Runner-up Matt Moloney was one of 44 Americans to play in the Amateur Championship.
Oisin Keniry, R&A via Getty Images
HOYLAKE, ENGLAND | No less than 44 Americans competed in this year’s Amateur Championship at Royal Liverpool, a significant rise on recent years, and there were many factors at play. In the first instance, the R&A had reached out to U.S. colleges, highlighting the quality and prestige of the championship.
But for many of the players who crossed the Atlantic, the triumph of Ethan Fang at Royal St. George’s 12 months ago was a vivid advertisement for both the tournament and links golf.
Two of the Americans who made the trip – Matt Moloney, who lost in the final to Ireland’s Stuart Grehan, and the man he beat in the last eight, Kihei Akina – spoke of Fang as a catalyst.
“I don’t know Ethan personally, but I watched his victory,” said Moloney, a University of Georgia student. “I knew that the championship is one of the best in the world and I began to appreciate how cool British seaside golf is. It’s very different to what I am used to, but it is beautiful and a lot of fun.”
Akina is part of the U.S. National Development Program and wears his Team USA cap proudly. The USGA initiative is playing catch-up with similar projects undertaken by the other nations participating in high-class amateur golf, and Akina is among the first wave of players.
“They encouraged all of us to come and I was funded,” Akina said. “I travelled with Max Herendeen, who is also on the program.”
It was not just Akina’s introduction to the original form of golf, it was also his first trip to Europe. Above and beyond that two-edged education, his imagination was also fuelled by the corridors of the Royal Liverpool clubhouse.
“I came here to prepare myself to play here in the future,” he said. “Spending time looking at photographs of my idols, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, has been awesome. There’s so much history here.”
One day, he hopes to add to that heritage.
Royal Liverpool, venue for the first Amateur Championship in 1885, hosted for a 19th time last week.
That inaugural event, won by Allan Macfie, who was a Scot and club member, was described by newspapers at the time as “the amateur championship of the golfing world”
The course hosted another seven Amateur Championships before the First World War and three of them were won by another Royal Liverpool member – the great John Ball who, in total, lifted the trophy eight times between 1888 and 1912, in addition to winning the Open in 1890.
“I have derived greater aesthetic and emotional pleasure from watching John Ball than from any other spectacle in the game,” wrote Bernard Darwin of a golfer who was scornful of what he considered modern gimmicks.
He refused to carry, never mind play with, a niblick (a 9-iron today), describing it as “another bloody spade” and he dismissed shallow parkland fairway bunkers as “geranium beds.”
In so many ways it would be downright cruel to take a step back in time, and to alert the cantankerous Ball to a future of AimPoint, strokes gained, Trackman and AI-driven clubfitting.
But it might be a lot of fun.
The championship’s return to Royal Liverpool was the first since 2000 when the winner was a man whose nationality would almost certainly have blown Ball’s brains inside out. In his time, of course, even American golfers were something of a novelty, so quite what he’d have made of Finland’s Mikko Ilonen lifting the trophy is anyone’s guess.
That triumph was a significant breakthrough moment for the Scandinavian country. At the time Finland had just 49 clubs and 50,000 golfers, success at elite amateur or professional level was unheard of, and courses were closed for six months a year because of the harsh northern winters.
Those non-summer months remain inhospitable to golf, but there are now more than 120 golf clubs in Finland and more than 150,000 registered golfers.
That transformation is not all Ilonen’s doing, but he has played an important role in it. He was not only the first Finnish winner of the Amateur Championship, it also earned him his nation’s first start in the Open Championship later that summer and, for the first time, an invitation to play in the Masters was posted to Finland.
Ilonen’s Augusta National debut came in the middle of his national service which presented problems. “Practising will be difficult but there will be no problem playing in most tournaments,” he said at the time.
Ilonen went on to enjoy an excellent DP World Tour career, claiming five victories before retiring in 2019, and he was back in Hoylake last week to mentor the Finnish youngsters who were inspired not just by his win 26 years ago, but also by his top-20 finish in the 2006 Open at Hoylake.
Another nation forever linked with Royal Liverpool is Argentina, because it was the home country of the popular Roberto De Vicenzo, who won the Open here in 1967.
Last week his compatriot Segundo Oliva Pinto, who completed back-to-back top-10 finishes on the Korn Ferry Tour earlier this year, carded rounds of 72-66 to ease through the stroke-play qualifier, eventually bowing out in the last 32.
“It’s my third time playing in the Amateur Championship and it’s good to finally have the opportunity to play match-play golf,” Pinto said. “There’s definitely a learning curve to playing links golf.”
Like the Finns, Argentineans retain great affection for the men who broke down barriers.
“Argentina has won only three majors and Roberto was the first winner of one here,” Pinto said. “He is our only Open champion. He was an inspiration when he played and still is.”
For one American, Joey Lenane of North Carolina State, the trip was heading in the wrong direction after he opened with a 77 at West Lancs and then started his second round with a double bogey on the second hole at Royal Liverpool.
Learning curves don’t have to end with glory or even come close to it, though. Sometimes they instead reveal character.
Lenane explained afterwards that he had told himself: “You can either give up now or you can just pick away at the round. You didn’t come 3,000 miles just to give up on the 20th hole. You can’t give up.”
Slowly his scores – and the trip – turned around. He completed the front nine with three birdies in four holes and then he added another four birdies in a row from the 11th.
“Momentum was on my side,” he said, but unfortunately he added a bogey at 15 before rebounding with two more par breakers at 16 and 17 to shoot 66. Ultimately he fell one stroke short of advancing to match play, but ended the week proud of having stood up to the challenge he faced on that third tee.
“My practice round might have been a 90,” he admitted. “It was so hard. I had no clue what I was doing. But I figured it out. I dug deep.”
The stroke-play stage of the championship was split between Royal Liverpool and West Lancs Golf Club, and the latter witnessed a hole-in-one by Irishman Jake Foley.
With 288 elite golfers playing 36 holes that achievement is probably to be expected. At the start of this month, however, the 15th hole at Royal Liverpool (the 17th when the Open is played there) witnessed a feat considerably more outlandish.
Playing partners of more than 30 years, Rob Davis (67 and playing off 10.8) and David Lewis (64 off 7.1), both made an ace on the 107-yard par-3.
It was a coincidence that the National Hole-in-One Registry estimated having odds of 17 million to 1. For perspective, flipping a coin and getting heads (or tails) 24 times in a row has odds of one in 16.7 million.
The short hole, built ahead of the 2023 Open, was initially deemed a little out of place – a piece of Whistling Straits on the Wirral, if you will. The good news is that such concerns have been acted on and it now feels more at one with its surroundings.
Akina, for one, is a big fan. He was when he watched the 2023 Open on television and he remains so having played it.
“A really cool hole,” the American said. “Right on the coast, windy, all sorts of fall-offs. I love a short par-3 and I especially love that one.”
That new hole was not the only change to the course ahead of the 2023 Open. The tee at the par-5 18th was pushed back and it had an impact – quite literally – that was unexpected.
To avoid the threat of the out-of-bounds down the right-hand side of the fairway, many of the bigger hitters took aim down the left, happy to take their chances with the wispy rough.
Unfortunately, that placed the galleries in the crosshairs and members were discussing last week that it was the busiest (which is to say most dangerous) spot the St John’s Ambulance has experienced at a 21st century Open hosted by the club.
Matt Cooper
