Stage is set as The Open swings into action at Portrush
The Open always provides plenty of food for thought, doesn't it?
Mark Darbon, the new chief executive of the R&A, is overseeing his first championship this week having taken over the reins from Martin Slumbers at the tail end of 2024.
The amiable Englishman came from a very different ball game of rugby. Anything, then, that has struck you about the world of golf, Mr Darbon?
'I've learnt pretty quickly that the golf industry loves a good lunch and a good dinner,' he said with a smile. Maybe not at bloomin' Portrush prices, though.
Hopefully, we all get to feast on some fine golfing fare over the next four days as the 153rd Open finally gets cracking.
The glorious, sweeping Dunluce links will provide a wonderfully robust examination. Poise and patience is demanded, driving accuracy will be at a premium while dunting the ball from tight lies to those elevated putting surfaces will call for guile, confidence and a strong nerve.
When local hero, Rory McIlroy, takes to the tee to get his assault on the Claret Jug underway, it will be impossible for the mind not to zip back to 2019 and the jaw-dropping start he made to the championship here six years ago.
With the kind of burdensome weight on his shoulders that would've buckled the legs of Atlas, it all went hideously wrong as McIlroy crashed to a debris-strewn 79.
Royal Portrush has a 16th called Calamity and a 17th known as Purgatory and poor old Rory got a grim, bitter taste of both those things on the very first hole when he racked up a ruinous quadruple eight during an engrossingly appalling spectacle that really should've been held behind a police cordon.
As he returns in 2025, there's something of a score to settle. But there's nothing to prove. His win in April's Masters ended his 11-year major drought and finally gave him the career grand slam.
He didn't just get a monkey off his back. It was almost like an entire planet of the apes.
'How good would it be to bookend the major season; win the first one, win the last one?,' pondered McIlroy, who seems to be back in fine golfing fettle after a post-Masters malaise.
Many will be backing him to do it this week. Ahead of a major, of course, all and sundry have a good stab at predicting the unpredictable.
Pundits, punters, experts, analysts, past players, swing gurus, soothsayers, religious zealots? Even the golf writers have a go at it.
Predictions, as we all know in this game of wildly fluctuating fortunes, tend to be a fool's errand. The high-profile thoroughbreds get saddled with the usual expectations while the field also features more dark horses than Zorro's stables.
Xander Schauffele's triumph at Royal Troon 12 months ago extended the current streak of first-time winners of the Claret Jug to 11. Will we get another come Sunday night?
The whole them and us palaver generated by the LIV Golf rebellion, meanwhile, seems to have slipped off into the background with no sign yet of any deal to bring everybody together.
The ongoing schism could return to the fore, of course, should a LIV golfer triumph here on the Antrim coast.
They have as good a chance as anyone. Jon Rahm has won two Irish Opens on links courses and relishes the competition and the cut-and-thrust in this neck of the golfing woods.
The Spaniard claimed one of those Irish titles just along the road from Portrush at Portstewart.
Scotland's hopes of a first champion since Paul Lawrie in 1999 rest with Robert McIntyre. England's wait is even longer. You have to go back to Nick Faldo in 1992.
Many moons ago, another Englishman, the colourful Max Faulkner, won The Open the first time Portrush staged the championship in 1951.
Sitting on a six-shot lead heading into the closing round, the story, told in many forms, suggests that Faulkner signed a ball for a young autograph hunter with the scribble, 'Max Faulkner, Open champion 1951'. Fortunately for Faulker, he didn't blow it.
Some 8000 spectators watched the action unfold on that final day 74 years ago. In 2025, 1.2 million applications poured in for 280,000 tickets in the ballot.
A mighty Open stage is set.
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