THE OPEN’S FUTURE
were allowed to get. The competition and the people who showed up for it was the product. For years, that was the reality. It's still the promise. It's just not entirely the experience anymore.
THE OPEN’S BRANDED “EXPERIENCES”
Players now are driven everywhere in Mercedes courtesy cars. The merchan- dise area has grown to the size of a de- partment store. The R&A, it seems, has done the maths on what the Masters makes off sales like these. The grounds overflow with branded "experiences," from whisky to tourism, to credit cards and insurance and watch-making. Hospitality has expanded, too, tiered now into "Signature," "Platinum," "Pre- mium" and "Select," in descending or- der of how close your money gets you to the game. Signature is the top of the ladder. It buys access to "Clarets," the venue overlooking the 17th green, plus three others around the course. A reserved grandstand seat at 18. A Q&A with a past or current player. A photo with the claret jug. A fast track through the Open Shop. All-inclusive food and beverage. Early-bird pric- ing ran at R22 000 for Wednesday, R55 000 for Sunday. It's not that these changes are being made – this is happening at all of golf’s biggest events – but how. Only the Old Course has hosted the Open more than Royal Birkdale over the last 70 years. That legacy didn't stop the club from remaking its setup wholesale since 2017: a full redesign of the short par-4 fifth; a shortened and rebuilt par-3 sev- enth; the old par-3 14th erased entirely; the old par-5 15th rebuilt to become the new 14th; a new par-3 15th that shares almost nothing with the hole it replaced. Erasing the old 14th also opened ground to carve out a short- game area that wasn't there before. The changes collectively feel like a betrayal of what a links is supposed to be. A proper links isn't a sequence of holes so much as a single organ- ism. One that breathes with the land, exhales with its weather and remem- bers, hole to hole, what it asked of you a few holes back, the way a good novel
The Open keeps growing
tant time. Lately it feels like the art is being altered just to get more people through the door, compromising the very reason they came. This isn't a rant against commer- cialism for its own sake. The R&A is transparent that Open week funds nearly everything the organisation does the rest of the year. Grassroots grants, course-access programmes, sustainability research, the amateur game, women's and girls' initiatives. It’s money that reaches well past St An- drews, into municipal courses with no connection to major championships. The R&A is not a private equity fund extracting value. It's a good steward putting the money to good use. The more this week makes, the more work it can do the other 51. That's all well and good. It's just that the Open guards a purity that much of the rest of the professional game waved goodbye to long ago. Players historically used the same modest clubhouse lockers. You see them walk- ing into town for dinner, unbothered, sometimes unrecognised. Get a tee time at a neighbouring course at dusk and you'll find a caddie or two playing nine with a local, chasing the last of the light. Fans camp in distant fields and walk in at dawn. The merchandise tent, until recently, looked more like a pro shop than a flagship store. No tier system for how close to the game you
But is it coming at the price of tradition? BY JOEL BEALL
THE FAN VILLAGE AT Royal Birkdale sat right of the 13th hole at the 154th Open Cham-
pionship, all retail tents and corporate fortresses and vendor buggies. Rising from the open field it was an impres- sive sight, so long as you didn’t think too hard about what it had replaced. This used to be Birkdale's practice range, where Jordan Spieth’s tee shot strayed during the dramatic final round of the 2017 Open and caused a 29-minute delay in play over a ruling. Where Spieth's shot had cleared the dunes and vanished into the unknown, you could buy a claret jug hat for R450. It was one change in a wave of them at Birkdale. Each was defensible on its own. Together, they have left things unsettled. The Open, at its core, is an exercise in preserving art from a dis-
16 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026
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