You’re about to leave the house early in the morning ahead of the biggest day of your life: What do you need before you go? A cooked breakfast, of course – one lovingly prepared and cooked by mum.
Matthew Jordan may have been playing Royal Liverpool since he was knee high to a grasshopper, but teeing off first in The Open at your home club in front of a packed gallery is a pretty big deal – and you imagine there were a few nerves.
“I made him breakfast at 4.30am, he was downstairs by five for sausages and poached eggs,” his Mum tells Golf Monthly. “I don’t really get that nervous. I do the Mum thing of, 'Is he feeling Ok? 'Has he eaten?' 'Has he got plenty to drink?' All those kind of things.
“At the moment, he’s still at home, he’s enjoying chilling in his own room. He just wants to stay at home, have a meal at home. He doesn’t want to eat out because he eats out all the time, so we’re just doing the family thing of sitting down and eating together.”
At 6.30am, playing partners Richie Ramsay and Branden Grace walked onto the tee and received a smattering of applause; then Jordan at 6.32am, and the cheers were a great deal louder.
The Wirral star backed off before pulling the trigger and started his pre-shot routine again. Jitters? Probably, and it was no surprise to see the first shot of the 151st Open Championship find the rough.
“The fact that he got it off the tee, that was pretty good to be fair,” says lifelong friend and fellow Royal Liverpool member, Tom Dawson, who was grinning from ear to ear and following his pal’s every shot, as were hundreds of Royal Liverpool members and young children from the local school Jordan used to attend.
The membership of Hoylake are understandably very excited – and proud. “It’s really hard to put into words, it’s like your best friend achieving their lifetime goal,” adds Dawson, who played a lot of junior golf with Jordan and describes him as a “Diet Coke and ham sandwich guy”, a hard worker that was “never influenced by alcohol” growing up.
“He grafts,” says Dawson. “He’s always on the range for three or four hours, and he’ll religiously play 18 holes when he’s back. He just deserves it. That’s why we’re all just so happy for him. There’s no one that deserves it more than him.
“To have someone who’s been so integral to the club do this, he's won the Club Championship, played Walker Cup, to see him hit that first tee shot was a goosebumps moment.
“It’s something we’ve all dreamed of, anyone who’s played golf to a decent level. We’ve all dreamt of that moment, but to actually do it, hit that first tee shot, it was almost an out of body experience.”
A tidy up-and-down from the front bunker on the first clearly settled the nerves, for come the second he’s walking his birdie putt in way before it finds the bottom of the cup, and the decibel level cranks up a notch. The local boy is leading The Open.
At the third, in front of a clubhouse where he must have eaten several hundred ham sandwiches over the years, another of his friends is bouncing down the side of the fairway. “He’s ripping it,” he shouts. “C’mon, Matty!”
Then, on 10, more whooping and hollering when the 27-year-old fires a dart at the flag. “Loves it, loves it,” says a friend as soon as the ball flies off the clubface. Having grown up watching Jordan shoot 63s and 64s round this place, he knows when his mate has hit a good one.
Jordan doesn’t quite go that low on Thursday, but he’d have taken a two-under 69 before the start of play all day long. Now he can go home, put his feet up and wait for his girlfriend, Kate, who has a longer day than he does working in television (European Tour Productions) at The Open. Perhaps mum will make him a sandwich.
“Amazing. I'm kind of running out of words to describe it,” says Jordan after a memorable morning on the links. “It was crazy, mental, loud, everything that I could have wished for. I'm certainly trying to think of a better experience than that, and I don't think I can.”
Asked about his emotions walking to the first tee, Jordan, who only qualified for The Open a couple of weeks ago, added: “I obviously knew it was coming, so I was just trying to go through my prep and make sure everything was going okay.
“I kind of envisioned the night before, just went through my head kind of going through the tunnel, it becoming loud, meeting the starter, meeting the players, and it gave me a bit of comfort that I knew what to expect so when I went there, there was nothing out of the blue. I knew the nerves would be there, as well, so I expected that, and from there on, just hit it.”
He'll have to do it all again tomorrow, and hopefully two more days after that.
