Ryan Fox holed a 12-foot birdie putt on the 18th to win the 154th Open at Royal Birkdale, one shot ahead of Cameron Young, his first major title at 39. Sam Burns, who led going into Sunday off the back of the lowest 36-hole score in major championship history, finished third. It’s only the third time a New Zealander has won a men’s major. He wasn’t the story anyone was writing on Monday. By Sunday night he was the only story that mattered.
That’s the honest way to close out a week of coverage. Report what actually happened, including the parts where the earlier predictions didn’t hold up.
The governance test passed
Bryson DeChambeau’s two-shot penalty on Friday held all the way through the weekend. He didn’t win. Jon Rahm picked up an official warning mid-week for throwing a club. A code of conduct isn’t governance until someone gets removed, or in this case, penalised and left to play through the consequence, and both calls stuck without being softened once the tournament reached its business end. Max Homa publicly defended DeChambeau afterward, which is worth noting too. Enforcement doesn’t require universal agreement to be real. It requires holding regardless of who disagrees.
The weather call, corrected
Earlier this week I wrote that Birkdale spent nine years preparing for wind and rain and might get a heatwave instead. That piece was about planning for the wrong kind of hard, and the actual conditions turned out to be a third thing neither the forecast nor I had fully accounted for: calm, scoreable, close to ideal links weather, described by players as unprecedented for this course. Three separate rounds of 62 got shot in two days, a major championship record. The lesson from that post still holds, you plan for resilience rather than a specific forecast, but the specific forecast itself was wrong, and it’s worth saying so plainly rather than quietly hoping nobody checks.
What actually mattered by Sunday night
A record 300,000-plus crowd came through the gates this week. The R&A’s own rules held against its biggest names. The course, redesigned over nine years, produced major championship history rather than controversy. And a 39-year-old who’d never won a major before got the finish he earned, with a putt that had to be holed, not just attempted.
None of that was guaranteed on Sunday morning. All of it is now the actual record of the week, corrections and all.
Ben Webb is a Sydney-based project delivery leader and 2022 AIPM Project Manager of the Year. He writes about why most project management is theatre, and what actual delivery looks like without it.
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