Royal Troon Starts Easy and Ends Hard

The comforting crash of the Irish Sea provides a rhythmic backdrop to the first tee at Royal Troon and the lure of three short par-4 opening holes that frequently play downwind -- all drivable by Tiger Woods -- is a seductively easy start.

Yet the farther away from the clubhouse the links carries its challengers the deeper into peril it takes them.

Slowly, almost deceptively, the holes grow longer and eventually the wind that starts at the players’ backs stings their faces as the final six holes play into prevailing northwest gusts.

This is a course where the wind has been known to blow so hard that -- according to local lore -- fish were tossed from the Irish Sea onto the fourth green during one particularly breezy day in 1952.

The key is to get under par early and hope to hang on. Good rounds are constructed on the front nine at Royal Troon and merely protected down the stretch.

“You’re hanging on from the seventh tee onward,” Colin Montgomerie said. “If you’re over par after six, you may as well keep walking past the ninth hole onto Prestwick and have a nice lunch in their clubhouse.”

The first three holes are par-4s measuring 364, 391 and 379 yards. Two of the next three holes are par-5s, including the 577-yard No. 6, the longest hole in the British Open.

The 126-yard eighth hole is the shortest hole in the Open, the famous Postage Stamp named for its tiny green.

“Certainly the green is very small,” the British golf writer Bernard Darwin said 80 years ago. “And it looks smaller than it really is as we stand trembling on the tee with some form of pitching club in hand.”

This is the hole where Gene Sarazen made a hole-in-one in 1973 at age 71 and where German amateur Hermann Tissies made a 15 in 1950. Tissies hit 13 bunkers before one-putting.

The final nine starts with consecutive par-4s measuring 438, 463 and 431 yards. And then the difficult holes begin.

“I looked at the card the other day,” Nick Price said. “It’s 3,450 yards going out and it’s par 36, and it’s 3,600 yards coming back and it’s par 35,” he said. “We might get some big numbers on the back nine.”

The final six holes -- all playing into the wind -- begin with the 465-yard par-4 13th and end with the 452-yard No. 18. In between are the 457-yard par-4 15th hole and the 223-yard par-3 No. 17.

Price knows these holes only too well. Stepping to the 13th tee in the final round of the 1982 British Open, Price had a three-stroke lead. He played the last six holes four over par and finished second by a stroke to Tom Watson.

Mark Calcavecchia won the last time the Open was held at Troon, defeating Greg Norman and Wayne Grady in a four-hole playoff in 1989.

“They’ve toughened up the golf course a little bit,” Price said. “The rough is going to be up, changed the 11th hole to a par-4. It’s going to be difficult, a very, very good test of golf.”

The outstanding physical features of Troon are the Irish Sea, a railway line that runs along one side of the course and banks of thick gorse to swallow up shots.

Troon was founded in 1878 and the club’s motto -- “As much by skill as by strength” -- is an accurate description of what is demanded by the course.

“I’ve definitely got to work on my ball flight,” Woods said about his preparation for Troon. “I have to be able to control it at will. Because if the weather is anything like it can be over there, we’re definitely going to need the lower ball flight or higher ball flight, curve it left to right or right to left at any given time.”

If it sounds like Woods is saying that Royal Troon will require every shot in the bag -- that’s exactly right. The winner will conquer Troon as much by skill as by strength.