Moving day at the 152nd Open Championship was a brutal one.
With winds gusting and rain pelting the leaders, Royal Troon showed its teeth. Par 4s played like par 5s. Players hit drivers(!) on the par-3 17th. Pars were cause for celebration, and birdies were nearly impossible to come by. Once the weather got really nasty in the afternoon, it became a war of attrition.
With a traditional out-and-back routing, almost the entire back nine played into the wind. Xander Schauffele hit a 3-wood into the breeze that he estimated would have gone 300 yards in warm conditions; it barely went 220 on Saturday.
“That was pretty humbling,” he said.
Scottie Scheffler called the inward holes the “hardest that [he’s] played,” after posting an even-par 71. Justin Rose said it was a “survival test.” Leader Billy Horschel joked that the back nine featured five par 5s. Of the players in the last 11 pairings on Saturday, just two players (Horschel and Schauffele) broke par.
“It was a tough one out there today,” Horschel said. “Just knew going into the back side that it was going to be a grind no matter what. You have to find a way to grind down and make a score.”
Horschel was among the only players near the top of the leaderboard to conquer the difficult conditions. His two-under 69 was one of the most impressive rounds of the day as he vaulted himself into the solo lead heading into Sunday as he seeks his first major championship title.
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The 36-hole leader wasn’t so fortunate. Shane Lowry, playing in the final pairing alongside Daniel Brown, fired a third-round 77 to fall three shots behind Horschel heading into the championship’s final day. His disastrous moving day included five back-nine bogeys en route to a five-over 40 on Troon’s most difficult stretch.
“It was hard,” an exasperated Lowry said after the round. “Playing a par 3 hitting drivers is not much craic. Roll the ball back, huh?”
Lowry was one of the competitors who had to hit driver on the 238-yard par-3 17th on Saturday. Hours earlier, before the nastiest of the conditions rolled in, Si Woo Kim aced the hole with a 3-iron.
“You’d have to question why there wasn’t a couple of tees put forward today, to be honest,” Lowry said. “Like 15 is 500 yards playing into that wind, it’s — yeah, they keep trying to make holes longer, yet the best hole in this course is about 100 yards.”
That “best hole” — the famed “Postage Stamp” par-3 8th — did not treat the 2019 Open champion kindly as he carded his lone double bogey of the day.
“I don’t really know what to say,” Lowry said. “It was a grind. It wasn’t much fun.”
Lowry wasn’t the only competitor to voice his frustrations with the course setup after the round. Brown, his playing partner during the third round, also called into question the length of some of the holes on moving day.
“Course setup probably wasn’t thought about too much this morning when that weather came in,” Brown said. “But yeah, we got the sort of wrong end of the draw.”
In links golf, handling the elements is the name of the game. And the person that hoists the claret jug tomorrow evening will likely be the person who handles those variables the best.
Buckle up.