And just like that, the worst-kept secret in golf is revealed. The 2028 Open Championship is to be held at Royal Lytham & St Annes, a club in northwest England that is lapped not by the Irish Sea, which is only a few hundred yards away, but houses, schools and a railway line.
Royal Lytham has none of the rugged terrain of Royal St George’s, the captivating beauty of Turnberry, the fairness of Muirfield. It does not have the historical longevity of the Old Course at St Andrews nor the stark brutality of Carnoustie.
Instead it is an out-and-back course with a depth and variety of golfing history that is greater than almost any other course: 11 Opens, two Ryder Cups, five Women’s Opens and five Senior Opens, a Walker Cup and a Curtis Cup, and five Amateur Championships. Starting unusually with a par-3, it is a course that requires shot-making and accuracy over a bunker-strewn landscape set amidst surroundings that even the most linguistically gifted would struggle to describe as anything more than mundane.
Lytham and your correspondent, now there’s a partnership that goes back a long way. In 1961 I was a gawky teenager who tuned in on a crackling radio to the Ryder Cup being held there while compulsorily standing on the touchline watching a school first XV rugby match. Of the 10 postwar Opens at this venerable course, I have attended the past six. It is where in 1926 Bobby Jones won the first of his three Opens and where Seve Ballesteros won the first and last of his three Opens.
It is where the holes on the practice putting green behind the first tee are smaller than on the course, where one of the first stand-alone Dormy Houses was built, where for the 1974 Open the 1.68-inch diameter ball was made mandatory.
It is the course where once there were almost as many bunkers as there are days in the year. There are still 17 on the 18th. And it is the home club of Colin Maclaine, one of the game’s wisest and most respected administrators on both sides of the Atlantic.
Some history, some pedigree, some course.
Is it Royal Lytham & St Anne’s or Royal Lytham & St Annes? The dashed apostrophe. Where does it belong?
Lytham getting its first Open for 16 years didn’t just happen. Even a club of its standing has to move with the times and it has built a new practice ground, straightened out and lengthened an existing hole, the 11th, and given a touch here and a dab there to other parts of the course to accommodate the near 300,000 spectators the R&A hopes for this July – and at most future Opens. To think that 90,000 spectators attended the 1974 Open at Lytham.
“It is a better golf course now,” a member said last week. “We are over the moon to be having the Open in 2028. Absolutely delighted.”
This scrutiny of Royal Lytham does not distract from discussions about what is happening at Turnberry and Muirfield, two other past Open venues not currently on the rota. As golf courses they are magnificent, Muirfield as fair as can be, Turnberry as scenically stunning as can be. But if they were oysters you would say there is grit in each. Both are mired in the difficulties that Mark Darbon, chief executive of the R&A, spoke of last year, and there is little positive news concerning the Open returning to either course.
Muirfield’s accommodation for cars for an Open is of concern and for an Open it needs a new practice ground. “It has a few on-course issues that are ongoing in our minds,” Darbon said last week with his usual brand of optimistic diplomacy.
One is whether the club is prepared to accommodate as many spectators as the R&A now want at an Open when barely half that number attended the last Open there, in 2013. Another is what the membership wants.
Though Turnberry’s association with the current president of the United States might be a problem to some, perhaps many, for the R&A the venue has road and rail issues, access and egress, and thus it remains, to use one of Darbon’s favourite phrases, an “ongoing issue.” And last week he admitted he did not have much up-to-date news.
Meanwhile, the R&A is actively negotiating to stage an Open at Portmarnock in the Republic of Ireland and while it is true that numerous of its events have been held at the distinguished Dublin club, never has one of those been an Open.
Would the R&A hold the Open outside of the U.K. at Portmarnock?
OISIN KENIRY, R&A VIA GETTY IMAGES
The prospect of the game’s oldest major championship leaving the shores of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland for the shores of another country is not one that is universally welcomed.
“We are Royal Charter, British, and [the Open] is British to our core,” said one R&A member. “It has been held in Britain for more than 150 years. How on earth could we think of taking it out of the U.K.?
“Portmarnock is not about anything other than the honeypot of Dublin with 12 major U.S. corporates who will buy endless corporate hospitality and make the thing a financial success. There is a £350 million economic benefit to the area the Open Championship goes to and we’re going to take that to Ireland? It has me fizzing.”
A footnote: Royal Lytham & St Annes has been at the centre of one of the great debates in golf. Is it Royal Lytham & St Anne’s or Royal Lytham & St Annes? The dashed apostrophe. Where does it belong? “The Lytham Century and Beyond,” first published just after the turn of this century, includes the apostrophe but the blessed and late lamented “The Golfer’s Handbook,” a bible of the game, did not – nor does anybody else much since.
The sad fact is that nowadays you are more likely to see an albatross in the sky than an apostrophe in its title. Much as GGP welcomes the return of Royal Lytham, it regrets the demise of the apostrophe from its proper name.
Top: Royal Lytham & St Annes
DAVID CANNON, GETTY IMAGES
