending champion after his epic final round with Phil Mickelson at Royal Troon which is just up the coast.
There are 2 Canadians to follow Adam Hadwin and Austin Connelly.
This is the 10th time Royal Birkdale has hosted the Open from 1954 through 2017. Winners at the course include Pádraig Harrington, Mark O'Meara, Ian Baker-Finch, Tom Watson, Johnny Miller, Lee Trevino, Arnold Palmer and Peter Thomson (twice).
For you who have followed golf as long as I have you will remember this is the course where in 1969 the Ryder Cup ended in a 16–16 tie when Jack Nicklaus generously conceded a short putt to Tony Jacklin to halve their match, which later became known as "The Concession."
One of the features of the course is that no 2 consecutive holes are played in the same direction, so you have different conditions on each tee, and with it's huge sand dunes it has more elevation changes than most links and there are some blind tee shots like the very difficult par 4 6th.
Jordan Spieth starts the week as the bookies favourite at 14-1.
So the sun is out now but the breeze is fresh, I will be back here around dinner time tonight with my summary, I have provided the link to https://www.theopen.com/ so you can follow all the action and your favourites.
Bryan Angus
No comments:
Post a Comment