{"id":15317,"date":"2025-07-22T11:27:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T11:27:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/15317\/"},"modified":"2025-07-22T11:27:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T11:27:08","slug":"is-it-time-the-open-returned-to-donald-trumps-turnberry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/15317\/","title":{"rendered":"Is it time The Open returned to Donald Trump’s Turnberry?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Donald Trump<\/a> is due to visit his Scottish golf courses, including those at\u00a0Trump International in Aberdeen<\/a>shire, later this week and is expected to receive a frosty reception from protestors. This will not deter him\u00a0from pushing the case for Turnberry, while officials here will seize the opportunity to parlay with the President on matters such as trade tariffs and the offshore oil industry.\n<\/p>\n

\n Read more:\n<\/p>\n

\n The punters who piled into Rory McIlroy overnight on Saturday to overhaul Scheffler’s four-shot lead following the Irishman’s spirited performance in the third round took a calculated gamble and lost. Betting on the eventual return of The Open\u00a0to Turnberry is an equally tricky proposition.\n<\/p>\n

\n \u201cYou see the scale of their setup here [at Royal Portrush] and we\u2019ve got some work to do on the road, rail and accommodation infrastructure around Turnberry,” Mr Darbon told reporters last week. \u201cWe\u2019ve explicitly not taken it out of our pool of venues but we\u2019d need to address those logistical challenges should we return.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n Asked directly if the resort’s ownership will impact the decision on Turnberry, Mr Darbon said this is a\u00a0“somewhat hypothetical question” unless these other issues are addressed.\n<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI met a couple of months ago with Eric Trump and some of the leadership from the Trump golf organisation and from Turnberry,” he added. “We had a really good discussion.\n<\/p>\n

\n Read more:\n<\/p>\n

\n \u201cI think they understand clearly where we\u2019re coming from. We talked through some of the challenges that we have so we\u2019ve got a good dialogue with them.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n While a bit short of a resounding endorsement this is a softening in the R&A’s stance under previous chief executive Martin Slumbers, who suggested on numerous occasions that the famed Ailsa course would not host The Open while under the ownership of Donald Trump.\n<\/p>\n

\n Speaking to the Golf<\/a> Channel the month before retiring from the R&A in December 2024, Mr Slumbers said:\u00a0\u201cWe will not be taking any events there until we are comfortable that the whole dialogue will be about golf.\n<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat situation is something we\u2019re still not comfortable with at the moment, but that could evolve in the coming years.\u201d\n<\/p>\n

\n Looking ahead to later this week, my colleague Brian Taylor put forward his views a few days ago as to whether the UK Prime Minister or Scotland’s First Minister should be more concerned about meeting with President Trump on his forthcoming trip. Both are scheduled to do so.\n<\/p>\n

\n Read more:\n<\/p>\n

\n Brian’s conclusion? Well, both meetings offer opportunities: “A chance to convince this most mercurial leader that he should change tack on tariffs, that global trade is in jeopardy. Or, at least, a chance to try.”\n<\/p>\n

\n Yet both\u00a0Keir Starmer<\/a> and John Swinney<\/a> can expect criticism for engaging with Mr Trump.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n

\n I’ll leave the political optics for others to wrangle with but I can’t help imagining the moment when First Minister Swinney broaches the subject of Scotch whisky exports to the US, which are being disrupted by higher tariffs. I’d lay a wager that “The Open” and “Turnberry” are\u00a0among the first 20 words in\u00a0President Trump’s response.\n<\/p>\n

\n The final tally has yet to be verified, but based on advance ticket sales the R&A estimated back in April\u00a0crowds totalling 278,000\u00a0throughout last week’s competition on the Dunluce links at Royal Portrush.\n<\/p>\n

\n When confirmed\u00a0\u2013\u00a0let’s be realistic, it will be confirmed \u2013\u00a0this will be the second-best attended Open in history after some 290,000 people descended on St Andrews in 2022 for its 150th anniversary. More than 258,000 fans attended last year’s tournament\u00a0at Royal Troon<\/a>, making it third on the all-time list.\n<\/p>\n

\n Read more:\n<\/p>\n

\n Size matters\u00a0in the modern model of this historic competition, and numbers such as those above dwarf the roughly 123,000 spectators who made the trip to Turnberry when the Ayr<\/a>shire resort last hosted The Open.\n<\/p>\n

\n With the exception of 2020 and 2021\u00a0\u2013 when the event was cancelled and the following year restricted by Covid containment measures\u00a0\u2013 Turnberry has by far the lowest attendance record of the last 17 years. The next closest is Muirfield in 2013 (142,000), another hopeful hampered by logistics which\u00a0is vying for a slot after being reinstated to The Open rota in 2017.\n<\/p>\n

\n Put another way, crowd\u00a0numbers in all of the last four years since the pandemic have comfortably more than doubled the turnout at Turnberry in 2009.\n<\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat\u2019s really important for us because not only do we want to showcase this wonderful championship to as many people as possible, but it\u2019s important for us in terms of our commercial model because everything that we generate from The Open, we then reinvest back into the game all around the world,” Mr Darbon said earlier this year.\n<\/p>\n

\n In this he clearly agrees with his predecessor Mr Slumbers, who was fond of saying that “big-time sport needs a big-time crowd”. Questions of capacity appear to have\u00a0overtaken politics in the quest to return The Open to Turnberry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Donald Trump is due to visit his Scottish golf courses, including those at\u00a0Trump International in Aberdeenshire, later this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15318,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[5904,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-15317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15317\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15318"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}