Lev Grinberg will become the first golfer from the Ukraine to play in a major at Royal Birkdale. This is his unlikely story…
Lev Grinberg lets out a sigh after discovering more bad news at Zurich airport. His third flight of a chaotic voyage to the UK has just been further delayed. Frustration, though, suddenly subsides as the teenager begins to articulate the magnitude of the week ahead of him.
“It honestly doesn’t feel real,” Grinberg says. “I’m at my gate now going to Manchester and it’s like, ‘Why am I going there?’ I’m seeing all these posts about The Open everywhere, I’m actually telling myself, ‘Oh, I’m also playing the tournament!’ It’s pretty cool.”
Grinberg will become the first ever Ukrainian-born golfer to play in a major championship when he tees it up at Royal Birkdale, an achievement that has not been lost on him.
“It’s an amazing feeling,” he says.
The 18-year-old claimed his place at Birkdale by winning The Open Amateur Series. Grinberg stormed to a seven-shot win at the St Andrews Links Trophy last month, where the final two rounds are played on the Old Course, while his performances at The Amateur and European Amateur were enough to the top the standings and secure his major berth.
It was also the Old Course that first ignited Grinberg’s love of The Open, his most vivid memories of Cam Smith’s charge into the record books on that stunning back-nine four years ago.
Grinberg’s win at the Home of Golf marked the next exciting chapter of a burgeoning career, which he says only ever happened by accident.
“When I was in Ukraine, I was in elementary school in the city,” he tells TG. “My dad had a little weekend house, that’s where he lived. We usually went there every weekend. We had a tradition where we had a very big brunch every Saturday, then we would ride bikes after.
“But one day, we took a different route. We saw some people hitting golf balls with sticks. We were like, ‘What is that?’ My dad and I said, ‘Let’s try it.’”
Grinberg began hitting balls as a six-year-old at Kozyn Golf & Country Club, a nine-hole layout about 25 kilometers outside Kyiv. His father Illya, once an international badminton player, spotted his son’s talents.
“After my first hour of hitting golf balls, I loved it so much that I kept coming back every Saturday for two or three years,” he says. “Once I started making the progress, we were like, ‘Let’s sign up for a tournament.’ The first tournament I played, I actually won. Two years after that, we realized that I’m actually pretty good and I need to try something else. That’s why we went to Europe.”
Grinberg left Ukraine and moved to Belgium aged 11 to train and play in better conditions, before later relocating to France and joining the French Golf Federation. That was a few years before his homeland was invaded by Russia, and at a time when golf did not register in the public consciousness.
“We didn’t even know golf existed in Ukraine,” Grinberg says. “If you walk around in England or Scotland, it’s like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m just playing golf.’ In Ukraine, it’s just football and boxing. There’s only two golf courses. There were three, but one got bombed in the war.”
Grinberg’s home club is still operational, but Golf Stream, a vast 36-hole facility to the north-west of the city, was decimated when the insurgent Russian military occupied the region in 2022. “I have my grandfather still living there,” Grinberg says. “I’m in contact with him every day. ‘He’s always like, ‘Did you win?’ It was really nice at St Andrews to say that after some time that I actually won. It’s difficult, I mean now it’s much better but he’s in a safe place and he’s OK.
“Especially when the war started it was pretty crazy to think that in [2022] you can still have massive wars. But I try not to think about it a lot. I hate politics from the bottom of my heart. It’s the worst thing possible. The more peace, the better.”
Golf was forbidden when Ukraine was under Soviet juristiction, viewed as an elitist pastime of the western enemy. It was not until Ukraine gained independence in 1991, and then the Ukraine Golf Federation established six years later, that a semblance of a golfing footprint was formed. There are still fewer than 4,000 golfers in the country, but the game is now being used as an inspiring tool shaping national resilience during the war.
Kozyn, the place where Grinberg learned his craft, is one of the surviving courses being used as a retreat to help Ukrainian war veterans rebuild their lives. Hundreds of amputees have been given access to the exclusive club free of charge in an invigorating ‘Unite for Golf’ program supported by the federation. While offering both physical and psychological therapy for war vets, the hope is that the slow-growing pre-war interest in the sport will also be revived.
One day, Grinberg says he plans to return to Ukraine. But he won’t be playing under the Ukrainian flag at Birkdale. His travel nightmare on his way to Southport comes after a jaunt to Estonia, where Grinberg began his Open prep by representing France in the European Team Championships.
The switch came when Grinberg recently upped sticks from Antwerp to the outskirts of Paris, a two hour drive from the French Golf Federation’s national performance centre at Le Golf National.
“I was searching for opportunities to train and get better and I know three of my best friends are French,” he explains. “I decided to go to the I tried to get to the academy in Paris National. It’s like an Olympic training centre, very very golf focused and they were very kind to let me in.
“Then they they proposed me to play – I obviously wanted to play for France – and they proposed to me. I had to learn the language to go through all the process. It was a long, long process but it was smooth and I feel like the support that I’m getting from them is amazing.”
Grinberg will leave his Parisian academy and head to the University of Arkansas in the fall as he plans a pathway to the PGA Tour.
“Golf is a very individual sport,” he says. “When you play football, you say, ‘OK, this is not about me, it’s about my team and I have to connect with them.’ When you’re on the golf course, you’re alone and you’re there with your own head and you’ve just got to get it going. Of course, there’s thoughts for my friends in Ukraine and everything, but I really love what the French Federation is doing for me. I think their support is going to help me a lot in the future.”
Grinberg speaks four languages, including impeccable English, and has grown up idolizing Jon Rahm. He says he is similarly “very fiery” to the Spaniard and his strength is his iron play. His big dream is to win the Ryder Cup with Europe as well as multiple majors.
“I love shaping the ball left and right and I love hitting knockdown shots,” Grinberg says. “It’s very creative, not just robotic. You have to think no matter what. You have to try to calculate the bounce somehow. You have to change your trajectories and the ball reacts with the way it lands. Everything can happen. It’s really fun. I can imagine that it’s going to be extremely challenging at Birkdale.”
Making his DP World Tour debut as a 14-year-old and dominating at the game’s most iconic venue is evidence that the spotlight doesn’t faze Grinberg, even if The Open is on a different scale entirely to anything he has ever experienced before. “I love pressure and if you don’t feel pressure you shouldn’t be playing any sport,” he says. That means you don’t care.”
Grinberg won’t set any targets other than to enjoy himself at Birkdale, though. The thing he is relishing most is the chance to glean insight from the world’s best players on how to prepare during these majors weeks, which he hopes to adopt on his own unique journey.
A journey, of course, that would have never been had Grinberg taken the familiar route on a breezy summer cycle ride back in Kyiv all those ago.
He smiles.
“Maybe it’s just meant to be.”