Golfpocalypse is a collection of words that runs prior to each week’s PGA Tour event, mostly ABOUT that event. Reach out with your hottest takes on absolutely anything at [email protected]. We’ll publish the best emails here.
Ladies and gents, we embark now on a very special time of year, when golf’s best head to Scotland, the second or third country where this sport was ever played.
[Ducks beneath a flying caber]
Just kidding! You’re no. 1! (As far as anyone can tell.) In all seriousness, I think these next two weeks, with the Scottish Open and the Open back-to-back, are the most exciting on the golf calendar outside of Masters week, and you better believe I’m going to be inhaling the linksland and berns and gorse and fescue and heather and gloaming and haggis all the other exotic things from this excellent part of the world. Let’s do this!
1. The Scottish Open should be on a rota
This is my most obvious, and obviously correct take. Since 2019, they’ve held the event at the Renaissance Club in North Berwick, and it will be there at least until 2030. I’m sure there are various good financial and logistical reasons for this, but I’m going to ignore those now to spout my opinion: This is bad. Not only is the course mediocre by high Scottish standards, and not only does it have a terrible name that sounds like it should be a tacky neon-splattered gentleman’s club in Warsaw, but it’s monopolizing a tournament that exists in one of the great expanses of golf on planet earth. Spread the wealth, baby! Give me all the good non-Open courses, from Royal Dornoch to North Berwick to Cruden Bay to Nairn. Give me Machrihanish, because I love the name.
I have played golf in Scotland exactly once in my life, very badly, and never at these courses, so I know zippo about them, but man would I be excited if a new, historic, gorgeous course came with the Scottish Open every year. Aye, I’d be proper chuffed, so I would!
(After I pitched this idea to Joel Beall and some others, he told me he wrote a similar take three years ago. Whatever Joel, here’s your filthy link.)
2. Will we get the return of the (Bobby) Mac?
One of the coolest stories of 2024 was Robert MacIntyre winning his home open, and despite a year that has seen him fade from 5th in the world rankings all the way to 20th, there have been a couple signs of life, most recently with his T-10 at the Travelers Championship. He’s not the only Scot in the field, but he’s the only one with a serious chance, and it’s always more fun when a local gets in the mix. This year, he’s 20th in SG: Off the Tee and 11th in SG: Putting, and as you may surmise from those numbers and his otherwise so-so showing on tour, his approach game has been super rough, losing strokes to the field with a rank of 120. However, he was 10th in this category at the Travelers, so positivity abounds.
Also, he’s in a completely sick group with Chris Gotterup and Rory McIlroy, and if you’re any kind of real golf fan, you’ll be getting up at 3:30 a.m. to watch them Thursday morning. (Note: I will not be doing this, but only because I already have my Real Golf Fan badge for writing this live blog of Jackson Koivun’s first PGA Tour round.)
3. This is the reunification before the reunification
LIV is dying—[steps aside to pat the head of the remaining LIV bots who insist it’s going great]—and some day soon all their players will have either landed back on the PGA Tour or its feeders, but we’re getting a little non-major glimpse of that at the Scottish, which is co-sanctioned by the DPWT. Granted, this is not exactly new (the same thing happened last year), but it feels different because of LIV’s crisis. This is true “taste of the very near future” material, and we’re getting Rahm, Hatton, McKibbin and Patrick Reed, who is not on LIV anymore but is in temporary exile. (Also Meronk, Puig, Perez and Canter, but who cares?) Rahm in particular hasn’t played since the U.S. Open, when I expected big things from a guy who seemed to have almost figured out playing in majors while on LIV, but instead missed the cut. He’s a top-five most interesting guy in the field this week.
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4. Who are the five other men I should care about this week?
Rory McIlroy — The three times he’s played here, which are the last three years, he’s finished winner, T-4, T-2. This is a very very good course for him.
Scottie Scheffler – Gave off serious “I got my mojo back” vibes at the Travelers despite losing in the playoff, but this will be the real test. For a guy with his high standards, there’s really just one more shot at having a great year, and this is the stage-setter.
Chris Gotterup – Won this baby last year, coming off a win at the John Deere with his brother on the bag, and the vibes seem incredibly good. But is he a true linksman? (This is now golf’s version of “is he a true Yankee?”)
Tommy Fleetwood – You’re going to be hearing about him nonstop next week because he grew up near Royal Birkdale, but it remains to be seen if he can rediscover the uber-elite form he found at the end of 2025.
Matt Fitzpatrick – I’ve just got a feeling he’s got a last big result in him this year.
5. The other cool thing about the Scottish Open
You’ve got 14 of the top 20 players in the world teeing it up, and guess what? It’s not even a signature event! It’s just so perfectly placed in the schedule that everyone wants to be there, which might be a pretty good lesson for the Tour as they creep closer to 2028 and the problem of getting all the best players to the Championship Series events, even though guys like Rory will not want to do it. Sure, you should technically be able to compel them, but in practice you can’t, so a little incentivized scheduling might be in order.
Just because this kind of stuff fascinates me, here are the top 20 players not coming to Scotland: Cam Young (3), Russell Henley (5), Collin Morikawa (6), Justin Rose (10), Ben Griffin (15), Sam Burns (17).
On some level, I understand wanting a week off before a major. On another? Ye anger the very gods!
6. Ranking the sponsor’s exemptions
Oh hell yes – Padraig Harrington – All the man does is win senior U.S. Opens and give fascinating sound bites that each last three hours. We love Paddy!
Selfishly great – Brooks Koepka – I’m in a season-long pool that is going to come down to Koepka to perform at the Open, so this warm-up is crucial
What? – Charley Hoffman – Did he win this at some point in the past, or something? [Looks it up.] No? Did they accidentally think he was Scottish?
Scottish – Scott Jamieson – This is the name an 18-year-old American writing a film script would give to a paper-thin character from the UK, based on the name “Scotland” and the whiskey “Jamieson” (yes, I know Jamieson is Irish, but this hypothetical student would not).
Woof – Danny Willett – I appreciate he’s still trying, but at this point it’s like seeing a ghost
7. What’s important to know about the Renaissance Club?
First off, it’s on land leased from the Duke of Hamilton by Americans, and the story of that is kinda fascinating. Joseph LaMagna at the Fried Egg called it a “mediocre test in a wonderful setting,” while acknowledging its “understated beauty and elegance.” He contends that the holes are not memorable aside from 13, it can be too hard to hit fairways in windy conditions, and the green complexes are too easy/dull. There’s also this Q&A with Tom Doak, who built the course in 2008 and revised it in 2014, and which comes with this tepid endorsement:
“In the end, the only thing that did convince me to take the job was that the Scots would not care about the visual part. They just wanted to see us build a good golf course that really played like a links, and there were a bunch of good holes. They would accept that as a really good golf course, and that was sort of liberating when I finally thought about that. I knew it wasn’t going to be the golf course that my friends in the States talked about the same way they talk about Cape Kidnappers. That’s okay. You don’t get sites like that very often. I understand that.”
However, the coastal stretch from 10 through 13 is always pretty great, and as a less knowledgeable course design and more a landscape aesthete, in my book just being able to look at Scotland is going to make up for a lot of shortcomings. To bolster my point, check out our “Every Hole At” video and tell me it’s not absolutely gorgeous.
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8. One Normie Pick, One Weird Pick
I want Gotterup for the repeat on the normie side, but my weird pick is Haotong Li, who has missed eight of his last 11 cuts. I just saw his name on the field list and the universe spoke to me, which worked beautifully last week with Max Homa, who finished second at the John Deere. If I get this right, I will immediately become the no. 1 golf gambling savant in the world, but like Julius Caesar I will refuse the crown three times until they make me emperor for life. And then all the other golf writers will stab me because I’ve grown too powerful.
9. The Rogue Golf Take: Learn from the U.S. national team disaster
I’m still reeling from how egregiously terrible our soccer team looked in the round of 16 loss to Belgium, and I wrote about it on Tuesday in the context of the parallels that exist with the U.S. Ryder Cup team. The same way you always hear “Europe just putted better!” from the dimmest fans after we get trucked every year, you heard “hey, Belgium was just better!” on Monday night. Both are true, and both ignore the bigger screw-ups that made it so. In the case of American soccer, the red card reversal debacle robbed them of all their good vibes and turned them into the bad guys, and they played scared and defensive because of the pressure it put on them. And the power of narratives is the biggest thing the Ryder Cup team can learn—you have to be prepared to be ahead of the story your enemies want to push (“pay for play” being the best recent example), because once you get behind, you’re screwed.
10. The Rogue Non-Golf Take: All hail this mini golf game
Maybe this isn’t exactly non-golf, but whatever: I love this stupid, excellent daily mini-putt game, and I think I am the Tiger Woods of making albatross (after roughly 15 tries). I believe this is what the Scottish shepherds had in mind for the future when they first began playing on the links.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
