Open Championship Recap: Tommy Lad Shines, Rory Battles Back, Justin Thomas Struggles Again

Warren Little. Getty Images.

A quick recap on the action out at Royal Liverpool, where I am not. I legitimately don't know what to do with my hands. This is the first major championship I've missed in years and it's eating at me. But we've got our Korn Ferry event next week, and I spent last week traversing the country with the Fore Play production crew shooting videos. It was simply too much. 

That said, thanks to the advancement in motor sciences, one can actually watch the tournament from anywhere and then write blogs like this one from everywhere. So we'll fire up these recaps to get you caught up in case you can't wake up at 5 am for four straight days and subsist solely on caffeine and nicotine. Here we go…

Tommy Lad shine

Tommy Fleetwood's playing some of the best golf of his career. Now, he still hasn't gotten that first-PGA-Tour-win monkey off his back but he's done everything but—he lost in a playoff at the RBC Canadian Open, finished top 5 at the U.S. Open with a final-round 63 and comes in off a T6 finish at the Scottish Open. 

Great timing, then, for an Open Championship quite near where he grew up. Fleetwood and his caddie, Ian Finnis, are both from about 20 miles away from Hoylake and Tommy grew up playing the course quite frequently. He's a big Everton fan, the chief rival to Liverpool FC. If Rory McIlroy is the crowd favorite—he always is at the Open these days—Tommy's probably second, and he gave the crowd a ton to cheer about with a five-under 66 to share the lead with Christo Lamprecht, a South African 6'8" rising senior at Georgia Tech who shot the only round in the 60s ever by an amateur at Royal Liverpool. 

“I guess for any tournament you just want to get off to a fast start," Fleetwood told reporters after the round. "It's not really been my strength recently. Started tournaments pretty slow, so to get something going today felt really good. From the fifth or sixth hole onwards felt like I started hitting good golf shots and I had some chances, but my putts were close rolling at the hole. Just a case of finally getting on a run.”

Lamprecht also played early in the morning and while there are no "waves" at the Open—like the Masters, all players tee off on hole 1, which is different from the U.S. Open and PGA Championship, where guys go off 1 and 10 in the opening rounds—the guys who played earlier look like they're getting the good side of the draw. The wind picked up on Thursday afternoon and the course played a full shot harder, and the weather looks dicey on Friday morning. 

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As far as Lamprecht goes…no surprise, given his size, that he absolutely mashes the ball. Here's a little breakdown video that goes into his background and his unique move. 

Rory battles back, stays in the mix

McIlroy entered the week as the betting favorite based on an excellent month-plus stretch of golf. I've said this a bunch, but it's my belief that the PGA Tour-PIF deal was the best thing that could've happened to him. He learned, the hard way, that all the work and effort and time and energy he put into reshaping the future of the PGA Tour, of being the de facto face of one side of the schism, was almost all for naught. When it came time to make a deal, he wasn't even in the room. So now he's back to golf-only mode, and he's definitely got a little bit of a fuck-you edge to him. He canceled his pre-tournament press conference for the second straight major; it worked at LACC, where he finished solo second, and so he followed that same formula. 

Things flirted with falling off the rails when he bogeyed the par-4 12th to fall to +2 for the round but he battled back, birdieing both 14 and 15 to get back to level par and finished there. That's despite missing a two-foot putt early in the round and leaving one in the bunker on the par-5 finisher when he was just trying to play out sideways. 

That's been a theme and will be all week—Hoylake's bunkers don't just have the pancake-stack faces. They're also extremely flat, which means the ball doesn't roll down to the middle of them. You're going to see plenty of balls that come to rest just inches from the edge. Tony Finau putted one backwards. Jon Rahm had to play backwards, and I got a kick out of the sheepish applause from the crowd when he did so. 

Back to McIlroy—he played a lovely fourth then where he holed a 10-footer for par that…all together now…will make dinner taste a little better. 

Justin Thomas is riding the struggle bus

Is…is Justin Thomas not going to make the Ryder Cup team? It's a distinct possibility, which is hard to fathom given his stature in the game and the role he's played at past Ryder Cups. JT was one of the only bright spots when the U.S. got thrashed in Paris, and he was arguably the emotional leader of the team when they thumped the Europeans at Whistling Straits. Plus, he's got that natural pairing with Jordan Spieth.

But his game is in dire condition. JT missed the cut at the Masters. He made the cut on the number at the PGA Championship. He missed the cut at the Memorial and missed it badly at the U.S. Open, where he shot a second-round 81 that he himself called "embarrassing." 

His round Thursday was borderline difficult to watch. He shot yet another 80-plus round, this time an 11-over 82 that has you wondering if there's something physically wrong with the guy. He's never once had a spell nearly this bad, for this long. His agent told me after LACC that he's fine and just working through some swing things, and there were some initial positive signs—he finished top 10 at the Travelers and made the cut at the Scottish last week. But for him to shoot 80-plus in back-to-back majors is genuinely shocking, and he beat exactly one player in the 156-man field. 

JT's the ultimate gamer, and he'll be back, but there's a really good chance he has to rely on sponsor's invites just to get into next year's elevated events on the PGA Tour. 

Viktor Hovland got shat on

Literally.