2019 Open Championship: Links-Style Courses a precursor to Success

The Open Championship (which is now less than two weeks away!) is the final major of the year with the new condensed schedule.

It provides an opportunity for American golf fans to see a different type of golf course; the fairways are wider, fescue and pot bunkers are abound and the links-style courses reward playing along the ground instead of attacking the course aerially. The weather nearly always factors into the Open Championship, with winds and rains challenging the field.

This is a stark contrast from most PGA Tour events; as we saw with Nate Lashley’s dominant win in Detroit most courses on the PGA Tour are straight-forward and favor the ‘bomb and gouge’ style of play. The Open Championship rewards a much different skill-set focused on precision and strategy. The 2018 Open Championship at Carnoustie highlighted this stark difference.

The European Tour provides more opportunities to play links-style golf, with the Irish Open and Scottish Open leading into the Open Championship. This weekend, though, only four players in the Top 25 are playing in the Irish Open (compared to five Top 25 players playing the PGA Tour’s 3M Open in Minnesota).

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Even the Scottish Open next week has only five Top 25 players committed. On the surface, this is incredibly strange; PGA Tour courses challenge players in vastly different ways than the Open Championship.

Additionally, the prize money is actually stronger for the European Tour events. The total purse both the Irish Open and Scottish Open are north of $6.9 million while the PGA Tour events (the 3M Open and John Deere Classic) offer under $6.5 million in prize money.

Therefore, players are actively skipping events that (in theory) better prepare them for the Open Championship and limit their earning potential. Are players making a mistake skipping these links-style events? Does this damage their chances of winning the Claret Jug?

To analyze, I looked at the winner and runner-up of each Open Championship since 2011 (when the Scottish Open moved to a more traditional links-style course) and looked at the events they played leading into the major.

Of the eight Champion Golfers of the Year, five (not including 2018 Claret Jug winner Francesco Molinari) played in at least one links-style event leading into the major. Each golfer made the cut but averaged a finish of 35th, with Phil Mickelson serving as an outlier with a Scottish Open victory foreshadowing his 2013 Open Championship triumph.

Fourteen players have finished at least tied for 2nd in the past eight Open Championships; 50% of them played in competition in Europe leading up to the Open, with an average finish of 17th. Similar to the winners, no one missed the cut.

Clearly it is beneficial for players to participate in either the Irish or Scottish Open leading into golf’s oldest major. However, participating in one of these links ‘tune-up’ events is not necessary for success.

These players are so talented, with such strong practice facilities (both in America and abroad), there are a plethora of ways to prepare for a major. Players can play practice rounds on links courses lieu of tournament competition and still come into the Open Championship in top form. Heck, Jordan Spieth even used a simulator before nearly winning the Claret Jug in 2015. 

There are so many factors that contribute to winning the Open Championship; good weather, clutch putting, course management and plenty of luck. Each player has a different style for preparing, though, and skipping the links-style tournaments before the major does not prevent golfers from winning the Claret Jug.