HOYLAKE, England — Golf is a sport in which a chap might be celebrated as non-conformist simply for wearing outré shades of khaki pants, and where tournaments on the weekly hamster wheel can blur together like the revolving door “family” partnerships of grifting influencers. There isn’t much left that retains a distinct identity, one unbartered to presenting sponsors nor hostage to discommodious interviews in which CEOs position products from financial instruments to shave foam as bettering humankind. Amid all of this commercialization and homogenization (not to mention politicization), major championships are golf’s safe haven.
Each of the big four owns a particular character, formed over decades and impervious to whatever branding concepts are dreamed up by a marketer with more ambition than awareness.
The Masters is about perfection: in the presentation of the course, in the choreography of the tournament, in the control of the broadcast, in the nomenclature that gives the week its own language. The U.S. Open is the veneration of challenge, or more accurately, difficulty — the desire to exert a vice grip on the world’s best golfers until all but one cry out in surrender. The PGA Championship represents the most compelling case against the Players Championship being a major because the players already have one. This is it, a tournament that prides itself on a set-up that doesn’t upset competitors, even at the cost of sometimes struggling to distinguish itself from other stops on the schedule.
And the Open? It’s defined by a multitude of elements that combine to make it the greatest championship in the game. Why?
Because of the history, for starters. The first shot was struck in the Open three weeks before Abraham Lincoln was elected president and every single great in the annals of the sport has contributed their share since.
Because its the original DNA of a game that morphed into a global sport, essentially unchanged as the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible over wild contouring land set hard by the sea.
Because the Open doesn’t try to protect players from the capriciousness at the heart of links golf, at least it didn’t until the R&A softened bunkers at Royal Liverpool. Good shots aren’t guaranteed good results and poor shots are often saved by a fortuitous carom off a contour. Vagaries are a virtue, not something to be mitigated.
Because it not only tests execution — which every man in the field has mastered — but…
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