It was a quiet day at the ice cream stalls around Royal Troon. The rain clouds had closed just as the leaders were arriving at the practice green and the misery was spreading across the links like a puddle that no one was there to mop up. It was the kind of weather that sends you back inside the minute you open the front door and after an hour the crowds were starting to thin out as people headed home early. Even the dry humour of the locals was soaked. As exciting as the Open is, you needed a damn good reason to want to go outside when you could watch it on TV.
Justin Rose had one. Rose, five under and two shots behind Shane Lowry’s lead from the previous round, was one of the few men left in the field who thought he had a chance to be crowned the championship golfer of the year. It’s a chance he’s been waiting for since he finished fourth at Royal Birkdale as a 17-year-old amateur in 1998, and he lit it during his four-and-a-half-hour round. By the time he finished, it was still very much alive.
He shot 73, with three bogeys, which was three times as many as he had made in his first 36 holes here. But given the conditions and the carnage unfolding around him, it was a fine display of cool, controlled golf.
Rose knows just how precious that opportunity is. He’s 43 now and, as he said earlier this week, “the clock is ticking.” There was a time when Rose wouldn’t have even noticed, but he was scrambling in May when he sat down with his team to plan his schedule for the season. Those conversations have been the same for the past two decades. “And you say, OK, Masters, Open, U.S. Open, PGA,” Rose explained, “how do we plan around that?” But this year, he realized that for the first time since 2007, he hadn’t actually qualified for the Open.
Rose qualified for last year’s Championship because he was ranked inside the top 50 in the world, but when the cut-off came around again in May, he had fallen to 56th. There are plenty of other ways to get a spot. Except he wasn’t in the top 30 of the FedEx Cup rankings, or the top 30 of the DP World Tour rankings, he hadn’t finished in the top 10 at last year’s Open, he hadn’t won any of the other majors in the previous five years, and worse still, the R&A had just scrapped a rule that gave exemptions to anyone who had played in the Ryder Cup. As Rose went through the list, he finally realised that he only had one route left.
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And so, on the first Tuesday in July, Rose, a man who has won the US Open, an Olympic gold medal and $60 million in prize money, found himself in the final Open qualifying tournament at Burnham & Berrow on the Somerset coast. It speaks volumes about how much the Open means to him, even now. “It’s a special event, one I’ve dreamed of winning since I was a kid,” he explained, “and of course you have to be there to win.” And if the only way was to play a 36-hole tournament on the shores of the Bristol Channel at Burnham-on-Sea, then so be it.
Rose had played at Burnham before, when he was a teenager on the amateur circuit. He won the Carris Trophy for under-18 boys there in 1995. And here he was again, almost 30 years later, battling it out with 71 others for one of the last qualifying places for the Open, sharing the course’s portable toilets with the few punters who had come in to watch. He reportedly stayed in the clubhouse afterwards for a long evening, signing autographs and chatting to members.
He said the experience reacquainted him with links golf and, perhaps more importantly, that he could no longer take the chance to play it for granted as he had done before. And to see him trudging around the links in the worst weather, his cap on backwards to stop the drops from the edge falling on his face, you could even believe he was enjoying it, lining up his lag putts and grimacing as he made his way out of the rough. He was about the only one in Troon who did that, along with the guys selling umbrellas.