Matt Cooper's Open Championship diary: Friday's notes from Portrush

Chasing Christiaan (MC)

Mid-morning I needed to leave the course and on my return heard two Australians becoming quite fretful about the bag checks ahead of us in the queue. “We need to get to the first tee,” they said. “Our friend is about to hit. We’ve come a long way very quickly to get stuck a few yards away.”

I let them pass ahead of me and watched as they raced across the turf, waved to other friends and family of their man Christiaan Bezuidenhout, and just about made it in time to see him squeeze a drive horribly close to the out of bounds down the left.

What an arrival that would have been. All the way from Down Under to see him slip on a banana skin. The good news is that he didn’t go into freefall after an opening bogey and heads into the weekend on two-under.

A numbers game (MC)

Golf has changed a lot since the first Open at Royal Portrush in 1951. That year around 7,000 spectators attended the tournament. This year a record-breaking 237,500 have bought tickets.

Prize money has changed as well.

Old Tom Morris banked £6 when he won the Open in 1864 which the Bank of England inflation calculator equates to £660 today.

The entire prize fund hit £10,000 in 1965 and £100,000 in 1977 (winner Tom Watson banked £10,000). Greg Norman was the first man to win £100,000 for winning and the prize fund hit £5million in 2011.

In 2024 a prize fund of $17million saw Xander Schauffele earn a share of $3.1million.

But here’s the rub: while the players are getting more and more money, who is having to save the pennies? The bleak truth is that it’s the rest of us. There’s no doubt that the facilities and the experience of attending the Open are more spectacular than ever, but it also costs more than ever too. The notion of a family spending all week at an Open is now slightly absurd unless dad is an elite golfer. No-one else can afford such a thing.

Budgets are being pinched elsewhere: dining, wages, travel. It’s all a bit like the rest of the world: the rich getting richer and austerity measures paying for it (and we’re cheerily complicit, by the way). It’s not the players fault but it’s a funny business and is it sustainable?

Supermarket sweep (MC)

Norway’s Kristoffer Reitan is one of the stars of the 2025 season. He won the Soudal Open with a Sunday 62 and seven days later added a 60 in the Austrian Alpine Open for second place.

He’s a good friend of Viktor Hovland and told me: “Viktor has helped me go to the States to practice so he’s been part of the reason I’ve got better.”

Reitan first played on the DP World Tour in 2019, but just the one top 10 meant that he lost his card and in his limited starts since he displayed very few signs of any improvement in form.

He was financially secure during the lows because his family are supermarket tycoons in Scandinavia and the Baltics. Nonetheless, with almost no playing opportunities in 2022 he considered giving up the tour life and starting a YouTube golf channel. “I wasn’t enjoying it and I was making no progress,” he said.

He made a change to his approach late last year, won Challenge Tour Grand Final and said: “I’ve just been trying to not hold myself back and let my talent out a little bit. That’s what me and my psychologist talked about and it has been working.”

Of the win and two second this year he said: “It’s great for confidence but I can’t lean on it and think that I don’t need to work hard any more. I’m afraid of thinking like that. It’s a trap I’m hoping to avoid.”

The 27-year-old carded a 68 on Friday to move up the leaderboard and into the top 30. His attitude is working wonders and he’s keeping it simple this weekend: “Just try and play good golf. That’s it.”

An omen for English (DT)

Today, I met a local bird called Cheyenne.

Nope, this column hasn’t reverted to the 70s, I’m talking about getting up close with a beautiful Harris hawk. The hawks have been hired this week to basically scare off the seagulls. But they do so in peace. There’s no aggressive squawking, just their presence is enough to keep hungry seagulls from descending and nicking overpriced food off hungry punters.

Aurora, Belle, Caine and Cheyenne are the four hawks on the rota this week and I met Cheyenne.

Handler David Trenier was happy to stop for a photo and a chat, and even allowed me to photo Cheyenne’s press pass: “Clear Skies, Northern Ireland.” Apparently, this also goes on at Wimbledon where a Harris hawk called Rufus has been ruling the roost for the last 15 years at SW19.

Anyway, as omens go, perhaps it was inevitable that Harris English is among the front runners heading into the weekend.

The curious case of Joaquin Niemann (DT)

Who has the most wins on the breakaway LIV Tour? Jon Rahm? Bryson DeChambeau? Brooks Koepka?

No, the answer is Joaquin Niemann and the Chilean has racked up six of them since LIV was launched in 2022.

But, bizarrely, Niemann just can’t get it right in the majors.

The 26-year-old from Santiago did finally secure his first top 10 when creeping into eighth place at May’s US PGA Championship. Since then he’s missed the cut in the US Open at Oakmont.

Niemann has never broken 50th in five cracks at the Open but in round one he put himself in nice position with a one-under 70.

Today, I decided to watch to see if he could build on it. I was slightly late to the tee so joined halfway up the fairway where the crowd had scattered and were surrounding a ball after someone had driven out of bounds.

Yes, you guessed it, the ball belonged to Niemann. His caddie came over to retrieve it and despite a couple of cheeky Irish lads pleading that they could do with a spare Titleist, Niemann’s bagman pocketed the ball and returned to the fairway where his man had found the short grass second time.

The resulting double bogey dropped him from -1 to +1 and he eventually completed a 74 to sit on +2 which means he spent the afternoon sweating on making the cut, thinking quite a bit about that first tee shot, and the four-footer he missed on 18. He's going home early again.