I have played golf in wind before. Kentucky in March. The Jersey Shore in October. Colorado, where the ball never does what you tell it to. I thought I understood wind.
Then I went to Hoylake.
Wind in America is weather. Wind on a links is the course. It is the second architect — the one who shows up on the day and decides which holes play long and which play short, whether your three-quarter seven iron is now a five, or a four, or whether you should just roll a hybrid along the ground.
This is a trip report. It is also the closest I've come to understanding what the game was actually built to be.
Royal Liverpool — Hoylake
You start at Royal Liverpool because of what happened here in 1963.
Bob Charles won The Open Championship at Royal Liverpool in 1963 — becoming the first left-hander to win a major. He remains, decades on, one of only a small handful to ever do it.
Standing on the first tee at Hoylake as a left-handed golfer is a specific feeling. You are not just playing a course. You are playing a place where your side of the game was finally allowed in. Every lefty who has lifted a major trophy has stood on Bob Charles's shoulders, whether they say so or not.
The course itself doesn't care. Hoylake is a flat, exposed, ruthless piece of ground that has been swallowing pretensions since the 1860s.
The fifteenth — Little Eye — was redeveloped in 2020. Elevated par 3, set into the dunes, run-offs on three sides, a view of the Dee Estuary that makes you forget what club you're holding. Doesn't need to be long to be a problem.
The eighteenth, Stand, is the best driving hole I've played. Bunkers right and left. An undulating green where the wrong slope feeds a perfectly good shot back to your feet. You finish wanting to play it again. That's the test.
Hoylake — golf as it was meant to be played. — Tiger Woods, 2006
Tiger hit two drivers that whole Championship and won by two. Not a story about Tiger. A story about what Hoylake will accept and what it won't.
Lesson one: the ground is a club. Every shot I tried to fly to a number, the wind ate. Every shot I started low and let run, the course rewarded.
Royal Lytham & St Annes
Lytham is the trick of the week.
It is not a classic links. No monster dunes. No sea views — the railway and the red brick of St Annes do most of the framing. Show someone a photo of Lytham from the seventh fairway and tell them it's a parkland course in the Midlands and they'd believe you.
Then you play it, and you understand why The Open has been here eleven times.
Harry Colt's 1922 redesign is still the bones of the place. Colt was the architect of the Golden Age — naturalistic, strategic, allergic to gimmicks. His courses don't announce themselves. They make you choose, hole after hole, between the safe shot and the right one, and punish indecision worse than either.
The bunkers are the point. Roughly two hundred of them. Small. Deep. Placed exactly where a good player wants to land the ball. Colt didn't put them where you'd obviously hit it. He put them where you'd think about hitting it. The more sophisticated cruelty.
Lesson two: man-made can be just as honest as natural. Lytham is essentially built. The wind still rules. The ground still runs. A course is what it asks of you, not what it looks like in the brochure.
Formby
Formby is the one I'll remember when I'm old.
It's a story course. The first six holes welcome you in. The middle stretch turns serious. The closing run sends you home through the linksland with the wind dictating every shot.
The third — a par 5 cape — taught me what swirling wind actually does. The pines guard the green from the ocean breeze, so on the fairway you can't feel the wind. The flag is still. You flight an American approach, high and proud, and the moment the ball clears the tree line it gets thrown around like paper. The locals will tell you: keep it low. Trust the locals.
The tenth is the pivot. Par 3 through the pines, the wind shifts as you walk in, the trees frame the green in a way that makes you stop. The twelfth is a contender for best hole on the course — narrow par 4, green ringed by trees, judging the wind is the entire challenge.
The closing holes are an invitation to get creative. Land short on thirteen and fourteen, let the mounds feed it forward. The eighteenth is framed by the clubhouse on the right, and the tee shot begs for restraint — you wouldn't be the first to put a drive into the clocktower.
Lesson three: the ball runs. All week I'd been trying to land approaches on greens. At Formby I started landing them ten yards short and watching them feed. The shots looked worse. The scores got better. Some courses are rounds. Formby is a story.
Southport & Ainsdale
S&A is the local secret of the Lancashire coast.
James Braid laid it out and it hosted the Ryder Cup in 1933 and 1937, when the Ryder Cup still meant a few dozen people walking the dunes with the players. Tangly heather, dunes that rise just enough to do their job. It holds its own next to its Royal neighbors without any of the Royal pretense. The caddies are excellent. On a course this subtle, you'll need one.
This is the round where the lessons of the previous three days finally came together. Low ball flight. Run-up shots. Putting from forty yards off the green. By S&A I'd stopped fighting the conditions and started using them. What I scored — middling, by my standards — felt like a personal best for how few times I'd hit the ball where I didn't mean to.
Lesson four: links golf isn't a different sport. It's the original sport. Everything else is a remix.
What I'm Taking Home
A few things I'll carry into every Northeast round from here forward:
- Knockdowns aren't a bailout shot. They're the shot. I've spent two decades treating the three-quarter swing as an emergency tool. On a links it's the default. No reason it only works in England.
- Aim away from the pin on purpose. The kicker slope, the front edge, the bank short-left — these are targets, not bailouts. Formby's thirteenth taught me to land thirty feet short on purpose.
- The wind is the second architect. Read the flag before the yardage. The number on the card is a starting point. The wind is the actual hole.
- For lefties: this is your history too. Bob Charles won at Hoylake in 1963 with a swing that looked like ours. The Open has been awkward for left-handers for most of its existence. Charles, then Mickelson, then Bubba, then Harman. A short list, but a real one.
The One-Line Version
If a friend asks me what links golf taught me, I am going to tell them this: the ground is a club, the wind is the architect, and the lowest ball wins.
Everything else I learned on this trip is a footnote to that.