For those of us who rotate our lives around the edifices of the sporting calendar then Royal Birkdale has painted our quintessential summer scene.
Powder-blue skies, shaggy oatmeal rough, fairways baked the colour of buttered toast ... yes, these are the hues of July.
Or at least this is how summer is supposed to look. Perhaps our summers were actually blustery and damp, and perhaps our minds have smuggled in the sun-glared footage of Open Championships on the BBC to trick us into believing it was our own experience.
It has been a week to show that there is a difference between nostalgia and tradition.
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Tradition’s bulwark is the Masters, the tournament that tries to suspend time. Augusta is a place where the weather hardly shifts and the course never changes; where the ban on phones and advertising leaves you feeling like you’re standing in front of the white cabins and among the fragrant cigar smoke of the antebellum South.
The Open has no such truck with tradition. It rotates its venues and tears them up between visits. Would you like to see the Birkdale spot where Jordan Spieth took his famous drop on the way to victory in 2017? Too bad, they have turned it into a fan village. What about the 14th hole on which he responded by almost holing out from the tee? Oh, they’ve simply discontinued that hole to construct a monstrous, stadium-style par-three for which they can sell a tall pile of hospitality tickets.
“That maybe the best shot and the best putt I’ve ever hit don’t exist any more is a little unusual,” said Spieth on Tuesday. Any member at Augusta National proposing to remove a hole would be quickly keeping company with men in white coats rather than green jackets.
And yet an overhauled Birkdale has still been able to present itself in such a way this week that it has animated some deep nostalgia within us. Perhaps it is playing on the same part of our minds that tells us against all scientific evidence that summer days were longer, brighter and warmer when we were kids. The clinical answer to this is that only your memories are cooling over time.
The tournament itself has pressed on the gap between what is and what we feel ought to be.
The Irish Times spent the build-up preaching the usual sorrowful and joyful mysteries of links golf, repeating ad nauseam that this is a unique test that requires experience and creativity; warning any American within earshot that they haven’t been playing this stuff on their Trackman. Shane Lowry declared pity for all those who had never played links golf before.
Then Jackson Suber landed with his name from Nascar and led after the first day’s play. Not only was this Suber’s first round at the Open, it was his fifth day in Europe. He said he was afraid to try driving on the left side of the road, and took a trip to Liverpool city centre to gaze in wonder at how the train system worked.
Other Americans have shown a similar ability to adapt to national customs. Bryson DeChambeau has mastered exquisite British passive-aggression by declining media in pique at comments by Nick Faldo claiming he had “zero clue of strategy.” DeChambeau eventually answered a handful of softball questions with the R&A and thrice wedged the word “strategy” into his first answer.
The national feeling that football ought to be coming home has been disappointed too. Tournament organisers wisely waited until after England’s semi-final result before answering questions on whether they would shift Sunday’s start time forward to avoid running into the World Cup final, and nobody has been mischievous enough to ask whether they might tweak Saturday’s schedule with the third-place match in mind. The sole Argentinian player in the field was Mateo Pulcini and he cupped his ears in tribute to Enzo Fernandez on the final hole of his first round after draining a 40-foot putt. (A heavy-handed emblem of football’s abrupt dropping from the conversation is the name of the guy dead last on the leaderboard: Thai amateur Fifa Laopakdee, who is genuinely named after the abject governing body.)
The irony of Birkdale’s familiar scene is how it has scrambled players’ well-tuned radars. Mid-irons are rolling to where their drivers usually stop, the sun-withered rough is giving balls unpredictable flights, while neither Scottie Scheffler nor Rory McIlroy can read the speeds of the greens. Hey, nostalgia doesn’t have to obey the narrow strictures of tradition.
All of this has conspired to stack the 54-hole leaderboard with a slew of unfamiliar names. Herbert, Suber, Cauley, Coody ... this could be the bill of a minor stage at Newport folk festival.
But even if you don’t remember the name of this week’s Open Champion in years to come, you will always remember the scene.
