baked-out Open Championship<\/a> when he strolled into the Royal Birkdale interview room this morning.<\/p>\nThe Southport links is looking gloriously brown, the fairways running firm and incredibly fast, and it is only Tuesday, with more sunshine to beat down on the course before go time on Thursday.<\/p>\n
Not since Francesco Molinari\u2019s win at Carnoustie eight years ago have the fairways been this hard at an Open venue. A younger and less battle-hardened Rahm missed the cut after a second round 78 on that occasion on the Angus links, but nowadays the Spaniard is a different animal.<\/p>\n
\u201cI may draw a little bit of inspiration from Carnoustie because right now it\u2019s playing somewhat similar,\u201d Rahm said. \u201cI thought, \u2018oh, the rough is thin. You can miss fairways, and I try to hit one too many drivers and ended up going home on Saturday.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cFrom what I\u2019ve learned in the past, if you start pulling out drivers in an Open Championship, you can do a good job short term. You can maybe get away with it one round. Over four rounds, you\u2019re going to start finding spots you don\u2019t want to be in, and you\u2019re going to pay the price.<\/p>\n
\u201cMore so than ever, when it\u2019s firm, you want to be in the fairway so you can have more control over the golf ball, because out of the rough you start having fliers and the ball can release so much where even if you\u2019re 100 yards away, it\u2019s tricky to find the greens. Putting the ball where you need to put it off the tee is going to be important.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rahm, therefore, is predicting irons off tees to be the theme of the week. They will run forever, and if weaved between bunkers, will leave only wedges into plenty of greens.<\/p>\n
Driver, though, is still in play as an aggressive option. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt definitely is,\u201d he confirmed. \u201cOn 16 [a 393-yard par-4] yesterday, playing with Josele [Ballester], he hit driver, and if you hit it on line, he definitely would have reached.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it wasn\u2019t on the green, it would have been very close. The problem is how difficult is it going to be with a wayward drive when you can hit 6-iron, wedge? That\u2019s what you need to gauge.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf we have the same wind on a Sunday and somebody needs to make up strokes, yeah, it could be a very viable option. It would be hard to say. On a hole like 11, it\u2019s much narrower, maybe a little bit more difficult to do so. 16 was a bit more feasible depending on the pin location.\u201d <\/p>\n
So what will Rahm\u2019s strategy be off the tee this week? <\/p>\n
\u201cIt all depends on the wind,\u201d Rahm said. \u201cWith the wind we had yesterday, we all hit 5- or 6-iron on 11 and still almost reached that bunker on the left. We hit 5- or 6-irons on 16 and some people reached the bunker on the left. [On the 10th], you could make an argument for a 5-iron as well, and if it keeps getting firmer and stays warm with the same wind direction, you could have quite a few holes where that 6-iron is going 280 yards.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s unprecedented for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n
Rahm believes Birkdale\u2019s distinction from the other Open venues is in its brutality, particularly since major changes made back in 2024<\/a> ahead of this tournament.<\/p>\n\u201cThey\u2019ve made it narrower. They\u2019ve added bunkers, moved fairways closer to hazards, added longer tees,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n
\u201cOn a golf course that was already difficult, they\u2019ve made it more difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Open Championship is going to have a very different feel this week. Just ask Jon Rahm\u2026 It\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":801479,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[443],"tags":[49,48,622,82],"class_list":["post-801478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801478\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/801479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}