Stewart Cink’s introduction to the horrors of The Open Championship came in 1998 at Royal Birkdale. He tied for 66th, then missed the cut the following year at Carnoustie. St. Andrews in 2000 didn’t go much better.
“It was pretty breezy,” Cink remembers. “First couple of times I just felt super intimidated by the golf course. It felt so hard, so narrow and I felt like the ball was just bouncing all over the place. I had no control over it.”
When you are a professional golfer, that can be a problem. The wind whistling off the water around these marvelous links courses is often the leading issue. The 14th hole at the Old Course, a 618-yard par-5, appropriately named “Long,” is particularly nasty.
“It’s one of the many holes of St. Andrews where you aim at the steeple off the tee,” Cink says. “But the fairway is pretty narrow because there’s the bunkers on the left side, terrible, deep bunkers. And then about 30 yards to the right of that is the boundary fence. And the hole just bends along around the boundary fence. And if the wind’s out of the right – it really affects the ball a lot over there because it’s cold, heavier – you have to start your drive out over the out of bounds and let it come back in. If you don’t, you’re in those bunkers.”
This required a leap of faith to which Cink wasn’t quite ready to commit. He ultimately tied for 41st in a memorable Open won by Tiger Woods. The next time he tangled with the Old Course five years later, Cink failed to make the cut. But after going home early in three of four Open tries, he summoned the patience and precision to master those volatile currents, winning his first and only major in 2009 at Turnberry, defeating five-time Open champion Tom Watson in a playoff.
Now, even at age 46, Cink is still learning.
“The golf ball spins a lot of time in the air in this game and when that air’s moving around, it’s awfully hard to get it right,” he says. “I’m still trying to learn how to play in the wind. Honestly, golf is like two different games. There’s golf, and then there’s golf in the wind.”
And that is the gorgeously gruesome game they’ll be playing this week at Royal Portrush in the 148th Open.
Portrush sits on the northern tip of Northern Ireland, along the North Channel, a 22-mile-wide strait between Northern Ireland and southwestern Scotland. If history holds, the wind will howl fairly constantly, at around 12 miles per hour, out of the north-northeast. Don’t even ask about the gusts.
Open golf is demanding enough with all those granite-hard fairways, looming bunkers, and acres of long grass and gorse, but how do you accurately assess an obstacle you cannot see? Golf Channel sat down with 11 Open champions (with an impressive collection of 22 titles) to discover the elusive answers.
“The golf courses we play on, they developed over 100 years, and they play a certain way in certain winds,” says Padraig Harrington, winner of the 2007 and 2008 Opens at Carnoustie and Royal Birkdale. “It can change in a day. The golf course, it can be easy if there’s no wind, but they can be beasts if there’s a strong wind.”
A MATTER OF SURVIVAL
Nick Faldo grew up on the isle of Great Britain. He remembers savage conditions at the British Amateur and an Irish Open at Portmarnock when the wind exceeded 50 miles an hour.
“I played county golf in gale-force 8,” Faldo says. “That might be at least 60 to 70 miles an hour. There was branches falling off the blooming trees. It was blowing sideways and you just went out and played.
“I enjoyed it when it was tough, but not when it was ridiculous. You really are in the lap of the gods.”
Over time, he learned to navigate the wind and wound up winning Open Championships in 1987, 1990 and 1992.
Far across the Atlantic Ocean, along the Gulf of Mexico, sits another frequent target of the wind, the state of Texas.
“I learned to play golf in Dallas,” says Lee Trevino, Open champion in 1971 and 1972. “The wind blows all the time. They always talk about Chicago being the Windy City – Chicago is not in the top 20. We played in a lot of 30-, 35-, 40-mile-an-hour winds.
“The greens are kind of low to the ground, hard, so there’s no reason to hit the ball on the green because it’s not going to stop. So, we learned to hit the ball low to run it. I loved landing 50 yards short of a green and running it to the hole. Oh, yeah. That was my cup of tea.”
Justin Leonard, another native Texan, said he had no choice but to solve the myriad mysteries of the wind.
“Growing up in Texas, especially in the springtime, there’s a lot of wind and [learning], it’s kind of necessary for survival,” he says. “Don’t try and hit the ball too hard. The harder you hit it, the higher it goes and the more spin you put on it.
“It’s just a different kind of challenge. You start playing angles, trying to decide how much the wind is going to affect it – not only the shape of the shot but how far it goes.”
Leonard won the 1997 Open at Royal Troon in Scotland. Ben Hogan (1953) and Jordan Spieth (2017) also hail from Texas – and, perhaps not coincidentally, won The Open.
Henrik Stenson was born and raised in Gothenburg, Sweden, hard by the North Sea.
“At an Open championship, you will have a few windy days,” Stenson says. “So, controlling your ball flights and knowing what shots to play, I think that comes with experience growing up.”
Stenson, who won in 2016 at Royal Troon, says playing in the wind demands a degree of creativity.
“You can hit a shot so many different ways,” he says, “So I like it because you can be a really intuitive and just go with what feels the best and play the shot you see. There’s no right or wrong shot. You use your imagination a lot more in the short game, anything from a 5-wood, a 2- to 5-iron, to gap wedge and a lob wedge.
“If you’re coming straight in from playing target golf, you’re so used to, you know, it’s 159-yard pin and you’re trying to land it around the pin. Here, you might have to go 10 paces short, five paces short.”
A HOW-TO PLAY IN THE WIND PRIMER
Growing up in land-locked Columbus, Ohio, Jack Nicklaus didn’t have the benefit of a gusty, coastal upbringing.
But eventually he figured out this fickle foil.
“You have to learn how to hit it hard by hitting it easy,” Nicklaus explained. “Learn how to play a lot of shots without putting any spin on the golf ball.”
And while hitting it hard and easy simultaneously is anything but easy, this Zen approach helped him win three Open titles, in 1966, 1970 and 1978.
“You use all the tools at your disposal to be able to play your best golf,” says five-time Open champion Tom Watson, “and one of them is knowing which way the wind is going to blow and how hard.
“One ability I did have was hitting the ball the right distance and judging the wind. The key ingredient to playing in the wind, no matter how high or low you hit it, is hitting the ball solid. It was paramount in getting the right distance.”
Initially, Trevino struggled with the invisible opponent.
“I used to fight the wind,” he says. “If the wind was blowing real hard from left to right, I would try to hook the ball in and hold it. And if the wind was blowing right to left real hard, I would try to hold it. And when I hit into the wind, I would try to hit it straight.
“When you’re going into the wind, you always try to hit a draw and control it. Generally, you have to take two more clubs. Like if you want to punch a 7-iron and go 145 yards, you might have to take a 5 and punch it.”
Australia is considered a continent rather than an island but, surrounded by water, it is subject to all kinds of meteorological disturbances.
“I was a big proponent of practicing in adverse conditions, not in perfect conditions,” says Greg Norman, Open champion in 1986 and 1993 and a native Australian. “I felt like practicing in the wind [was beneficial], especially with the wind at your back – which is very difficult putting – where you’re getting buffeted all the time.”
According to Norman, not all winds are created equal.
“You can feel the heaviness of the wind or the lightness of the wind when you play in South Florida or certain parts of Australia, certain parts of Scotland,” he says. “The density of the wind is different in each and every location. So, the ball is going to fly differently. It’s just out of experience.
“You can’t really teach that.”
THE WIND IS YOUR FRIEND
Where does the wind come from?
It’s created when changes in temperature cause air to move from high to low pressure areas. Wind is a world traveler. A gust that knocks down a tee shot at this year’s Open might have originated in Southeast Asia.
The player who best copes with his own internal atmospheric conditions at Royal Portrush will likely have the best chance to win.
Says Leonard, “A lot of it is not just about the ball flight. It’s about the attitude of, ‘I’m not going to let these conditions beat me.’ Playing well in poor conditions is probably the largest percentage that goes into being successful, just kind of your attitude and your mindset.”
“It’s total trust,” Norman insists. “You know what the wind’s got to do and you trust your swing. Right? I never was a big proponent of fighting the wind. I always wanted the wind to be my friend.”
Zach Johnson, 2015 Open champion at St. Andrews, agrees.
“You’ve just got to understand that, ‘I’m going to hit some shots that feel great off the face, actually start off proper, and they’re just not going to end up very well.’
“I enjoy the test, what it requires of me from a patience standpoint, which I don’t like that word, but I certainly embrace it.”
In historically miserable conditions at Muirfield in 2002, Tiger Woods shot 81, his worst round ever in a major. Employing his epic low stingers that cut through the wind, he came back in 2005 and 2006 to win Opens at St. Andrews and Royal Liverpool.
The 14th hole at St. Andrews was where Cink learned to be one with the wind.
“It took me awhile to learn how to control the shots,” Cink says, “and, really, it was more about controlling myself. I could physically hit the right shots but learning about what the ball was going to do in the air and learning how to control my emotions about my decisions, that was a different ballgame.
“Every time you play at St. Andrews, that’s one of the shots you know you’re going to have to face. It’s been there for as long as golf has been played on this earth and it’s always been a challenging shot, and it always will.”
Greg Garber is a longtime reporter for ESPN.