Open Championship diary: Matt Cooper's Tuesday update from Royal Birkdale

The British Lawnmower Museum

Not the intro you might have been expecting. But the shuttle bus away from the course last night was abuzz with excited chatter about one of Southport’s great tourist attractions.

Yes, the boating lake may interest some. The beach others. The night time attractions of Lord Street, will draw a certain crowd. But those in the know head to the town’s hidden gem – the British Lawnmower Museum.

It boasts an eclectic and somewhat chaotic collection of memorabilia, with the odd nod towards the Open championship course on its doorstep.

The highlight, however, is the labelling of the machines. My second favourite is propped on a 1960 mower and is placed beneath a photo of an elderly man peering through a noose. “This machine belonged to Britain’s famous hangman Albert Pierrepoint 1905-1992,” it reads. “He hung 400 people. His fee was £15 per execution which coincidentally was the price of this mower.”

And my favourite? “Charles Darwin was the proud owner of a Samuelson’s donkey drawn lawnmower in 1857, & also famous for this theory of evolution & writing ‘The Origin of Species’ in 1859.”

If the linksland is good for the golfing soul, those captions are good for any soul.

Unlikely poetry

I was at the Callaway party last night where the star guest was Jon Rahm who revealed a fondness for Harry Kane. He was especially impressed that Kane had played such fine football for so many years without winning a trophy, yet always maintained his high standards.

One of the drinks on offer was a new kummel called Birdie. Famously popular at Royal Dornoch, I only know kummel from my favourite John Betjeman poem which goes:

I walked into the night-club in the morning;

There was kummel on the handle of the door.

The ashtrays were unemptied.

The cleaning unattempted,

And a squashed tomato sandwich on the floor.

That led to a discussion of how Betjeman also wrote a famous poem about links golf:

How straight it flew, how long it flew,

It clear’d the rutty track

And soaring, disappeared from view

Beyond the bunker’s back -

A glorious, sailing, bounding drive

That made me glad I was alive.

There will be plenty of bounding drives this week as the course continues to dry out. The dunes resemble dust hills never mind sand hills. It feels like Opens of old.

But how will it play? Jon Rahm was excellent on the coming challenge, focussing on the fact that the tournament committee will be able to control the greens more so than the fairways.

“St Andrews (in 2022) was firm and their fairways were running very fast, but the greens, they managed to keep them decently soft. This week the greens are way smaller than at St Andrews. Distance control is going to be key. Knowing how the ball is going to react and where you need to land it to give yourself a putt is going to be very, very important.

“This golf course is known as not being the easiest already. Weather conditions usually are pretty harsh, windy. It's always windy, right? So a lot of those holes are going to present a very strong challenge.”

I was on Open radio with Matt Adams late in the day and he revealed that the R&A have watered the course (“in sips”) more often that they planned to. They also hope that workers of the ball will thrive, golfers who can shape shots into prime positions from which to attack.

The professional amateur debate

Depending on you point of view the appearance of Stuart Grehan in this week’s field is either a wonderful example of a fellow finding his life sweet spot or a craven example of using the system.

I make no apologies for sitting firmly in the former camp. I watched Grehan win last month’s Amateur Championship at Royal Liverpool and thoroughly enjoyed the day, especially when I talked to him and his family afterwards, but almost as much at the start of the day.

Because it was while ordering a coffee in the small tented village by the dog leg of the first fairway that I became aware of a growing number of spectators wearing red shirts, jumpers and windcheaters emerging from the car park behind the clubhouse.

They joined me at the cafe, desperately in need of caffeine having had a 3am alarm call. It turns out they were all from County Louth GC, Grehan’s home course, and as soon as he won his semi-final the call had gone up: book flights and the ladies captain would sort out buses to and from Dublin and Liverpool airports.

The excitement and pride of those golfers was evident all day and late in the second round they began to relax as Grehan moved clear. Then he – and they – became stressed as he neared the finishing line.

Having stumbled over it they all went wonderfully mad and afterwards we discussed his decision to quit the pro game two years ago after an eight-year slog on the minor tours. The turning point was a HotelPlanner Tour event in Czechia. After the third round he realised the paid ranks weren’t for him. He filled in the forms to renounce his professional status that night and then played the final round of his pro career.

“Did I think I was good enough?” he said. “Absolutely. But on a deeper level I was not in love with the lifestyle.”

He’s now a financial advisor who squeezes practice and competing as an amateur around visits to the office and lots of time on the phone with the laptop in front of him. A very modern life, in fact, and he’s found serenity.

It’s not enough for some folk, however. They bridled on social media that he should not be permitted to return to competitive amateur action, that “amateurism used to mean something” and that “it’s dodgy”. They argue his time in Redditch and Telford, playing on the fourth tier, wondering about the meaning of life, gives him an unfair advantage over “true” amateurs.

We’re all entitled to our opinions, of course, but I’m really not sure that Grehan is gaming the system.

Top Amateur

Talking of amateurs, it has become tradition for the diary to delve into the Top Amateur market off the back of my attendance at most of the leading amateur events in the summer. So here’s a look at the runners and riders.

The 27-year-old Irishman David Howard qualified at Dundonald Links and is defying cystic fibrosis which is sensational, but he’s done little on the links in championships and the same can be said of Jack Buchanan, this year’s Africa Amateur champion (but he did attend Birkdale as a fan in 2017 so might be inspired).

Fifa Laopakdee (Asia Pacific Amateur champion) and Mateo Pulcini (Latin America Amateur champion) are in new golfing territory. This year’s European Amateur champion, Tim Wiedemeyer, has done little on the links and Dutchman Nevill Ruiter qualified at Dundonald Links but is also raw by the seaside and plays a parkland course at home. Spain’s Alejandro de Castro Piera qualified at Burnham & Berrow but has twice failed to make the match play at the Amateur Championship.

Lev Grinberg – hailing from Ukraine and now representing France – has form. He qualified through the Open Amateur Series thanks to victory in the St Andrews Links Trophy and a top 10 in the European Amateur Championship. The American Mason Howell has class – the 19-year-old won last year’s US Amateur Championship. And Grehan has the finest links pedigree.

I’d have that trio as the top three in the betting so Wiedemayer’s favouritism is something of a surprise. Grinberg is a threat but Grehan has been talking to Padraig Harrington ahead of this week who told him to remember that he knows links golf better than most in the field.

With conditions unlike anything his fellow amateurs will have encountered I’m happy to side with him at 5/1.

More Open content

• Open Championship preview
• Ben Coley's Open special
• Who creates chances in majors?
• Player-by-player guide to the field
• Royal Birkdale talking points

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