Open Championship Recap

As previously blogged, The Open Championship holds a very significant  meaning to the story of how our Tas-Tee dreams started. It was at St Andrews in 1995 that I first saw professional golfers and several had golf tees in their mouths from time to time. As a way to emulate my favorite golfers, I took a golf tee to chew on while I watched them play. The rest as they say, is history... our history

The Open Championship holds a special place in so many hearts of golfers and fans. While I will be repaying my dad w a timely St Andrews trip next year, I wanted to post about the epic competition at this year’s Open Championship at Royal St George’s. 

So many narratives to follow throughout the tournament but I’ll try and keep the lengthy backstories to a minimum for this blog post. The three storylines that emerged on Sunday afternoon were more than enough to make a full length Tas-Tee blog post.  

First we introduce the favorite(s); The 38yr old experienced veteran, Louis Oosthuzien, a previous Open winner and the obvious crowd favorite as well as Tour vet and 3x major winner, Jordan Spieth, who is on a resurgence since falling off his game for the past 3 years. Jordan stole our hearts in 2015 by winning the Masters by the largest margin of victory in Masters history but quickly broke our collective spirits the following year when a Sunday collapse stopped him from winning b2b Masters and it proved to be the beginning of a decline that would only start to reverse after the COVID plagued 2020 season. And finally the young buck, the bright eyed 24yr old from California, Collin Morikawa. This kid can flat out play! He’s won on every level and has burst onto the scene w a PGA Championship win and a WGC title in just his 2nd year on tour. Winning the Claret Jug would’ve been a massive win for any of the 3 contenders but only one would emerge victorious and it wasn’t the one most thought it would be.

The fact that Collin & Louis were in the final pairing on Sunday and Jordan was in the group in front of them was a perfect script for what would unfold on the back nine of the illustrious setting.

None of the 3 had a very good start, altho all were fairway finding, none took charge either because of missing greens or missing putts. After 6 holes things had shuffled a bit but none had taken Louis out of the top spot. Hole 7 seemed to be the first real palpable momentum by the leaders. Jordan lit up the crowd w an eagle at 7 followed by Collin’s birdie and Oostie’s bogey. Collin birdied the next 2 holes and held off Jordan who, while he didn’t have his very best game, set off some thunderous roars that could’ve easily rocked Collin game... but it didn’t rattle him, in fact, nothing seemed to rattle him. Collin matched every one of Jordan’s great shots and added some Tas-Tee highlights of his own including some real “dodgy” up & downs down the stretch (the one on 14 for birdie was an absolute gem).

Collin, Jordan and Oostie w US Open champ Jon Rahm making a late surge to post -11 left us w little doubt this was one of the best contested Open Championships in my memory.  

Congratulations to Collin and JJ, his caddie, and of course JJ was celebrating his 39th birthday on Sunday. Golf just has a way of bringing things together. Hope I did on this blahhg post, ha!