Updates from the course during Open Championship at Royal St George's

Welcome to Sandwich

I hope that I didn’t come across a little churlish yesterday, when highlighting the difficulties of hosting golf’s greatest championship on golf courses in remote locations. It’s an absurdity, but one I relish. Give me glorious, complicated, characterful chaos over bland modern staging any day. Besides, the linksland is worth all the mad hassle.

The incongruous nature of the modern world coming to a genteel, olde worlde location was re-emphasised on Saturday morning when all in-coming trains were greeted by the Mayor of Sandwich and his town cryer, who rang his bell and oh-yayed us in. It felt a little as if we had not been transported to the 2021 Open, but to the 1894 edition. Or that we’d got off at Chigley instead of Sandwich.

All such innocent daydreaming was cut short when we climbed the ramp and bumped into a policeman brandishing a machine gun, the first I’ve ever seen at an Open.

Long socks

Paul Casey’s caddie Johnny ‘Long Socks’ McLaren must be feeling right at home this week because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen so many men walking round an Open course in shorts and long socks pulled up to the knee and often kept there by extravagant toggles, sashes and strings.

They make for an extraordinary and, I’d argue, a not especially elegant sight. They look like public school rugby socks and tightly wrapping most of your leg would also appear to more or less entirely defeat the object of wearing shorts.

Turns out the attire is demanded of members at Royal St George’s who want to enter the clubhouse this week. The man who explained this to me said he quite liked them and his wife added: "That said, standards are dropping. They’ve started allowing short socks at times." I think she was joking.

Conditioning

A different Royal St George’s member, one wearing long trousers, revealed a few subtleties of the course conditioning this week.

We already knew that head greenkeeper Paul Larsen has shorted the yardage somewhat by increasing the size of the greens and also widened the fairways in order to mitigate the famous random bounces on the undulating short grass. The theory was that more balls would catch the outer limits of the fairways and the first cut, rather than ricochet into long grass.

But this member explained that the heavy rough was also as much as 10 yards wider than in 2011. There are two reasons for this. The first is to catch out wild-hitters – they often miss the thick rough and find the grass beyond it, which is trampled down by the galleries. The second is that with fewer crowds it was felt those who do attend could afford to be slightly further from the action. So the space that would have been taken by more fans was effectively being handed over to the rough and this also increased the distance between the fans and the players, helping Covid protocols. I’m not entirely sure I buy the reality of the latter idea, but the rest makes a lot of sense.

Earwigging

I headed down the range just after lunch and let my ears flap a bit.

Among the thoughts and words overheard were a pair discussing that Francesco Molinari had played a lot better this week than his missed cut would suggest. Later, I looked at his numbers to see if they backed up the notion. He shot 68-74, was one shot shy of the weekend and his tally of 10 birdies was seventh best in the field through 36 holes.

The second bit of info takes a bit more believing, but a coach did say that Hao Tong Li had turned a corner and Li was in a very good mood, laughing and joking with his fellow countryman Yuxin Lin. He was also hitting a lot of balls and could not in any way be described as tortured, which you might expect of a man who hasn’t made a cut in 11 starts or a top 50 since August last year.

Moreover, he ranked 145th for Driving Accuracy this week (11 of 28) and 140th for Greens in Regulation (19 of 36). He did need just the 55 putts (ranking third), but that’s partly, of course, down to missing so many putting surfaces with his approaches. I’ll keep my eye on him, but might not be in a rush to back him just yet.

The final good words came for Richard Mansell who was said to have loved his major championship debut and it was intimated that he’ll really kick on for the experience. Apparently he couldn’t buy a putt through 36 holes, but flushed it tee to green.

Young Americans

I had another natter with Bones Mackay and he was very interesting on the subject of young golfers thriving in the modern game. "The game has changed somewhat," he said. "The young players now, they learn so much from practice rounds. Take Justin Thomas. He doesn’t have to play the Old Course with Tiger Woods to learn about playing it. They chat about that when they’re playing in Jupiter, Florida. The young guys, they learn quickly and they plug it in. They become adept very quickly."

We didn’t have the time to ponder why this is the case – I had to make do with a fellow who has been very close to the game acknowledging that the dynamic has changed. I do sometimes wonder if computer games are responsible. It’s not just that famous courses can be played on consoles, but also playing computer games generates an aggressive attitude that they take out onto the course.

Local flavour

There’s quite a local flavour to this week’s championship. Literally so. We can drink Shepherd’s Neame or Whitstable Bay beer, and eat Kent Crisps and local fish.

It’s quite a contrast to the Paris Ryder Cup which was more or less anglicized. Most of the food and drink had been imported from Britain, most of the staff too, and the concession outlets had a very international flavour.

Poor Thomas Levet was really quite distraught about it all. His anguished sighs that there were no red wine and cheese stalls, instead of burger bars, remains one of my favourite memories of that Sunday. The Gallic shrug was at its wonderfully disdainful best.