British Open: Wind batters afternoon players at Royal Troon, ‘It’s brutal out there’

Matthew Southgate stepped before the microphones at Royal Troon, running a hand through his hair as if he had just survived a dozen nightmares. When asked to assess the conditions at the British Open on Friday, a weary Southgate didn’t hold back.

“I have to lie down in a dark room,” he sighed. “It’s brutal out there. That’s one of the toughest experiences I’ve ever had on a golf course. There was crosswind everywhere and there were pins on the same side that the wind was coming from. It’s just so, so hard. It was really survival golf.”

The weather at the British Open is uncertain even under the best of circumstances, and Friday at Royal Troon was, as the players later confirmed, one of the worst. The wind howled at over 30 miles per hour. As if the wind speed wasn’t bad enough, the wind direction was unpredictable, changing not only from one end of the course to the other, but from hole to hole, or even from tee to green.

“Mentally, I mean, it can drive you crazy. It’s just so tough,” Abraham Ancer said. “It’s hard to make putts. It’s hard to put the ball where you want it to be, you know. Most of the time you feel like you’ve hit a good shot and you know where it’s going to end up. You have to have a little bit of luck here, too.”

The afternoon draw was met with a heavy blow. At 7 p.m. local time, only two players on the course had a round under par — Jon Rahm at 2-under, MK Kim at 1-under. All 10 players under par after two rounds played in the morning wave, either pulling off the course or clinging to their lives before the wind reached critical levels.

“It’s funny, I think that kind of 5-, 10-mile-an-hour difference in wind speed makes a big difference. The first nine holes were so, so tough. The whole course is so tough,” Laurie Canter said. “You’re looking at a lot of putts that are, at best, 30 to 50 feet in some cases. It just feels like you’re grinding every hole.”

The wind disrupted everything in the area, from the players on the course to the planes in the sky en route to nearby Prestwick:

“I think today it went over the edge where the elements were in control, meaning you were aiming straight at a pin and you cut the ball and you saw the ball hook. So the wind was in control of the ball. The player couldn’t control the wind. I think that’s the tipping point today,” Justin Rose said. “Yesterday I felt like it was playable. I felt like yesterday it was a fair fight. Today it was just a little bit more survival.”

Rose tied with five others for the day’s lowest round at 3-under and is just two strokes behind leader Shane Lowry, who has dropped to 7-under this week.

While so many others have struggled this week, Rose — who fought his way through the qualifiers — has been having the time of his life. Rose’s birdie on 18 elicited a Ryder Cup-style roar:

On the other side of the leaderboard, the winds have knocked a number of notable names out of the tournament altogether. Both US Open heroes, Bryson DeChambeau and Rory McIlroy, struggled from the jump on Thursday and teed off in the heart of the wind on Friday. Just weeks after fighting out a duel for the ages, both McIlroy and DeChambeau will be heading home disappointed and early.

At least McIlroy could laugh about this too-small, too-late birdie:

The half-round of the day belonged to Joaquin Niemann, who managed to go 4-under on the back nine after making a stunning quintuple bogey on the Postage Stamp, the par-3 8th. “It was a tough hole. It was a tough break,” Niemann said. “I knew if I recovered quickly, I could come back because I played some great golf.” He is on even par, seven shots behind the leader

Trying to predict the weather in Scotland is like trying to predict how McIlroy will play on any given hole, but it looks like the wind will be in the single digits on Saturday … and the rain will pick up in the afternoon, right around the time the leaders tee off. The best weather day of the tournament may well be Sunday, but then again, in Troon, “best weather” is a dubious concept and a moving target.