Note: A break from our regularly scheduled BTS content for a few words on the 150th Open Championship.

Rory McIlroy is not Scottish. But if you tuned in to more than five minutes of this week’s Open Championship, played out and back across a spit of land in eastern Scotland that rightfully claims its place as the spiritual and historical home of golf, you’d have been forgiven for assuming that his family had been operating a beloved St Andrews street corner chippy for six generations.

The energy of the pulsating pro-Rory crowd crackled through the Old Course on Sunday, the power of its partisanship reaching across the world and into living rooms from Belfast to Boston. Rory, still only 33, has been the face of Irish golf for decades. His ascent was promised during a childhood talk show appearance, chipping balls into a washing machine that looked like it came off the set of Leave it to Beaver. Twenty years on, he’s added the rest of the British Isles and the golf-mad nations of Europe to his gym-sculpted shoulders, that support driven as much by his consistent human vulnerability as his sometimes incandescent golf and sterling Ryder Cup record. 

Adding fuel to the fire (pun intended): Rory’s unshakeable anti-LIV stance, even as his peers and foils and adversaries have run off to the desert to swim in piles of oily cash. As MBS drops bag after bag on brand-name golfers, Rory continues to demonstrate loyalty to the Tour he’s played for years, and the state of the game that got him to where he is today.

So, at this sesquicentennial Open, played at golf’s holiest ground, with Rory standing firm in the press tent and bouncing confidently down the fairways, everything felt set for a storybook ending. 

“It’s just one of those days where I played a really controlled round of golf,” Rory intoned on Sunday evening. “I did what I felt like I needed to just apart from capitalizing on the easier holes around the turn.”

Controlled. Proper. Mistake-free. All apt descriptors of Rory’s bogey-free 2-under 70. McIlroy avoided the blowup that had doomed so many major quests over the past eight years. He dissected this ancient golf course, keeping it in second gear, his TaylorMade happily skipping past death bunkers and finding the fat parts of these obese putting surfaces.

The only problem? A turbocharged Aussie made the turn for home, shifted into fifth, and sailed past Rory as if he was standing still. 

In a sport that takes upwards of five hours to complete, Cam Smith’s game engenders descriptors like “sizzling” and “electric.” You’ll see his string of five consecutive birdies from the 10th through 14th holes on Sunday described as a “charge” or that he was “running downhill.”

In truth, as we know, golf is slow. It’s plodding. It’s patient. The time between the shots, walking along the firm turf from one divot to the next, often matters nearly as much as the actual strike of the ball. 

Rory is one of the most thoughtful and introspective golfers to achieve his level of success. One wonders what was running through his mind as he hit each of The Old’s greens in regulation, then two-putted each in succession, while Cam Smith filled cup after cup just one group ahead of him. Could he feel this landmark opportunity slipping away? As he burned edges and left putts dead in the heart, did the weight of history start to settle upon him like the ancient stones in the buildings of this age-old town?

Smith led Rory on a merry chase back into town, the Aussie holding the gas pedal to the floor and widening the gap with each successive birdie. And after another birdie try went begging at the Road, and a last-gasp chip sailed long, Rory took home another meaningless top 5, while another up-and-coming superstar collected his first major championship.

Smith’s demeanor does not match his game. There are no histrionics after birdies, only a mounting sense of self-belief. It seems as if he expects to shoot 54 each time out. He deserves immense credit for his round, and his tournament, especially as he was playing the role of spoiler for perhaps the most romantic finish in the history of the game. When Smith hit his tee ball on 18 to within a few feet of the green, the silence was deafening. When Rory hit his 15 minutes later, it sounded like the town exploded.

As Smith made the microphone rounds after the tournament, all dazed smiles and muttering “unreal” and (admittedly classy) gratitude towards the grounds staff and fans, one could only imagine the pubs of St Andrews swiftly filling up. If Rory could have put a few more circles on the card? That shared fairway between 1 and 18 might still have revelers dancing across its hallowed surface.

Rory McIlroy is not Scottish. Cam Smith is not the enemy. But at a golf tournament that often doubled as a morality play and whose outcome will reverberate for as long as golf is played, the prince who was promised left one too many chinks in his gleaming suit of armor.

Words by Robbie Vogel
Photos by Christian Hafer