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Is it April 2024 yet?
The close of golf's major championship season is always a bit melancholy. The buzz and pageantry ramps up from Monday of Masters week through Sunday of Open Championship week, compressing a year's worth of golf energy into less than four months. When it's over, we hardcore fans can feel a bit drained, as if we just, say, walked seven miles in a steady rain.
The gloom that hung over the final round of the Open Championship was a little unfair to Brian Harman, which is perhaps odd to say as the native Georgian ended up all smiles, hoisting the Claret Jug in the midst of the makeshift stadium that welcomes the close of every Open.
Grumpy cloud cover, insistent rain and foggy TV camera lenses may end up dampening our memories of this week, even though Harman's six-shot margin of victory marks his win as the most dominant major triumph since Bryson DeChambeau stiff-armed the field in the 2020 U.S. Open.
With a throwback playing style and incredible putting touch - which never goes out of fashion - Harman provided both a counterpoint to golf's recent tilt toward all-out power and a reminder of the type of skill set the highest level of the game has rewarded for more than a century and a half, and should continue to.
In honor of Harman's winning margin, here are half a dozen pleasant takeaways from the final major championship of 2023:
1. The art of playing in the rain
Fair-weather golfers are legion, especially here in Florida. Ever since I moved down here, I've encountered more than a few who adhere to the 70-Degree Rule - i.e., if the forecast high isn't at least 70, they're not playing. So you can bet they wouldn't be caught dead on any course on a day like players experienced at Royal Liverpool Golf Club on Sunday. Their loss.
Playing golf in the rain is great fun, actually, provided you arrive at the course prepared. Good rain gear - truly waterproof (I'm partial to Galvin Green's high-end but impenetrable GORE-TEX rain jackets), not too baggy and with just a bit of stretch to let you swing freely, plus a trusty pair of rain gloves (or, in Harman's case, a bouquet of regular golf gloves tucked into an umbrella) - can often grant a golfer the considerable reward of having a course practically to himself or herself.
What's more, the actual process of playing the game in the rain can be illuminating because it forces players to strip things down to the essentials: fairways and greens, nothing fancy. It highlights the crucial importance of golf swing fundamentals. It's little wonder that Harman, whose swing is one of the simplest in pro golf, was so unbothered by Sunday's rain at Hoylake.
2. Golf's growing global appeal
The 2023 Open Championship set an important record in the game's history, as players from 26 different countries made the cut at Royal Liverpool. The top 9 finishers represented 8 different nations, including both those with long histories of producing champions and decidedly emerging corners of the game.
To the latter point, Shubhankar Sharma posted the highest-ever Open Championship finish by someone from India. Anyone who roots for the game's worldwide spread has to be excited by that performance, which follows Aditi Ashok's brush with the podium in the 2020 Olympic women's golf competition.
It's also a tidy reminder that professional golf is not just an American concern. The sport of golf's future has never been less certain, but one near-to-medium-term concern for the sport's big institutions should be leveraging the world's growing interest in the game to create the most compelling possible golf circuit in the U.S. and beyond. One look at Sharma's Nike swoosh apparel is a reminder that Tiger Woods worldwide reach primed millions in other countries to jump into the game. Who is holding out that helping hand now?
3. Bring on the Ryder Cup
The aforementioned post-Open ennui has a bright side this year in the form of the Ryder Cup, which itself is bringing the golf spotlight to a new country: Italy. Harman's victory at Hoylake virtually assures him a place on friend and fellow Sea Island mafioso Zach Johnson's team, while a high finish from Austria's Sepp Straka strengthens his own case for inclusion on Luke Donald's squad.
Harman is an especially intriguing Ryder Cup prospect; he was a match-play terror in his junior and amateur days, and his accuracy-first game should work well at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club, with its terraced fairways and target-style design. A partisan pro-Europe crowd should also fuel Harman's fire. You can win a trip to the Ryder Cup through our BMW Sweepstakes. Read more about the sweeps and Italy's golf culture in the article below.
4. Mersey me
Okay, so technically Hoylake is in the neighboring borough of Wirral, but it and Merseyside, which encompasses nearby Liverpool and snakes north to Southport, where 2026 Open Championship host Royal Birkdale Golf Club, seems to be an excellent potential golf destination. Hoylake and Birkdale are both accessible to visitors, and there is a terrific list of other worthwhile links in the area. Here's a list of courses I'm particularly interested in within easy reach of both of these Open Championship venues:
5. Links bunkers matter
For the first two days, one of the biggest stories at The Open was the bunkering. Royal Liverpool's 80-odd pot bunkers were tiny in physical diameter but played many times bigger, both physically and in the psyches of the players. The contours of the typically firm turf funneled countless tee and approach shots toward them, and on Thursday, their raked-flat sandy bottoms facilitated several disastrous lies and stances, forcing many players to play out sideways or backwards. In other words, finding a bunker meant nearly a shot penalty.
Comments from the players on Thursday prompted the R&A to rake a bit of a bowl into the sandy areas for the remainder of the championship, taking some of the teeth out of the pits. But Saturday and Sunday's rain changed the complexion of the course, trading out bunkers for damp, uncertain rough and length as Hoylake's main defenses. In effect, the field played two different golf courses over the week, making Harman's performance even more impressive.
Bunkers are arguably the biggest difference between classic links like Royal Liverpool and the vast majority built elsewhere in the 150-plus years since. American golf courses tend to be particularly over-bunkered, and the overwhelming majority of bunkers are too large, too shallow and too improperly placed to sufficiently honor their original role in golf architecture.
They are among the most expensive parts of a golf course to build and maintain; the fact that so many of them function as little more than window-dressing on thousands of golf courses means they have strayed far from their original purpose. And when it comes to their impact on professional tournaments, a post-Open tweet from PGA Tour winner Michael Kim summed it up best. "I think it’s great these bunkers are penal," he wrote. "The bunkers are too lenient in the states since we even purposely aim at green side bunkers going for par 5s in two sometimes while you avoid them here like a virus."
Royal Liverpool's treacherous bunkers are part of what makes the golf course great: they frustrate all golfers - even the very best - roughly equally, while 99% of other bunkers are little problem at all for low-handicappers and pros.
6. A too-early 2024 majors outlook
Golf course nerds have salivated for years over the 2023 major championship schedule. Oak Hill's restoration by architect Andrew Green was a wonderful canvas for an entertaining PGA Championship, and Los Angeles Country Club delivered both a tantalizing first look at one of America's most exclusive clubs while offering something different - and a little bit controversial - for the U.S. Open. And Hoylake got a little bit of spice with its brand-new short par-3 17th hole.
Next year might be thought of as a somewhat more familiar, meat-and-potatoes major championship rotation. The U.S. Open returns to Donald Ross' sandy, rugged masterpiece Pinehurst No. 2 for the first time since Martin Kaymer's Brian Harman-like shellacking of the field in 2014, while the PGA heads to Valhalla for the fourth and likely final time, as the PGA of America recently sold the club to the membership.
The Jack Nicklaus design is one of the most prominent of the late-20th century era of difficult, showy championship course design. Architecture has lately trended away from its brusque features and pure execution-based shot values, turning it into something of a museum piece at less than 40 years old. But it does represent another chance for Rory McIlroy to banish a decade of major championship doldrums, as well as an opportunity for Jordan Spieth to etch his name into history as a career Grand Slam winner.
Finally, the 2024 Open Championship visits Royal Troon, which is among the more straightforward sites on the rota. But if the last Open there is any indication - Henrik Stenson and Phil Mickelson's epic final-day duel in 2016 - we could be in for a barnburner.
What's your lasting memory of the 2023 major championship season? Let us know in the comments below.
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