Why Royal Liverpool's Closing Hole Is Providing All The Drama This Week

The R&A’s thinking coming into The Open was that Royal Liverpool might lack a bit of drama down the closing stretch. So we all fixated on the new kid in the class, the par-3 17th, and seemingly took our eyes off its big brother.

The 18th at Hoylake is neatly named ‘Dun’ and many of the field will have felt like they have been after seeing decent rounds turned into ordinary ones and ordinary ones into horror shows.

Ahead of the 151st Open this closing brute has seen the tee moved round to the right and pushed back 50 yards to 609 yards. To make matters worse there’s a bit of a walk from the 17th back down to the final tee, a stroll where you might easily cast your eye towards the two fairway bunkers and, more likely, the internal out of bounds. Up ahead there are three bunkers protecting the left half of the green (more on them later) and two on the right.

If you can avoid all the hazards off the tee then your second will be played over the corner of the OOB. Then you can throw in that you might well have a 3-wood in your hand, grandstands on either side and the small matter of some strong winds. And it's final Major of the year.

Our record so far is a 10 by Taichi Kho of Hong Kong. He had done much of the hard work, sitting in a greenside bunker in two. Then this happened where even some shot-by-shot commentary barely makes sense of the mess.

• Shot 1: 313yds to Fairway, 282yds to pin
• Shot 2: 279yds to Greenside Bunker, 9yds to pin
• Shot 3: 1yd to Greenside Bunker, 9yds to pin
• Shot 4: 0yds to Greenside Bunker, 9yds to pin
• Shot 5: 11yds to Native Area, 19yds to pin
• Shot 6: 12yds to Greenside Bunker, 8yds to pin
• Shot 7: Drops ball to Native Area, 29yds to pin
• Shot 7: 23yds to Native Area, 25yds to pin
• Shot 8: 31yds to Green, 9ft. to pin
• Shot 9: 9ft. 9in. to Green, 10in. to pin
• Shot 10: Ball Holed: Double Bogey or Worse

If ever there was a cryptic golfing puzzle then it was this. We think that he left two shots in the bunker, then found the rough, then returned to the bunker, then back to the rough where he got a free drop, chipped on and two-putted.

Tyrrell Hatton was inside the top 10 when he arrived at 18 on Friday, he departed the scene after a brace of crimes off the tee and began Saturday in a share of 39th.

Rickie Fowler made his treble the more conventional way by simply blowing two approach shots straight out of town. 

His big mate, Justin Thomas, was already having a day to forget when he smoked one onto the old race track before finding himself in an awkward spot in the short-lived experiment of raking the bunkers flat where balls coming flying in from 260 yards were then nestling underneath the face of the sand.

A good look for an Open closing hole is to test the world’s best, a bad one is to have a host of players chipping backwards into the middle of a bunker. Even Phil Mickelson, having reloaded on the tee, was unable to get his recovery shot out of that first bunker en route to his eight.

In the interests of fairness there has been some drama going the other way. There were plenty of birdies (92) over the first two rounds and five eagles including one from our leader Brian Harman. Cam Smith came to 18 needing a birdie to make the weekend and coolly nutted a fairway wood to kick-in distance for an eagle three.

But 18 doubles and nine ‘others’ saw it playing at an average of 5.013 for Thursday and Friday which is some going for a par 5 in the modern game. The 15th at Augusta played at 4.55 this year while the lengthened 13th was 4.85.

For some context there were five ‘others’ at 17 and only one other hole, the 4th, made it above two. 

The R&A wanted drama coming home and they’ve certainly delivered.