It was a slow day’s trade at the ice cream stands roundabout Royal Troon. The rain clouds closed over just as the leaders were arriving at the practice green, and misery spread over the links like a puddle no one got around to mopping up. It was the sort of weather that makes you turn straight around as soon as you open the front door, and after an hour of it the crowd started to thin out as people made their way home early. Even the locals’ dry sense of humour was wet through. Compelling as the Open is, you needed a damn good reason to want to be out when you could be back watching it on TV.
Justin Rose had one. Rose, five under and two shots off Shane Lowry’s overnight lead at the start of the round, was one of the few men left in the field who fancied he had a proper shot at becoming the champion golfer of the year. It’s a chance he has been waiting for ever since he finished fourth at Royal Birkdale as a 17-year-old amateur back in 1998, and he kindled it right through his four-and-a-half-hour round. By the time he finished, it was still alive.
He scored 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 considering the carnage unfolding around him, it was a fine exhibition of cool, controlled, golf.
Rose knows exactly how precious this opportunity is. He’s 43 now and, as he said himself at the start of this week, “the clock is ticking”. Time was when Rose wouldn’t even have noticed it going, but he got a hurry-up in May when he sat down with his team to plan his schedule for the season. Those conversations have been the same for the last 20 years. “And you go, OK, Masters, Open, US Open, PGA,” Rose explained, “how do we plan around that?” But this year he realised that, for the first time since 2007, he wasn’t actually qualified for the Open.
Rose qualified for last year’s championship because he was in the top 50 of the world rankings, but when the cut-off came around again in May, he had dropped to 56th. There are plenty of other ways to earn a place. Only he wasn’t in the top 30 of the FedEx Cup standings, or the top 30 of the DP World Tour standings, hadn’t finished in the top 10 at last year’s Open, or won any of the other majors in the last five years, and worse luck, the R&A had just scrapped a rule which gifted exemptions to anyone who had played in the Ryder Cup. As Rose worked through the list, he finally realised that he only had one route left open to him.
Which was how Rose, a man who has won the US Open, an Olympic gold medal and $60m in prize money, came to be teeing it up in the final Open qualifying tournament at Burnham & Berrow on the Somerset coast on the first Tuesday in July. Which tells you plenty about just how much the Open means to him, even now. “It’s a special event, the one I’ve dreamed about winning ever since I was a kid,” he explained, “and obviously you’ve got to be in it to win it.” And if the only way was to go through a 36-hole tournament on the banks of the Bristol Channel in Burnham-on-Sea, so be it.
Rose had played at Burnham before when he was a teenager on the amateur circuit. He won the Carris Trophy, for boys under 18, there in 1995. And here he was again, almost 30 years later, scrapping it out with 71 others for one of the last final qualifying spots to the Open, and sharing the course’s portable toilets with the few punters who had wandered in to watch. According to reports, he stopped for a long evening in the clubhouse afterwards to sign autographs and talk to the members.
He said the experience reacquainted him with links golf and, maybe more important, meant he wasn’t able to take the opportunity to play in it for granted in the way he had done previously. And watching him grind his way around the links during the worst of the weather, cap on backwards to keep the drips from the brim from falling on his face, you could even believe he really was enjoying himself out there, lining up his lag putts, and grimacing as he figured his way out of the rough. He was just about the only one in Troon who was, along with the fellas selling the umbrellas.
