Analyzing 2026 Open Championship Quotes and Soundbites

One of my favorite Open Championship pastimes is pouring a big pot of coffee and reading through press conference transcripts. The combination of the year’s final major and playing golf where it was created provides a rare opportunity for deep introspection and honesty from some of the game's best players. This year, the press conferences featured the game's premier talents, who spoke eloquently on a myriad of subjects from legacy to links golf. Let's jump into some quotes and their deeper meanings.

Links Golf

Justin Rose: “I think as pros we love to be prepared. Really to answer your question, it's we love to be prepared. I think ultimately at an Open Championship, your preparation needs to be — you can't perfect something. Play with creativity and play in the moment. Just play with a lot of flair in the moment. See a shot, bump and run. You might not have practised it, you might not have hit that shot for a long, long time, but if you see it, go with it.”

Here's Justin Rose just waxing poetic on the unique challenge presented by links golf and firm turf. So much of golf in America — around the greens or even approaching the green — is see number, grab club, swing. On the links, it's so much more feel-dependent. You often find yourself visualizing a particular shot. It's less aerial and far more diverse in terms of the shots you should hit. This week, with Royal Birkdale playing so firm and fast, it's going to be spectacular to watch the approach shots and shots around the green. I am anticipating a vast array of creative shots.

LIVE BLOG: Early week insights and amusements from Royal Birkdale

Almost 10 years ago, I had a great dinner with Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Clayton, and Mike Cocking. At that dinner, Geoff remarked something along the lines of, "The saddest thing about pro golf is that the golf courses don't ask us questions that require us to hit all the shots we can hit." It's so true. So much of pro golf is point and shoot, which is why the ends of tournaments with stakes on the line are so compelling; the challenge and the questions being asked inherently get more difficult. This week, Birkdale is so baked out that we are going to see a course asking a lot of questions we don't normally see, and in return, we are going to see the world's best players deep in their bags, attempting shots vastly different than the other 40 weeks on the PGA Tour calendar.

{{inline-article}}

Justin Rose: “A links course is interesting because you never really, I don't think, get to know them that well. You can have different Open Championships — like 2008, I think it was, yeah. Weather was dreadful. It was wet. Course played completely different. You might have been hitting 2-irons and 3-woods into par-4s, and now you could be flicking 52-degree wedges in. A golf course can play so differently decade to decade when we come back that you never really get to know the course, I don't think, that well.”

We'll go back to the Rose well here. I found this particularly insightful as it relates to how we think about course history at the Open. As the Open's “Forged by Nature” branding would suggest, this championship and a course's feel can vary so much from year to year simply because of the weather. This doesn't really happen in America at a course like Shinnecock Hills, which played very similarly in 2018 and 2026. Royal Birkdale's conditions at this year's championship are so drastically different from 2017 that it will present a completely different test of golf. (Note: it's pretty much a completely different golf course, more on that later.)

Strategy at Royal Birkdale

Scottie Scheffler: “Here's how I would say it. The fairways this week are really tight, so you get a lot of crosswinds. They can be difficult to hold just because they're so fast and they're so firm. So there's a lot of thinking off the tee on whether or not you want to just hit driver up there somewhere and kind of play from the rough most likely, or do you want to start hitting some irons, getting it in some fairways and hitting some longer shots into the greens?”

I think Scottie Scheffler is one of golf's greatest tacticians and has a great mind for breaking down golf courses and how they should play. What's particularly illuminating to me in this excerpt is how Scottie talks about strategy in terms of pushing forward past bunkers or laying back short of them. For the most part, I think pro golfers think of strategy this way, laying up or pushing forward, not side to side, because very few courses demand more than the mere stopping power offered by a well-struck short iron or wedge. I thought the way Wyndham Clark illustrated the challenge of short or long was really insightful.

Wyndham Clark: “I mean, you might hit a 4-iron that goes over 300 yards, and then you've got to look at a bunker and go, it's 320. How do we stay short of that because we can't cover it? But that makes it fun.”

This adds so much color to what Scottie was saying. When conditions are this firm and fast, it eliminates a wide swath of clubs from the bag. If a bunker is at 320 yards and Clark can't cover it, then unlike most conditions, a 3-wood, 5-wood, or 3-iron are all out of the question, and the 4-iron is one hot bounce away from finding it. So instead of predictably laying up 10 yards short of a bunker, you might hit a 5-iron, get a soft bounce, and wind up 40 yards shorter than you'd like. This is what makes these specific conditions such a challenge.

Also, I smiled at the last part of Clark's response. I love when the world's best admit there are courses where being on the right side of the fairway is an advantage.

{{inline-course}}

Wyndham Clark: “I like courses similar to Shinnecock where maybe there's a lot of strategy and you have to be on certain sides of the fairway to hit into the green, miss in certain areas. I personally enjoy majors like this.”

A player who has been thrust into the limelight in 2026 is PGA champion Aaron Rai, a polite and well-spoken fellow. I loved how he drew a parallel between his development as a golfer and his development as a person.

Aaron Rai: “Yeah, I think the enjoyment comes from different places. I think, as you develop as a golfer, as your skill develops, I think as you get older as a person obviously the relationship changes, the challenges of it change. You appreciate different parts of the sport. So I'd say I find enjoyment in different places compared to what I did when I was 12, 14 years old. But I still enjoy it the same amount and still -- yeah, just like the challenge of it, really, because that part never changes no matter what your level of golf is, no matter where you find yourself in your career. That's a real humbling part about the game.”

His comparison really resonated with me as I thought about my life and my golf game and how some of my interests in both have changed. As a kid, I loathed working on my putting and chipping. Today I couldn't be bothered to hit golf balls at a range, but I'd kill for a backyard short-game area. Overall, these comparisons to golf and life always bring me back to what I believe makes golf so addictive: it's an activity that creates deep thoughts and emotions that most closely mirror life.

Enduring Greatness

There was much discourse online about Shane Ryan's questions to Rory and Scottie about their legacy. I found both the questions and the answers extremely worthwhile, a real lens into greatness. Unsurprisingly, neither cited leaving a lasting legacy on the game as important.

Scottie Scheffler: “To be completely honest, not really. I don't really play, like, for a place in history. I'm not playing for anything like that because — this is going to sound a little morbid — at the end of the day, I'm going to live my life, and it's going to end. When it ends, I'm going somewhere else, and I'm not going to be here anymore. Legacy and all that stuff was never really something that motivated me. For me, it was always competition. I loved playing golf. I loved waking up with butterflies because I'm going out to play a tournament and I get a chance to compete today. I love those feelings, and when I retire, I'm going to miss them. For me, I was always trying to get out, play, get the most out of myself, and I love the challenge of trying to play golf. I love trying to get the most out of myself, trying to manage not only my body but my mind as well, and trying to control this little golf ball and to get it to do the things that I want to do with it. Those are the things that motivate me and try to get the most out of myself. I've never been one to play for history or legacy or anything like that.”

It should go without saying, but if you're doing something for legacy or accomplishments, you're likely not going to achieve what the person doing it for inner passion and belief will. When Dustin Johnson was world No. 1, people often bagged on him for not working hard. I don't believe getting to No. 1 in golf is possible without a tireless work ethic and, most importantly, a burning competitive passion. As Scottie has reached levels we haven't seen since Tiger Woods, I think what amazes me most about him is his sheer competitiveness. It shows in the wins, sure, but more so in turning a T-50 on Saturday into a T-6 by the end of the tournament. He never concedes a shot, and he typifies playing the course, not his competitors. Rory went on about something similar as well.

Q. So when you hit the first ball on the 1st tee on Thursday, what would be the single biggest motivator for you?

Rory McIlroy: “Seeing how good I can be. Seeing if the work I've put in and the practice that I've put in can stand up to the most intense pressure that we are under, which is major championships.”

That's where I'll end it. Enjoy the week ahead, and I'll keep poring over these pressers with great enjoyment.