The rain and a wind that changed direction from Thursday and Friday turned the third day of the British Open into an exercise in survival. The game was very different from the previous two rounds because the gusts blew in different directions and the golfers’ route, the strategy to tackle the first and last holes of the Royal Troon layout, also had to change. They had to look to the sky as much as to the meadow. That is the Open, the great one in which nature claims its share of prominence. Water, cold and wind in Scotland and a picture of the purest and most traditional golf.
The result of the mess was a classification with only nine players under par for the course. The American Billy Horschel leads with a normal score of -4, followed by Thriston Lawrence, Sam Burns, Russell Henley, Xander Schauffele, Justin Rose and Daniel Brown with -3, Scottie Scheffler with -2 and Shane Lowry, who was the comfortable leader for good stretches of the tournament, with -1. Signing par on every hole was a treasure in the trenches of Royal Troon. Hunting for a birdiepure gold. Jon Rahm carried one more stroke on the day and dropped to +2 in the general classification, a record that nevertheless places him in 15th position.
The Basque woke up with a bogey on hole 2 in his attempt to recover lost positions, a putt He missed a short shot that he solved with a further hole at the next stop. He then linked a couple after another until he fell again at the 12th, again with a detour on an impact about two meters from the flag. He also failed to hit the 14th at medium distance, a reflection of where he was going in the green the chances of winning at the Open.
At Royal Troon, Open sages Lowry and Rose, number one Scheffler, and newcomers Brown battled it out… All against Mother Nature. Lowry, who won the British at Royal Portrush in 2019, succumbed on the par three of the 8th, in the deep bunker near a green so small they call it The Postage Stamp, and came out with a double. bogey which began to push him down the leaderboard. He would add four more strokes in five holes, from 11 to 15. Scheffler, king of the world ranking, also had a tough time with a course that in the previous days had sent home McIlroy, DeChambeau… Jorge Campillo is +8 and Luis Masaveu, +13.
British Open standings.
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