‘A thing you never see’: Pro intentionally pitches into rough at Open Championship

Perhaps what makes the Open Championship so appealing to us American hackers is seeing the best in the world encounter situations they never see on the PGA Tour.

And that often results in seeing the best in the world hit shots that we American hackers would never dream of.

On Friday at Royal Troon, Matthew Fitzpatrick, the U.S. Open champion from just two years ago, hit just such a shot.

After opening with a 70 on Thursday, the Englishman was off to a tough start in the second round as bogeyed the par-5 4th and doubled the 6th, another three-shotter.

At the 7th, Fitzpatrick put his drive into a left fairway pot bunker.

In case you haven’t heard, the bunkers are Royal Troon this week are no joke.

“They’re hazards,” R&A CEO Martin Slumbers said Wednesday morning of Troon’s bunkers. ”They’re deep. They’ve got big faces, and they’re designed to stay out of. We’ve been looking very carefully at the sand, and I think some of the players have commented how we’ve pushed them up a little bit to give them a slight chance to be able to get out.”

That slight slope around the edge of the bunker wasn’t enough to help Fitzpatrick Friday. If things weren’t going sideways enough already, the 29-year-old literally had to play out sideways.

What’s worse is that since Fitzpatrick is right-handed and was up against the face on a left-fairway bunker, so his only option was to pitch out toward the heavy fescue. He had just a yard or two of light rough between the edge of the bunker and the fescue.

It was a delicate shot and he played it a touch too far. Fitzpatrick watched hopelessly as his ball bounded into the long fescue grass.

“It’s just a thing you never see in a normal tournament,” a broadcaster on the Open’s world feed said.

Luckily, Fitzpatrick’s lie wasn’t too bad as he got his third shot onto the putting surface and two-putted to drop just one shot.

The two-time PGA Tour winner and nine-time DP World Tour winner turned in 40, but after a disastrous 7 at Royal Troon’s 11th, the railway hole, he found himself at six over for the tournament and well outside the projected cutline.