A Caddie's Read on Royal Birkdale — The 154th Open Championship
Eight architects have had a hand in this place. The eighth one changed it more than the club let on.
If you looped at Birkdale in 2017 and walked out to it again this week, you'd stop somewhere around the 5th tee and realize your yardage book is a museum piece.
The bones are the same. That's the thing about Royal Birkdale — the bones are why it's the fairest links on the rota. George Lowe routed it in 1897, and in 1932 F.G. Hawtree and five-time Open champion J.H. Taylor rebuilt it as one of the first purpose-built championship links in the world. Their idea was radical then and still defines the place today: run the fairways along the flat valley floors between the dunes, not over them. Dunes 20 to 40 feet high on either side of you, and flat lies underneath you. Almost no blindness. No random bounces. What you see is what you get.
That's the deal Birkdale makes with you. It won't cheat you. It also won't forgive you.
And this week, at par 70 and 7,223 yards, with Championship play starting Thursday 16 July, it's asking a different set of questions than it asked Jordan Spieth.
What actually changed
Mackenzie & Ebert's pre-Open work is not a nip and tuck. Walk it in order:
The 5th is a completely rebuilt drivable par 4 — new tee, new fairway, green moved left, and for the first time you can actually see the target. There's a pond right, which on a links course is an oddity bordering on a practical joke.
The 7th is shorter now, rotated 45 degrees onto a green raised a full metre. Smallest, most undulating surface on the property, ringed by the deepest bunkers on the property. The famous front-left "donut" bunker — the pot with an island of grass in the middle — has been restored to its original size.
The 13th landing area was reshaped. The fairway got pushed back out to the left-hand ditch to bring the hazard into play, and the right-hand bunkers were shifted specifically to punish the 300-yard drive. And the patch of practice ground where Spieth took twenty minutes and a committee to sort out his unplayable lie in 2017? It's a Fan's Village now. And it's out of bounds.
The old par-3 14th is gone. In its place, the 15th from 2017 has been moved a fairway's width right, stretched 40 yards, and renamed: a 602-yard par 5, playing into the prevailing wind. That hole was the easiest on the golf course in 2017. It is now the longest wait for a par 5 anywhere on the Open rota, and there is a real chance the longest hitters on earth cannot reach it in two.
The 15th is brand new — the only entirely new hole out there. 241 yards, downwind, the longest par 3 at Birkdale. It's the one hole built to be run along the ground: Redan-ish, angled right-to-left, raised, and sloping gently away from you. One player took a look from the back tee and said, roughly, "what the hell?"
The 16th — Arnie's hole, where the plaque marks the 1961 recovery out of the scrub — is 45 yards shorter with three fewer bunkers, and the rear mounding has been removed. The backstop that used to save you is gone.
The 18th tee moved hard left. The old left-to-right dogleg is now a dead-straight 508-yard par 4 aimed at the white Art Deco clubhouse, with six fairway bunkers repositioned into the 330–350 range.
Total: 108 bunkers, down from 123. Fewer bunkers. Better bunkers.
The read that matters
Here's what a caddie tells you on the 1st tee, and it isn't about any of the above.
The greens are fescue and browntop bentgrass, averaging around 5,200 square feet, running near 11.5–12 on the stimp. But speed is not the defence here — firmness is. And the detail that should reorganize your entire strategy: there is not a single bunker behind any green at Royal Birkdale. Not one. The greens are bunkered at four and eight o'clock rather than across the front, which means the ground game is wide open to you.
What waits behind the greens instead is tight-mown run-off. Which is worse. A bunker at least stops the ball.
The wind comes off the Irish Sea left-to-right, 10–20 mph, and the closer you get to the sea the more honest it gets. Holes 1, 2 and 6 play into it. 8, 15 and 17 ride it. Low ball flight, and a putter you trust from off the green.
That's the whole caddie's brief. Firm ground, no backstops, sideways wind, and a golf course that will never lie to you about what it's asking. Par is a real score around here. On the 6th — 514 yards, par 4, into the breeze, the lowest point on the property at 21 feet above sea level, the most challenging hole of the 2017 Open — par is one of the best scores you'll make all day.
Two things we built for you
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Thursday morning, somebody's going to stand on that 1st tee — out of bounds down the entire right side, the prevailing wind blowing straight at it, a hole that's averaged near 4.4 in recent Opens — and reach for driver anyway.
Don't be that guy.