Championship golf, in its purest form, is supposed to be about a player being the captain of their own fate. At Royal Birkdale, that fate often arrives as an all-you-can-eat buffet of agonizing indecision. Rory McIlroy himself pointed out that watching a golfer wrestle with their own brain makes for a pretty good show for the rest of us, even if the golfer feels like they're getting a root canal without any painkillers.
Take the first hole. There’s a bunker sitting there, looking like a bad omen in a pile of sand. You could play it safe, lay back with an iron, but then everyone else sees you as a total wuss. Or, you could try to hug the out-of-bounds stakes, a gamble that rewards the brave with a short approach and the truly idiotic with a first-class ticket home.
Fast forward to the fifth, and you’ve got this charming little invitation to go for a swim. The course designers clearly spent all their money on water features instead of, you know, player comfort. It’s the kind of no-win situation that makes even the steadiest pros wish they’d pursued competitive snooker instead.
And then there’s the sixth. It’s a par four so long it has its own zip code. You’ve got to choose between the sensible route, which leaves you with an approach shot that needs a catapult, or the hero line that means ignoring all the strategically placed gnarly rough designed to punish anyone with ambition.
The weather just piles on. The fairways are baked harder than a Victorian biscuit, so every bounce is a wild card. It’s a stark reminder that we make plans, and the golf ball just laughs, usually as it disappears into some prickly gorse.
In the end, this tournament will probably be won by whoever is best at making terrible decisions at high speed. Golf, bless its heart, is a sport that charges you a fortune for the distinct privilege of feeling like an absolute dunce in front of thousands of people.