Hometown Take

As a child of Northern Ireland, David Feherty has a sense of what is coming when the Open Championship returns next week to Royal Portrush on the edge of the North Atlantic.

This is no ordinary Open Championship, if there is such a thing. This one has been 68 years in the making, since the day Max Faulkner won the Claret Jug at Portrush in 1951, through the Troubles that painted the country in blood and anger and, finally, through the insistent dream of many that the course and the country were deserving of this moment.

“It is colossal for the people of Northern Ireland,” said Feherty, whose golf career took root in his homeland and whose accent remains even as he has become an American citizen and golf commentator planted firmly in Dallas, Texas.

“To have the Open there is remarkable. It is an indication of how far things have come since the Good Friday Agreement.”

That agreement, signed in 1998, brought peace to the region after years of bitter and deadly religious and political fighting that took the lives of more than ...