The Open Radio sounds different, which is why everyone from Hawaii to Royal Portrush listens

New York Times

17-07-2025

PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — There was a vacationer relaxing by the sea in Gothenburg, Sweden. A barista working somewhere near the Rock of Gibraltar. A semi-truck driver in Peru, Illinois. An electrician in Toronto. A man mowing his lawn in Little Silver, New Jersey. Letters from Hawaii and the Caribbean. Dispatches from Des Moines, Iowa and St. George, Utah.
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All on the same channel.
All listening to the same voices.
Each tuned to Open Radio on Thursday, delighting along with hosts Marcus Buckland and Sue Thearle, and snickering with a band of on-course voices. Each sent an email, saying hi, telling their story, declaring their rooting interests. All over Royal Portrush, fans did the same. With one ear on the course and the other on the broadcast, they sent their emails, chiming in from the grandstands and ropelines.
There's something about this broadcast. Those who've heard it know it. Some kind of fanciful combination of event (the Open, golf's most time-honored tradition), stage (ancient links courses) and style (brisk, cheeky, vividly descriptive) that bridges present and past and maybe even makes you feel something.
My first Open Championship was last year's trip to Troon. Geoff Shackelford, the golf writer and course architecture authority, suggested I be sure to grab an earpiece radio and tune into the broadcast. Sure, I said, not realizing that I'd soon feel like Moonlight Graham stepping off the diamond and onto the gravel.
Of all media, radio comes with a romance that's all its own. The sound of a fading era. Live storytelling. Voices using five senses to feed one of yours. It can be intensely personal. Like everything else, though, such things changed over time. Audio has evolved, from dials to streams, and broadcast styles have moved along like everything else.
But then there's Open Radio. The broadcast, produced by International Management Group (IMG), is a marathon spanning nearly the entirety of all four days of tournament play, stopping for only two 30-second breaks per hour. Thursday's broadcast began at 7 a.m. local time and concluded at 10 p.m. For 15 hours, Buckland and Thearle swapped in and out as lead 'presenter,' while 11 on-course commentators and analysts, mostly working in tandem, called feature groups, all working 36 holes, just as they'll do again on Friday, all while a group of a half-dozen producers direct the show. Without straying or fatiguing, the show moved constantly Thursday from one moment to the next, calling as many live shots as possible instead of reporting what's already happened. The result felt like a carload of passengers white-knuckling along a winding road, loving every turn.
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'The listeners are part of the team,' Steve Tebb, Open Radio's producer, told me on Wednesday, sitting in a makeshift booth along the 18th fairway. 'It's like you're telling stories over a beer, reflecting on the day at the pub. There's an intimacy and loyalty. We have human stories, we love to work together and —'
Tebb stopped, shook his head, and continued.
'Like Robert, my friend who is giving me the finger right now …'
On the opposite side of the glass, Robert Lee, the former longtime European Tour player, smiled with a middle finger in the air.
Lee often works in television for Sky Sports, but prefers the whimsy and artistry of radio, and the small family feel that makes this broadcast so peculiar.
'Golf works really well on the radio, and if you're listening you can stay really immersed, and you get the smells and the bells and the sights and the sounds through your ears,' Lee said. 'It's using language. Language makes life interesting.'
On Open Radio, that tee shot did not simply roll on that hill. No, it 'scampered down a hog's back.'
That putt? It wasn't tapped. It was 'tickled in.'
Seeing Cameron Smith push a tee shot left, Buckland reported the Aussie as watching it with 'an accusatory stare.'
On the sixth hole, along the Irish Sea shortline, commentator Rupert Bell compared the build and contours of colleague Brendon de Jonge to that of Giant's Causeway out in the distance.
A player's opening tee shot? It's secondary to a full description of what he's wearing.
The weather? It's as much of a character as any player.
Matt Fitzpatrick, after dunking a chip shot on Portrush's dastardly par-3 16th, did not emerge smiling. He came upon the green grinning with 'the boyish looks of a Yorkshireman,' per analyst Sophie Walker, a former Ladies European Tour (LET) player.
Because the broadcast is owned and operated by the R&A, which opts not to include any advertising or presenting sponsors, all of this unfolds without interruption or distraction. Just one line after another, free of commercialization and clutter, all via a variety of accents. Altogether, it's as pure as Irish whiskey, or 'uisce beatha' in Gaelic — 'the water of life.'
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Is the R&A leaving money on the table by rolling ad-free? Yes, but it makes plenty elsewhere and, in truth, the real value of the radio broadcast to the Open Championship isn't monetary. That's why it streams for free on the Open's website. That's why the Women's Open has its own broadcast. That's why the R&A has expanded coverage in recent years to include qualifying events.
'You should tune into the radio and feel like you're uniquely part of the conversation in a way that other coverage can't do,' Ellie Montgomery, the R&A's head of content, told me. 'We'd be silly to lose that element, which is essentially the linchpin of our listenership.'
The R&A first pursued producing an in-house broadcast in 2001, primarily for the on-course audience. In time, American satellite radio company SiriusXM and UK-based talkSPORT came to see the broadcast as an available feed to fill the air. That led to simulcast deals and an exponential expansion of the broadcast's reach. What was a quirky little broadcast went worldwide.
So often this is where style is sacrificed for conformity.
But Open Radio? It's some kind of immune unicorn, which has, in turn, ratched its popularity in ways no one could have ever projected. While live radio is not exactly a booming enterprise in 2025, Open Radio has experienced a 71.2 percent increase in listeners over the past three years, according to the R&A, with most of the growth coming from the United States.
'I think people in the States have come to love the sound of it and how it fits this tournament specifically,' said Sirius senior producer Justin Ware.
That's because when spending any extended time with anyone on-air, whether sitting across from one of them in the booth or listening while driving a garbage truck in Newton, N.C., you stop sounding like yourself and start sounding like them. The accents. The turns of phrase. Every voice is absorbed by osmosis.
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Take Buckland. As an 8-year-old in London, he'd pop batteries in a tape recorder and pretend his father was a West Indian cricket player, conducting a post-match interview. While attending the prestigious Ludgrove School, an English boys' preparatory boarding school in Berkshire, he'd unzip a stuffed blue dog to reveal his hidden transistor radio before bed each night. Under the covers, he'd listen to 'the lilting Welsh voice' of commentator Peter Jones during soccer season and legendary BBC commentators John Arlott and Brian Johnston during cricket season. Time and again, he was busted by the school's matron.
Today, while spending plenty of time doing television, Buckland remains most passionate about radio.
'I love words and I love language,' he told me. 'This feels like a return to simpler days. It's providing company and entertainment in quite a simplistic way. You know, we live in an increasingly complicated world and there's something wonderfully uncomplicated about this.'
Most broadcasts would've dumped the emails years ago.
Open Radio reads more than ever. It's perhaps what the broadcast is most known for.
At one point Thursday, a group driving to Pinehurst, N.C., for a golf trip of '16 knuckleheads' chimed in with a note. An hour later, an employee from the Pinehurst Golf Resort wrote one of his own to welcome those knuckleheads.
One listener wrote in from a barbecue joint in McGregor, Texas, while a SpaceX test launch occurred nearby.
Another American wrote in to thank the broadcast for keeping him entertained while hanging drywall. When Buckland read it on-air, he asked analyst Harry Ewing what drywall is, as, in the United Kingdom, drywall is a foreign concept. The American wrote back a short time later, offering a full explanation, one also read on-air, in full.
Who's to say how long it'll sound this way. But for now, and for the foreseeable future, time isn't catching up with Open Radio. There's something strangely comforting in that. Something worth listening to.