Liverpool, England: Ever heard of it? In addition to being a fine setting for the final major of golf’s 2023 campaign, the northern English city on the River Mersey has yielded some truly notable talents in the field of music. Gerry & the Pacemakers, anybody? (And yes, we know that Royal Liverpool is technically located a stone’s throw away in Hoylake—we’re doing something here.) Will Scottie Scheffler soar through the tough links setting? Can Jon Rahm power his way to a Claret Jug? Does Rory McIlroy have the magic to repeat his 2014 triumph at the same location? Is Brooks Koepka the walrus? With rain in the forecast and a song in our hearts, Matt Dollinger and I are psyched to bring you everything you need to know before we tee it up from the cloudy land of “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields.” (Our usual playing partner and all-around swing guru, Meg Schuster, is under the weather. We’ll do our best to keep it in the fairway in her absence.) —Elizabeth Nelson
What can we expect from Rory McIlroy?
Nelson: There is no fair or easy way to say this, but it’s never felt more like nut-cutting time for McIlroy than this week at Royal Liverpool. He is 34 years old. He is a four-time major winner and a surefire Hall of Famer who has provided many of the game’s most astonishing thrills over the past few years while serving as the conscience of a sport moving ever further into the realm of the unconscionable. He owes us nothing, yet it is impossible not to feel the aching sensation that his résumé is incomplete.
I’m as big a fan of McIlroy as there is, but facts are stubborn things. It’s been an astonishing nine years since Rory last bagged a major. And if ever there was going to be a week, this is the week.
Here are a few reasons Rory McIlroy will obviously win the 2023 Open Championship:
Rory McIlroy has finished in the top 10 in six of his last seven majors, including a runner-up finish at last month’s U.S. Open.
Rory McIlroy won the Open Championship the last time it was played at Royal Liverpool, in 2014.
Rory McIlroy showed tremendous form in winning last week’s Open Championship warm-up, the Scottish Open, with big-balls birdies Sunday on the 17th and 18th holes.
The arc of history is long but bends toward justice, and no outcome aside from an Open Championship win for Rory McIlroy is cosmically defensible.
That’s just science, people: seemingly all the evidence you’ll ever need for this impending triumph. And yet, paradoxically, everything above is part of the problem.
We’ve been here before with Rory—times when the state of his game, the style of course, and the historical moment all seemed to be leading inextricably to a major breakthrough, yet it hasn’t happened. The longer that circumstance continues, the larger the questions grow, both in his mind and in those of his legions of fans. Golf is weird in ways that other sports are not. You can be the best player on the course for four days and get unlucky when the wind kicks up at the wrong time and the course becomes unscorable. You can hit a perfect drive that lands in a divot and costs you a crucial shot. There are so many ways to lose a golf tournament, and there is such a narrow path to victory. Even the strongest-minded competitors start to see ghosts lurking around every dogleg after a certain amount of shady luck. I’ll say it again: It’s completely unfair. But when the stars align the way they have this week, a McIlroy loss would say just as much as a McIlroy win. He’s a treasure to watch and a credit to the sport, but that won’t stop the whispers from growing louder if he comes up short. A win will release nine years of borderline-unbearable pressure. Anything less will do the opposite.
Will Royal Liverpool prove a challenge?
Matt Dollinger: Even these divisive times can’t mess up the one thing all golf fans can agree on: When you watch a major, you root for the course. Particularly if you’re up watching at 5 a.m. on a streaming app that you swore you already installed. When it’s Open season, you’ll call family members and read them 10-day forecasts like Woj himself sent you intel on the weather. You root for wind and rain and umbrellas and windbreakers and Gore-Tex. The more Gore-Tex, the better.
The forecast and the early buzz on the ground suggest Royal Liverpool will play tougher than it did the last two times it hosted a major, when some guys named Tiger Woods (18-under par in 2006) and Rory McIlroy (17-under par in 2014) went astonishingly low to take home the Claret Jug. Those performances ranked tied for fourth and sixth, respectively, for the lowest scores in relation to par in the Open Championship’s 150-year history.
Granted, both of those wins came under fairly tame and firm conditions. A wetter course will stretch things out and also force more players to hit driver on the 7,383-yard layout. Take a sip of coffee (remember, these are Open hours) every time an announcer reminds you that Tiger hit driver only once over four rounds in ’06.
A wetter and windier forecast should add some teeth to Royal Liverpool. While it’s a famously flat track, with only about 20 feet of elevation across the course, it’s the undulation that makes it maddening. Pot bunkers, fescues, and unlimited free refills on sand dominate the layout. Each putt leaves you with the mind-numbing dilemma of playing the break, the wind, or both. Now add some rain and 20-mile-per-hour gusts and you get the picture.
There’s also the debut of the new 136-yard 17th hole, known as “Little Eye.” The course boasts scorecard-sized greens in general, but this one is so small—it’s about half the size of the average Royal Liverpool green—that Patrick Reed figured he could move it and no one would even see it. The treacherous, tiny hole should provide a unique challenge as players look to close their rounds, the perfect warm-up act before a closing par 5 on 18.
Can Cam Smith repeat as champion?
Nelson: I mean, the hirsute Australian is the best putter in the world, so the short answer is yes. Anytime you are all but guaranteed to pick up multiple strokes on the field with the flat stick, you are a threat at the majors.
The more complicated answer is that Smith has never competed at Hoylake, and short of a couple practice rounds this week, he won’t bring the familiarity with the course that will aid many of his competitors. He isn’t particularly great off the tee, which didn’t hurt him too badly on the forgiving fairway expanses at St. Andrews last year, but it is likely to create more problems at Royal Liverpool. Expected cold and rainy weather won’t help with the driver either. His form has been solid of late; he had a fourth-place finish at the U.S. Open last month and a victory at the recent LIV event in London. But defending major championships is just a difficult ask. Best guess is that he’ll be hanging around the leaderboard on Sunday but not in the winner’s circle. Last year’s Open truly set up perfectly for Cam. This one sets up just OK.
Is this Scottie Scheffler’s to lose?
Dollinger: Rory is rightfully dominating the discourse this week, but your knees start to buckle when you stop and read what Scheffler has done in 2023. He’s on a streak right now that sounds like a chapter out of Prime Tiger. Scheffler has finished tied for 12th or better in a staggering 19 straight events. That’s Week 9 of the 2022 NFL season. Just to give you an idea of how incredible that sustained period of dominance is, this cutting-edge visualization shows you what 19 golf tournaments look like:
- World Wide Technology Championship
- Cadence Bank Houston Open
- Hero World Challenge
- Sentry Tournament of Champions
- The American Express
- Waste Management Phoenix Open
- Genesis Invitational
- Arnold Palmer Invitational
- The Players Championship
- World Golf Championships-Dell Technologies Match Play
- The Masters
- RBC Heritage
- AT&T Byron Nelson
- PGA Championship
- Charles Schwab Challenge
- The Memorial Tournament
- U.S. Open
- Travelers Championship
- Genesis Scottish Open
Somehow, Scheffler finished tied for 12th or better in all of them. He’s yet to blink in 2023. Granted, he’s also yet to go on much of a winning streak. Despite the prolonged prowess, he’s come away with just two wins and zero majors. Scheffler’s been particularly close of late, finishing tied for fifth or better in his last seven (what?) tournaments, but he’s collected no victories. That’s what happens when you combine world-class power and world-class precision with Korn Ferry Tour putting. It’s not that Scheffler is a bad putter. It’s just that the margin between being a winner and being second place each week allows for no implosions. Right now, Scheffler is lapping the field, but he keeps stalling out on the final stretch.
Despite Scottie’s failures to close, he’s the Vegas favorite to win this week. If he can get a few putts to drop on Thursday, he might be able to gain the type of downhill momentum that helped the 2022 Player of the Year win four times—including the Masters—last year.
Who else should be a favorite?
Dollinger: As Elizabeth mentioned, it’s hard to pick against Cam Smith, the reigning champ. His game is pretty much tailor-made for Open Championships, although accuracy off the tee will be critical to his chances. He’s finished in the top 10 in each of the last two majors, and he’s coming off a victory at LIV’s most recent event in London. If you don’t think he can win, you’re just anti-mullet, and that’s a loss on your end.
Also, it’s somehow been only three months, not three years, since Jon Rahm won his first green jacket. He won three times before that, and he could be primed to add a Claret Jug to his collection after finishing T3 two years ago. He’s coming off a respectable top-10 showing at the U.S. Open and seems to have the right blend of power and finesse to handle anything Royal Liverpool throws at him.
Finally, the comic’s comic pick this week is Viktor Hovland, who just seems destined to put it all together and win his first major sometime soon. The 25-year-old has finished T7 (Masters), T2 (PGA), and 19th (U.S. Open) in the three majors this year and finished T4 at St. Andrews last year. He’s learned enough brutal, haunting Sunday lessons to know the type of course management and focus required to win.
Which dark horses could pull off a Wyndham Clark?
Dollinger: Imagine you pull into the Royal Liverpool and the entire field is squeezed into the clubhouse. You and Tiger Woods are captains, and you have to live-draft the teams in front of everyone. Will you tell me, when there’s a links course outside and it’s in the mid-50s and raining, that you’ll pick 14 golfers before you take Shane Lowry?
That’s what the sportsbooks are saying, which makes Lowry (+4000) a dark horse to me. The champion of the 2019 Open is coming off a strong showing at the Genesis Scottish Open and is in his element on a links course like Hoylake. He’s also quite familiar with Royal Liverpool as a major setting, having finished T9 when the 2014 Open was held there. If the conditions pick up, Lowry’s score will probably go down.
In terms of potential first-time major winners in the spirit of Clark, Cameron Young finished an oh-so-close second at last year’s Open and could be a threat if he can find his putter (figuratively, not literally—the latter would be easier at this point). He did finish T7 at the Masters and T6 at the John Deere Classic earlier this month, offering a reason for optimism that he can regain his 2022 form (plus, Elizabeth and I have been trying to will this into existence for months).
Finally, Tom Kim is only 21 years old, but I don’t think he’s scared of anyone in the field. He’s quickly becoming one of the most fun players to watch in golf. The only thing keeping Kim from becoming a true star is time at this point. Can he figure out how to harness it all at a major? He almost did at the Scottish Open last week, and a top-10 finish at last month’s U.S. Open showed he’s closer to putting it all together for four rounds. Now all he has to do is Wynd. (Dear God, we need Meg back.)
Where do things stand across the rest of the golf world?
Nelson: Still weird! Any notion that the fallout from the proposed PGA-LIV-DP merger would be smoothed over by summer’s end was rendered laughable by the recent headline-making Senate hearings, wherein PGA power brokers Jimmy Dunne and Ron Price were hauled before the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and grilled for three hours by everyone from liberal committee chair Richard Blumenthal to hard right-winger Josh Hawley about the financial and human rights implications of the tour’s international dealings. There was also the news that the Department of Justice was scrutinizing the deal on antitrust grounds, forcing LIV and the PGA Tour to rescind a provision in their framework agreement that would prevent tours from poaching one another’s players moving ahead.
In the meantime, players like Scheffler and Rahm who were loyal to the PGA during the great Saudi cash grab of the past couple years remain understandably nonplussed by the news of the strange and amorphous union. “As a player on tour, we still don’t really have a lot of clarity as to what’s going on, and that’s a bit worrisome,” Scheffler lamented to reporters last Wednesday. “They keep saying it’s a player-run organization, and we don’t really have the information that we need.” This is what a salty farmer would call a goatfuck.
To be fair, this is not entirely the PGA Tour’s fault. As an organization, it has traditionally been unreasonably obstinate. Some reasonable concessions to frustrated players surrounding tour earnings and personal licensing agreements may have headed off the LIV charge before the Saudis got an oar in the water. Once they did, however, the PGA Tour essentially had an unplayable lie. According to reports, the fees for the tour’s legal battles with the endlessly deep-pocketed Saudis to date were in the $50 million range. The tour is a wealthy organization to be certain, but $50 million here and $50 million there, and suddenly you’re talking real money. There was no way it could survive a 10-year courtroom siege by LIV and its benefactors. Just as you might be shocked to find out there is gambling in Casablanca, you will no doubt be gobsmacked to learn that the Senate committee’s role in all of this is a bit opportunistic. Sensing the seriousness of the LIV threat, PGA Tour officials had spent more than a year imploring Congress to take measures to slow LIV’s hostile takeover of the sport through hearings, query letters, public statements of concern, or really anything. It was crickets until the deal was actually announced, by which time most of the damage to the sport was done.
Where it all goes from here feels as unreadable as the turtle-shaped greens at Pinehurst No. 2. Congress and the DOJ could back off, the new consortium could find a way to appease disaffected players (money), and the new face of golf could presently be upon us. It’s also possible that the whole deal will fall through under pressure and we’ll be right back where we started. Regardless, golf’s all-time, king-high melodrama is far from over. Buckle up.
Who will win?
Nelson: Tommy Fleetwood in a playoff over Rory McIlroy. Look, folks: I’m a simple, simple person. I want the guy from Liverpool to win his hometown tournament, and I want it to happen in a playoff that can be captioned: Fleetwood-Mac. But I also think Fleetwood can do this. Solid recent record and impeccable vibes. Sometimes, there’s a man that just fits right in.
Dollinger: I’m not sure we as a society can handle a McIlroy loss in a playoff to extend his streak of bad luck. Damn it, the drought ends this week. It was cathartic watching Rory channel Rickie Fowler with his celebration at the Scottish last week. At first, he was in disbelief. Then, he arched his back and cackled in glee like he had just regained his superpowers. If so, everyone else is screwed.
