There’s one thing that nobody prepares you for about bearing witness to a (we’re talking golf here, so adjust the following phrase accordingly) major news event: How quickly it happens.
That was the first thought that arrived in my head on Friday night at the Open Championship, when I glanced up to see one of the tournament leaders, Bryson DeChambeau, evidently engaged in a yelling match with an official from the R&A.
I’d had no warning that DeChambeau was in consideration for a tournament-altering two-shot penalty when I’d sat down at my desk 30 seconds earlier. But once it happened, I knew immediately and unquestionably that my night and week — and those of dozens of colleagues around me — had just changed. The question immediately became…now what?
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It was a glorious week at Royal Birkdale for the GOLF Magazine squad — but a long week, too. We arrived on Monday morning and worked until the wee hours of the following Monday. There was golf to see, historic courses to experience, stars to write about, controversy to cover, and eventually, a champion to crown.
We worked almost nonstop creating content for you, our beloved audience. But that’s the funny part: There was still so much that slipped through the cracks.
Today I’m picking up the pieces of the best bits and bobs you never heard about from Open week 2026 — and I’d like to start with the story behind the story of this tournament week: Bryson DeChambeau.
My very first day “in the field” for GOLF Magazine came on March 12, 2020 — the opening round at the 2020 Players Championship, and also the day that the world ended.
I remember getting dinner in Jacksonville Beach on Wednesday evening, March 11, with my colleague, Dylan Dethier, when the news started to break. We’d just finished up a round of golf at the Jax Beach Muni, and we were seated around a U-shaped table enjoying beers and dinner in front of the flicker of the bar TV. There were increasingly ominous chyrons crawling across the screens, but still — we had no idea we were enjoying our last few unspoiled moments before a global pandemic ripped a hole in our twenties.
And then it happened. League after major pro sports league announced they was postponing competitions indefinitely on account of Covid. Flights were getting canceled and countries were getting banned and people were rushing to the store to buy face masks. Rudy Gobert, who hours earlier had infamously touched each of the press conference microphones in a display of defiance against the virus, was among the first players in the world to test positive.
Life as we knew it had changed by the time we stepped out of the bar. But one thing hadn’t: Dylan and I still had to do our job.
We went back to the Holiday Inn in Jax Beach that night and mapped out our approach for the following day. We would wake up early. Very early. And get through the gates to the golf tournament as soon as they’d let us. Once we were there, Dylan would set out on the range canvassing players and agents and caddies and associated members of the Pro Golf Cognoscenti for their intel. And I — on my very first day traveling for my very first big boy job — would figure out … something else.
By the end of the day, we had two stories. One terrific, in-depth, expertly reported piece covering what the hell happened. And one … talking to the fans who were trying to figure out what the hell was going on themselves. I’ll let you figure out which one I wrote.
But the biggest takeaway to emerge from that day for me was also clear: I was a reporter. I was a news-gatherer. I was a witness to history.
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When Bryson went ballistic on Open Championship Friday night, this was the history I leaned upon. I knew my colleague, Sean Zak, was somewhere out in the field, likely literally running to the scene of the crime on the side of No. 5. That left me to be a set of eyes and ears for our audience … somewhere else.
At first I spent a little while watching the broadcast. Typically I avoid the broadcast if I reasonably can — it’s the only thing that everybody else is seeing — but in this instance it also felt critical to our understanding of the event, because it was the only place you could reliably find footage of the ordeal in the high-grass. Once Bryson hopped back in the cart to come into scoring, I more or less leapt from my chair and ran out to the clubhouse, where I figured I might catch a glimpse of the Big Man arguing his case. I didn’t. The carts pulled in behind a back entrance and Bryson slipped into scoring right under my nose.
Then I hustled back into the media center to see if we’d learned something about the nature of the ruling. We hadn’t. So I went back out to the area outside of scoring where I found what seemed like two-thirds of the assembled golf press, including Sean … waiting around.
This felt like a poor use of time, so while they all figured that out, I went inside to try jot down some quick thoughts on what I’d witnessed. Thankfully Bryson soon emerged again — off to the range without a whisper about whether he’d be playing in the golf tournament or not — and word soon emerged that he had, in fact, been assessed a two-shot penalty. At this point I knew that he had become the story of the night, so I hustled out to the range to find a place different enough from where Sean was posted up to conceivably capture something new and different than him.
I wound up waiting on the range for what felt like 90 minutes, but was probably closer to 45, as Bryson hit balls deep into the darkness before disappearing into the night without a word. I tried to capture a few notable nuggets for Sean, and for social media, before returning to the media center close to 11 p.m. for the third and final time.
At this point, I realized another truism about breaking news events: Often, everybody has the same exact information, or lack thereof. So I thought back to the only true differentiating factor I was certain I had: A conversation I’d had seconds before Bryson’s penalty had been assessed, way back around 8:30 p.m., with Mike Tirico, the famed sports broadcaster who — in a strange feat of broadcasting and good fortune — had also served as spotter for all 18 holes of Bryson’s round. And I decided that my Bryson story for the evening would be centered around Mike’s experience following the Bryson group for what wound up being the most consequential round of the tournament week.
The scene around the 18th hole at the Open Championship is one of the very best in golf. The enormous grandstand. The long walk up the fairway into the cavern of blue. The feeling of imminent history.
When Ryan Fox arrived up the 18th fairway, it was also something else: locked down.
An enormous barricade separated every inch of the 18th hole from the rest of the golf course at Royal Birkdale, making it so that the bubble surrounding the hole was perfectly contained. If you were inside the ropes, you were staying inside the ropes until Fox’s group finished the 18th. If you were outside, you were staying outside.
The closed-quarters security made it tough to find anywhere to watch Fox hit his approach and birdie putt from, but after some good sleuthing, I was able to capture a neat, different view from behind the green.
The feeling I was struck by was one that didn’t get conveyed on the broadcast: Surprise. Not just from the crowd, which was seeing a relatively anonymous pro win one of the biggest events in the sport, but also from Ryan Fox himself, whose celebration when his putt on the 18th found the bottom of the hole was delayed by just a beat longer than most golfers celebrating a 72nd-hole make — as if to suggest Fox needed an extra moment to believe his own eyes.
The pause was just one small detail as part of a much larger winner’s story for Fox, and for those of us who got to see it from the right side of the barricade, there was no forgetting it.
If you ever get the chance to travel to Europe during a World Cup, you should do it. And if you ever get the chance to see England play a World Cup ceremony while in England? Drop everything and get your rear end on the plane.
As you probably know, this was not the World Cup that England fans were dreaming about. It was not, in fact, coming home. And yet to witness the genuine passion and intensity shared by everyone in Southport on Wednesday evening was something I’ll carry with me for the rest of my life.
That scene was a glimpse into the very best of sports. People from all over the community came out of the woodwork to celebrate a common goal together. They filled the downtown promenade by the thousands. They wore the same colors. They danced and drank and sung and screamed and cussed.
When England scored to go up 1-0, I literally wondered if the cops would have to disperse the crowds in the event of a victory. When Argentina scored twice in the final 10 minutes to drive a dagger straight through England’s heart, I also wondered if the cops would have to be called, though for an entirely different reason.
The suffering that filled the promenade — and, strangely, a very small men’s bathroom — immediately after the loss was not something I’d wish on anybody, and yet it reminded me of something core about sports: The stakes are the point. The only reason it feels so good to see our teams win is because we know how sad it would feel to see them lose.
There’s a lot of losing in golf, too. Maybe, just maybe, one of the players in the field took away something from witnessing the pain up close.
There was plenty of hubbub around the shade of this year’s Open Championship, which walked right up to the edge of burnt out all week long at Royal Birkdale. But on Monday of championship week, the GOLF team was treated to another world-class test: Royal Lytham and St. Annes, which will host the AIG Women’s Open in just a few days’ time (and the Open in ’28!).
To say Lytham is a world-class links test is an understatement. But to play it in the conditions we saw on Monday, when the course was also in a glorious shade of brown and the fairways played like cement? It was the only way to understand the full repertoire of golf shots needed to survive when the ladies come through here next week.
Personally I find that a good test of a golf course is how many clubs I bring with me around the green. It speaks to the variety of shots needed to score well, and by extension, the variety of the golf course. By my count, I used no fewer than 6 clubs around the greens at Lytham (4-iron, 6-iron, 8-iron, 54-degree, 60-degree, putter).
I think I’ll be watching the Women’s Open closely.
Something I love about golf in the UK is that there’s more than just great golf. There’s great golf history. Somehow, it seems every course you stumble upon has a link straight back to the origins of the sport. All you have to do is ask around to figure out the connections.
You don’t need to spend much time in Southport to know the town is something of a golf Mecca. There’s Royal Birkdale and Hillside. And then there’s Hesketh and Tommy Fleetwood’s old Southport muni. And that’s not even counting some of the other gems, like Formby and Formby Ladies, less than 15 minutes up the road.
But the course that most captured my imagination during tournament week was not any of the ones listed above, it was Southport and Ainsdale, the club walking distance from the Merseyside Rail. From the outside, Southport and Ainsdale seems like a classic links test: Bouncy fairways, death-defying pot bunkers, high yellow grass that blazes in the late-afternoon sun. But from up closer, the course is much more than that: It’s also a piece of golf history.
You see, Southport and Ainsdale was not just a great club in the early 20th century, it was also host of the 4th and 6th Ryder Cups — one win belonging to the GB&I, one win to the U.S.
The course is still in tournament condition these days, and still a total delight to play. But best of all? Each tee time during Open week came with an invitation to explore international membership in the club, with memberships starting around $2,000.
Golf in the homeland: Still great, and as it turns out, still eminently affordable.
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