Best bets
2.5pts each-way Collin Morikawa @ 16/1
1pt each-way Tyrrell Hatton @ 22/1
1pt each-way Tom Kim @ 40/1
1pt each-way Adam Scott @ 50/1
2pts win Rory McIlroy @ 7/1
0.5pt each-way Arron Rai @ 60/1
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Bookmakers should be rubbing their hands with glee when the Open comes to the great Ayrshire links of Royal Troon as they usually get a right result there. The last four Troon winners, Mark Calcavecchia in 1989, Justin Leonard in 1997, Todd Hamilton in 2004 and Henrik Stenson in 2016 all arrived not having won a major championship and they never won another afterwards.
It was the same with the 1973 winner Tom Weiskopf. All one-Major wonders and great if you were a layer as they weren’t the obvious ones, all Davids slaying Goliaths like Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Ernie Els and Phil Mickelson.
‘Bookmakers should be rubbing their hands with glee.’
When Hamilton won, he was a 500/1 shot and no takers, a wandering American of no great style who played most of his golf in Asia as it took him 17 years to gain a PGA Tour card. He had no links pedigree but, armed with a trusty all-purpose hybrid club he employed to avoid the 98 bunkers (he visited only three all week) and impenetrable rough, he wore down Els in a four-hole playoff to make it a week of misery for punters who hadn’t recovered from the shock of Ben Curtis’s 750/1 win the previous year.
Honest, dour Troon, arguably the toughest bar Carnoustie on the Open rota, commands respect. Plodder Hamilton respected it while bigger names with bigger weapons perished. In 1997, the year Leonard, another plodder, won, young Woods didn’t give it sufficient respect. Result: triple-bogey seven in round one, quadruple-bogey eight in round two and a six at Troon’s signature hole, the 123-yard Postage Stamp eighth, where one distraught competitor in the 1950 Open ran up a 15.
So who is going to be the bookies’ pal this time or will the undeniably great Scottie Scheffler be ambling to his seventh victory from 16 starts in 2024?
It’s worth pointing out that, unless you count the unofficial short-field Hero World Challenge at the end of the year, the world No. 1 has done all his winning in the first half of the year. All four 2023 wins were done and dusted by April and it could be that he has already peaked.
His worst performance this golden year came at the US Open on a course, Pinehurst No. 2, that asked different questions to the norm. It could be the same at Troon where the bounces into the rough, subtle wind shifts and elements of luck that links golf always brings into the equation may unsettle his well-ordered mind. He may be taken out of his comfort zone as he was at Pinehurst.
After three solid but far from persuasive cracks at the Open, eighth, 21st and 23rd, the jury’s still out. Great golfers eventually find a way unless they get a bad break with the draw (so important with the field going out from one tee from 6.30am to 4.30pm). Much happens to the weather on the West Coast of Scotland in a ten-hour span and for me there’s not quite enough juice in Fitzdares’ 9/2.
To those pundits who say Rory McIlroy has got a mental block about the Majors – it’s ten years since he won one – and will never get over the putting disasters that cost him the US Open last month, his resilience may surprise them. He embarrassed himself in the last round of the 2011 Masters but bounced back to win the next Major. It may be that way again.
His T4 at the Scottish Open on Sunday was the perfect warm-up as victory there would have put him under so much media pressure. I didn’t sense he was too bothered about losing his title and he had more to give. His consistency this year has been remarkable, he knows how to win an Open and he knows Troon well enough, having finished T5 to Stenson in 2016.
The Majors are particularly special this year while the interminable wrangling between the PGA Tour and the LIV breakaways continues to strangle the game. They are the only four tournaments where both sides compete against each other, admittedly in an uneasy truce, and all the top players are there.
With LIV star Bryson DeChambeau winning the US Open and Richard Bland copping back-to-back senior Majors, the LIV bandwagon is picking up speed and they have several contenders for the record $3.1m top cheque that goes with the Claret Jug. Many fancy DeChambeau for a quick double but I am not one of them as he has failed to master links golf in the past, as form figures of MC-51-MC-33-8-60 bear witness.
I would rather be on our own Tyrrell Hatton who finished ahead of DeChambeau when finishing first and third in the last two LIV contests and he knows the course, having tied fifth with McIlroy back in the day. Tyrrell’s a far more rounded golfer in 2024 than in 2016, not least because he has worked hard on not letting an explosive temperament interfere negatively with his sublime game. And as a double winner of the Dunhill Links po-am, he’s very much aware of what this type of golf demands.
When Hatton last played a Troon Open, the winner and runner-up, Stenson and Mickelson, both coincidentally on the LIV payroll these days, produced such a sensational head-to-head they left the rest for dead, so much so that the third man home, JB Holmes, finished 14 behind Stenson and 11 behind Lefty.
‘The Majors are particularly special this year while the interminable wrangling between the PGA Tour and the LIV breakaways.’
The course has been stiffened to stop anyone getting to 20 under this time. The sixth at 623 yards is now the longest hole in Open golf and the final short hole, the 17th, extended to 242 yards. The notorious 11th, the Railway hole, with the out-of-bounds rail track to the right and wicked gorse bushes waiting to grab any errant drive, is a 498-yard nightmare where making a par four is a feat.
If the first seven holes on this 7385-yard par 71 (195 yards longer than in 2016) are eminently scoreable with the wind always in the same direction, the back nine is as tough a back nine as there is on a Scottish links.
As with most Open links, length is not the problem unless the weather is really vile (not expected) which is why Tom Kim, one of the shorter hitters on the PGA Tour, comes on to my radar.
Three tip-top performances (2-6-15) on the quasi-links of the Renaissance club for the Scottish Open and a brave T2 behind runaway winner Brian Harman at last year’s Open at Royal Liverpool while hobbling with a badly bruised foot convinced me he was an Open champion in waiting. At only 22 it may be just too soon for this precocious triple PGA Tour winner and to be fair he has not played as well this year as last but the way he went toe to toe with Scheffler at the Travelers before giving best in a playoff was a big encouragement.
Jon Rahm has been rubbish since he signed for LIV but he was T2 in last year’s Open and, as they say, form is temporary, class is permanent. Even so, form horses Collin Morikawa and Xander Schauffele are preferred. Schauffele has won his Major for the year so it is Morikawa, right up there on the driving accuracy stats and close now to the form that took him to two Majors in 2020-21 on his PGA and the Open debuts, who is saddled with my main selection at 16/1, poor chap.
The early magic wore off for a while, particularly with the putting, but the young Californian has started banging in the birdies again, particularly effective in the Majors (3-4-14 this year), and when you stir in a second place at Memorial, fourth at Memorial and a T4 at the weekend in Scotland you might have the recipe for an Open champion.
He’s done it before, at Royal St George’s, ignore the two missed cuts since as his game was out of kilter, and factor in that three of his six victories came in July. The six Troon champions before Stenson all hailed from the USA and in Morikawa, Schauffele and Scheffler they hold a very strong hand.
On the home front Bob MacIntyre’s stock has risen after spectacularly winning the Scottish Open with a 20ft birdie putt at the last – tipped up here at 40/1 last week – but he used up plenty of adrenaline in the process, not to mention the celebrations that followed, so could find it hard to get himself up for Troon.
He stole the title from under the nose of Adam Scott who looked home and hosed until Bobby Mac eagled the 16th but the classy Aussie is fancied to turn the tables on the local hero. He is an old hand at the Open and should have won it at Royal Lytham in 2012 but blew a four-shot lead with four to play. He recovered to win the Masters the following year and ran up a tidy sequence of top-five Opens. Ironically, Scott’s putting, for so long a liability, is now the best part of his game and the 43-year-old can show the flag for the golden oldies just as Mickelson did at Troon eight years ago.
Ludvig Åberg was going to be a pick on his Open debut until he suddenly looked fragile when trying to protect his lead on the final day of the Scottish and if Ryder Cup colleagues Tommy Fleetwood and Shane Lowry putt decently, and the flat, uncomplicated greens shouldn’t frighten them, they would be in with a big shout.
Lowry is a fabulous bad-weather golfer but we are promised four days of nothing worse than light rain and a moderate breeze. Super-steady Brit Arron Rai is having a run of high finishes – second in Detroit, seventh at John Deere and T4 in Scotland. As the 2020 Scottish Open champion, he is proven on links too and is peaking at the right time.
He’s worth a small interest but pals Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas have done little to recommend them and surely last year’s totally unexpected champion, little Brian Harman, can’t do it again. The crowds will flock to see Tiger Woods play, just to tell the grandchildren, but he’s a hard watch these days to those who remember him in his prime. If he makes the cut, job done as even in his halcyon days he never got the better of Troon.
Bring on another great sporting week!
Best bets
2pts each-way @ 9/2 Els Top Senior
1pt each-way Hatton @ 9/2 Top LIV
1pt win Clemons @ 4/1 Top Amateur
3pts Rose @ 11/10 to win 7.41 threeball
2pts Koepka @ evens to beat MacIntyre
From the reams of Fitzdares’ Open specials I’m trusting an old friend, Ernie Els, to come up trumps at 9/2 in the Top Senior market. With seven fellow Open champions to beat it won’t be a doddle for the Big Easy but the great South African is having his best spell since joining the over-50s and has just landed his first Champions Tour Major.
The 54-year-old has been working hard on mind and body and the results are there for all to see: three wins in six weeks, topped off by what used to be called the Senior Players Championship but is now unrecognisable under the name of the sponsors Kaulig Companies.
Ernie has a special place in my heart because his Open triumph at Royal Lytham in 2012 won me more than any other bet I’ve ever placed, having backed him at 80/1 and 50/1.
Despite his surge of form, three are preferred to Els in the betting, Padraig Harrington, Stewart Cink and LIV rebel Phil Mickelson.
I wanted to put Lefty up as he has terrific Troon form, runner-up to Henrik Stenson in 2016 and third behind Todd Hamilton and Els in 2004, but the quality of his golf with LIV has been so poor it has put me off. No one has put in more hours in the gym than Mickelson to stay relevant at 54 but it ain’t working.
‘Ernie Els’ Open triumph at Royal Lytham in 2012 won me more than any other bet I’ve ever placed’
Harrington is hitting it further than he did in his Majors-winning prime and looks a bigger danger to Els than 2009 Open champion Cink who has been struggling on the main tour and has yet to make a serious mark in five senior starts. Ernie looks an each-way bet to nothing.
US Open champion Bryson DeChambeau is a warm favourite for top LIV honours but while he’s flavour of the month at the moment, his links record is scratchy to put it politely.
He may be the real deal now but Tyrrell Hatton has finished in front of him on his last two LIV starts and the in-form Brit, a first-time LIV winner at Nashville, then a close third to course specialist Sergio Garcia at Valderrama, could make it a hat-trick. He knows Troon better too.
Hideki Matsuyama looks a class above at evens on the top Japanese list and Adam Scott’s second in the Scottish Open on Sunday gets him the call at 13/5 over Cammie Smith, Min Woo Lee and Jason Day for Top Aussie. It’s the best I’ve seen Scotty swinging and putting for a long time.
It’s a bit of a surprise to see Majors specialist Brooks Koepka – he has five – as the evens underdog against man-of-the-moment Bob MacIntyre in the match-ups. Bobby Mac will be under pressure from a noisy Scottish crowd starved of an Open contender since Colin Montgomerie to perform like he did last week. Not only may he try too hard, there may not be as much petrol in the tank.
Top amateur is always fiercely contested but anybody who can shoot 62 round fearsome Muirfield gets my attention as that would be my score for nine holes … on a good day.
Dominic Clemons, a member at Gog Magog in Cambridgeshire who is going to turn pro after completing at a US college, did that 62 on the way to a 17-shot victory in the Scottish Open Amateur, then went on to share top spot with Justin Rose at Burnham & Berrow in Open Qualifying. He’s 4/1 to take the Silver Medal for top am and isn’t short of confidence.
Clemons has a fair chance at 9/4 of upstaging US professionals Cink and Chris Kirk in the first-day threeballs but the odds are tight and I prefer the 11/10 for Rose to outscore Francesco Molinari and Asia-Pacific amateur champion Jasper Stubbs in the early 7.41 game.
Sadly Molinari is no longer the force he was and as Stubbs was only 476th in the world amateur rankings before he won his title, he looks to be punching above his weight.
The weather forecast suggests later starters will be favoured, good news for backers of favourite Scheffler (off at 3.10 with Spieth and Young) and my main pick Morikawa (off at 2.48 with Sam Burns and Si Woo Kim) but less so for McIlroy fans as he tees off at 10.09 with Hatton and Homa.
Tiger Woods groupies have to wait till 2.37 to see their idol. He’s in hot company with Xander Schauffele and Patrick Cantlay. He’s 19/4 to beat that star pair. Not for me but we wish him nothing but the best.
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