2024 British Open Course Breakdown - Royal Troon

4 months ago by Joe I (TourPicks)

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Professional golf has made its way to the coast of Scotland, set to take on Royal Troon Golf Club for the 152nd installment of The Open Championship and crown the top scoring as Champion Golfer of the Year. You'll need to put a coffee on early in the morning as the golf will begin while most of the United States is still fast asleep. Royal Troon, certainly not the most acclaimed venue in the Open Championship rota, does present a proper test and has proven itself to be a worthy host over time. This year marks the 10th time that Royal Troon has hosted The Open.

Royal Troon will give you all the looks and feels of traditional links-golf, but it's noteworthy that many in the architectural space have described Troon as a play with three distinct acts. Each set of six holes has its own identity and will ask the pros different questions which we will look to explore further in this article. We can rely on statistical trends that we have seen in previous Open Championships and combine them with course-specific insights to gain a better understanding of the course and the players best suited for success.

I wanted to use this piece to hopefully highlight a few different angles and elements that may be less spoken about to provide some value in this course preview. I'm hopeful that you can utilize this for building lineups and making your stat models to provide you with the best possible chances of success this week. It's a touch bittersweet that this is the final Major Championship of the season but I have put a ton of effort into my research with hopes of landing another winner for consecutive weeks in Scotland. Without further ado, here is everything you need to know about Royal Troon.

An Introduction to Royal Troon

The year was 1878, and the head groundskeeper at the infamous Prestwick Golf Club decided to procure some land next door to build a modest 5-hole golf course and thus founded Royal Troon Golf Club. Located along the coast of Troon, South Ayrshire, Scotland, the club quickly gained notoriety in the area for its coastal landscape and expanded to 18 holes by 1888. By the early 1900's the club had earned a reputation for its demanding layout and hosted its first Open Championship in 1923.

The success ultimately paved the way for Royal Troon to become a regular destination with the Open Championship rota and 2024 will mark the 10th time in which it has hosted The Open. Over the years, Royal Troon has done an excellent job of preserving its character and naturalness while maintaining its ability to provide a proper test for the best players in the world. As with any links-style golf course, the difficulty primarily relies on one giant uncontrollable factor...the weather.

With a rich history that nearly dates back 150 years, Royal Troon has become best known for two things. The epic 36-hole duel in 2016 between Phil Mickelson and Henrik Stenson where they completely boatraced the field to square off in a back and forth heavyweight fight on the weekend, and possible the most famous par-3 in the rota known as the Postage Stamp. To understand Royal Troon, you must understand the three segments of the course and how the differ. I'm going to go through and give me detailed notes on each of the three acts. Until then, here is the drone flyover of every hole at Royal Troon Golf Club. Enjoy!

A front nine featuring the longest hole in Open history and the iconic Postage Stamp. A back nine considered one of the toughest in golf.

Royal Troon is a stunning championship venue, and often tells a tale of two nines.

Explore that tale with this year’s Open course guide in… pic.twitter.com/CpoSUWPFFa

— The Open (@TheOpen) July 15, 2024

Scorecard with changes from 2016:

Royal Troon - A Beginning, Middle, and End

Act 1 - The opening six holes (#1-6)

The word that comes to mind when I think about the opening six holes at Royal Troon is opportunity. One of the unique things about the Open Championship is that every player in the field will start on hole #1. They'll be met with a relatively simple and dare I say easy challenge, but you also have the inherent pressure that players KNOW they have to score quickly out of the gates. The opening holes play along the coast and provide incredible views of the Scottish Sea as you make your way out to the sand dunes.

Players will start with three consecutive par 4s. Each is under 390 yards and gives players a generous fairway with multiple landing areas. In 2016, the majority of players took iron or something less-than-Driver off the tee, prioritizing the fairway with an understanding that they will likely only have a short wedge left in. Taking a deeper look at the total distance to the front edge of the green, I think we may see more players hit Driver this year. They could in fact be reachable for the longer players, but at worst you can try to get yourself into a green side bunker while knowing that you only need to get up and down for Birdie from there.

Here is a look at the soft opening three holes at Royal Troon. In 2016, the prevailing strategy was to lay back off the tee and get yourself to wedge range.

Part of me thinks Bryson and Rory may have other plans this week... pic.twitter.com/Wxu6a5ra6I

— Joe I (@TourPicks) July 15, 2024

Holes 4-6 feature two of the three par 5s at Royal Troon. The fourth hole should play as one of the easiest holes of the week, offering players the opportunity to come storming out of the gates. The par 5 sixth hole is listed at 623, upped 22 yards from when they played The Open in 2016, and will now be on record as the longest hole in Open history. All in all, I would not be surprised if we see some players start -5 through the first six holes. It's a gentle handshake to welcome you to Troon before you make it to the dunes and this course starts fighting back.

Act 2 - The Diabolical Dunes (Holes #7-12)

Once you enter the sand dunes that define the terrain of Act 2, you will immediately feel like you are on a different course. The landscape and topography is no longer flattish and the difficulty ratchets up to a new degree after easing players into feeling comfortable. In the first six holes, you play three par 4s, all of which are under 390 yards. In the next six holes during Act 2, players will face five different par 4s, all over 400 yards in length.

The secret sauce to having a great par 3 is creating a golf hole that players think about all day, and they can feel it coming when they get close to it. That's exactly what you have in the eighth hole, infamously coined as the Postage Stamp. The green is incredibly small and narrow, playing downhill from an elevated and intensely exposed to the coastal gusts. The green is protected by 5 bunkers including the coffin bunker. We have seen some of the biggest implosions in Open Championship history take part on this 120-yard masterpiece. Buckle up, you are going to be seeing a ton of coverage on this hole.

Some of the best content all year are the daily inside the ropes videos on the R&A YouTube page

On Sunday, they started with Tiger playing the postage stamp and then took you alongside Scottie Scheffler and Sam Burns for their practice round

Full video: https://t.co/dNueDC7IvD pic.twitter.com/al5nmpdLfI

— Patrick McDonald (@pmcdonaldCBS) July 15, 2024

Once players make the turn, they will be met with two of the most difficult holes on the property at #10 and #11. Both holes feature blind tee shots that give professional players fits. Hole #10 is 450 yards to a narrow fairway where you have to pick a target deep in the distance. Hole #11 plays along a railway and is 498 yards, typically playing into a prevailing headwind. The tee shot must be played blindly over a giant mound of gorse and fescue. In 2016, Hole #11 played as the most difficult scoring hole of the entire year in professional golf. A par is a fantastic score at eleven.

Act 3 - The Finale (Holes #13-18)

Things don't get any easier and players turn back toward the clubhouse to play the closing stretch of holes. The holes are long and heavily contoured in the fairways and around the green surfaces. The pot bunkers really come into play on these final six holes. If your ball lands in one, it will require a chip out sideways and creates a genuine hazard. Holes #13 and #15 are some of the longest par 4s on the course and create a sandwich for the par 3 14th hole which has been lengthened by 22 yards and will now play 200 yards total.

The par 5 16th hole is your last real chance at birdie. After such a difficult stretch of holes where players are holding on for dear life, there will be a ton of pressure to score here, particularly if you know that you are chasing the leader. Hole #17 will now play as a 242-yard par 3 and has an tiny green for such a long approach shot. It's made effectively even smaller in terms of the landing area required to hold the green due to some dramatic run-offs around the edges. The last hole is a bit anticlimatic as a 458-yard par 4, but does have some cavernous fairway bunkers. It also features Out-of-Bounds just 3-4 yards behind the green which could come into play with any back pin location. After that, players will be ready for a stiff Scottish whisky at the bar...trust me.

3 yards to the pavement pic.twitter.com/Pt8Laxm5xU

— Matt Gannon (@matt_gannon_) July 15, 2024

Statistical Considerations

When you dive into the leaderboard from the 2016 Open Championship at Royal Troon, you have an eclectic group of players with different skill sets. It's really hard to find one stat that you can point to as a marker for success at Royal Troon. My gut says that like most Open Championship venues, the R&A typically prioritizes accuracy over power, thus setting up their courses to be overly penal for wayward misses. I'm going to weigh Driving Accuracy a good bit more than I would in most weeks.

Secondly, putting is just different across the pond. The greens are kept at a slower speed historically and it has been extremely rainy over the past eight weeks in the UK. I think they will play soft and slow, but unlike some other venues like Royal Liverpool and St. Andrews, these greens are not massive in size. In fact, they are relatively small. Therefore, I have less stock in lag putting and I am putting more emphasis on Putting inside 25 ft., particularly on slower-than-average surfaces.

The Open Championship has long carried a number of historical trends that have done a good job of narrowing down the list of potential winners. One of the biggest ones is Open experience. Nearly all of the last 10 winners have posted a top 10 result in a previous Open Championship before winning the claret jug. I can't be understated and proves the importance of having a knowledge base around this style of golf.

Lastly, I want to know how players have performed in the first three Majors this season. They have featured the best fields, the toughest courses, and the most pressure. It's rare that we have seen a player jump out of nowhere and suddenly win the Open Championship, even Brian Harman last year showed signs leading in. The last 10 winners of The Open have all been inside the Top 33 in the Official World Golf Rankings at the time of their victory.

WEATHER REPORT WED-SAT (as of 11 am on 7/15):

Preferred Lines:

My podcast this week which goes into greater detail on the golf course, including player skill sets that I believe are best suited for Royal Troon is now LIVE. I had the incredible Ben Coley as my guest to provide top-level insights and analysis. Enjoy!