THE OPEN’S FUTURE
at the US Open, layering in more cor- porate hospitality tiers each cycle. The Ryder Cup, run by the PGA of America, now functions as much as a hospital- ity event as a competition, with ticket packages becoming controversial. Still, is there a cost to what the Open is doing? This championship has a version of the game closest to how it was invented. Played over land no one built, on ground fast and cruel enough that luck and skill blur into the same thing, in weather nobody controls and nobody thinks to complain about. Ev- ery other major sells controlled perfec- tion; the Open, historically, has sold the opposite. Not pure, exactly. But the closest thing left. The Open's value was never tradition for tradition's own sake but a reminder of what this game once was and, if only for a week, can still be again. At Birkdale, there sure felt like a lot of proverbial scaffolding. And the thing about that is, put it up, keep it up long enough, and even- tually people forget there's a building underneath at all. They start to think the scaffolding is the attraction. If the Open gets sanded down into something more legible for a bigger gate, it won't have necessarily failed. Attendance up. Revenue up. Grants written, courses funded, good work done. But it will be another step away from why any of this matters in the first place. Nobody votes to kill an identity. They just keep trading slivers of it for next year's numbers, until one day the identity is simply gone, and no one knows why it vanished. But at least you can buy a hat at the spot where the identity once lived. FUTURE OPENS The 2028 Open at Royal Lytham & St Annes will be played three weeks later than usual, on August 3-6, due to a clash with the Los Angeles Olympic Games in July. The 2027 Open at St Andrews is from July 15-18.
nock in Dublin, Ireland, waiting in the wings for its own Open bid, already being told the local infrastructure isn't ready with not enough beds, not enough roads, fans possibly ferried in by boat. The real test of how far this goes arrives next July, at St Andrews, when it hosts the 2027 Open. The Home of Golf is supposed to shatter Birkdale’s attendance record, drawing as many as 30 000 to 40 000 more fans than it did in 2022. Somewhere near 330 000 people funnelled into a town of 17 000. That's a town problem, a roads prob- lem, a can-this-place-physically-hold- this many-people problem. St Andrews is the source code. If the Old Course starts getting redrawn to answer to a gate number, there's no longer a ver- sion of the Open immune from this thinking. Everything becomes nego- tiable once the birthplace of the game is on the table. CORPORATE HOSPITALITY To be fair, the Open isn't the only one making this trade. The Masters has spent the last decade turning its hos- pitality operation into an arms race, expanding merchandise revenue and premium patron packages well be- yond what Augusta once tolerated. The USGA has followed a similar path
where there are things that we can do together that also help us operation- ally, they often make sense to do to help with the staging of the champion- ship," Darbon said of course changes he insists the members were behind. "I think it would be wrong to say that all of the changes are driven by a need to accommodate spectators." But is there a potential price for re- fusing to change? Darbon says there's no threat to those that don't, but Royal Portrush had to carve out two new holes to build a fan village in 2019. Royal Liverpool did the same in 2023. And there are the current predica- ments of rota courses Muirfield and Turnberry. Both spent years on a kind of shadow probation over political en- tanglements – Turnberry for its ties to the Trump family, Muirfield for its no-women membership – the sort of principled stand the R&A could make and still look virtuous doing it. Now each is sidelined for other reasons. Turnberry is deemed too remote; the R&A wants new roads built to handle the traffic. Muirfield's sin is refusing to remodel itself for bigger crowds; a smaller, more intimate footprint that once read as a virtue is now treated as a disqualifier. The 2013 Open at Muir- field drew roughly 140 000 fans. The same logic applies to Portmar-
18 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2026
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