PORTRUSH, NORTHERN IRELAND | Rich Lerner, Golf Channel’s elegant essayist and the man who anchors the TV programmes that often feature lively discussions between Brandel Chamblee and Paul McGinley, remembers his first Open as clearly as if it was yesterday. A smile spreads over his face as he recounts it.
“It was in 1999 and [Jean] Van de Velde and we were all ready to escape Carnoustie,” Lerner said. “It was done and dusted. The Frenchman would be the first from his country since Arnaud Massy in 1907 [to win]. The laptops were closed and we were ready to move on.
“Then he [Van de Velde] jumped in the burn and all I remember is five hours later I was stumbling down the train tracks in Carnoustie smoking a Marlboro – and I don’t smoke. That was my introduction to the Open.”
By that time Chamblee had been coming to the U.K. for nearly 20 years. His exposure to British golf had begun in 1982 when he toured with Paul Thomas, the son of Dave Thomas, the Welsh golfer who finished second in the 1958 and 1966 Opens. “I got a great taste of links golf that summer,” Chamblee recalled. “That was when I fell in love with links golf. Paul and I bought a silver trophy and named it some profane name, which I can’t say in public.
“We played for that cup all summer, starting and ending at St Andrews. It’s hard to believe but we arrived on the 18th tee after the whole summer dead even. Paul pushed his tee shot to the right and broke the window of a milk cart. I played safer to the left and hit it up onto the green.
“I watched Paul get in a fight with the milk cart driver and thought: [Our summer] couldn’t end more bizarrely. I did win the cup. I still have it somewhere.
“I came back to compete in the 1987 Open [the year Nick Faldo had 18 pars in his final round to win the first of his major championships],” Chamblee continued. “I looked up recently what I shot to qualify. It was good – 64 and 66.”
There is no doubt Tom Watson is what the British call a Yank but he is also more of an Anglophile than most. “I love coming to this country,” Watson said during a recent Senior Open Championship. “I like the politeness of people in this country, their respect for one another, the good manners.” Watson, too, knew his Arthur Conan Doyle, the British author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. He had read these books at school and he smiled when asked how many times he had heard the phrase: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”
So it was no surprise to learn that Watson enjoyed aspects of life in Britain that other visitors found challenging. He relished the task of driving a car with a manual gear change on the left-hand side of the road, as he would in the U.K. Nor did he object to driving what to an American would be a compact car on some of Britain’s slender roads.
In 2014, after competing in the Open at Royal Liverpool in north-west England, Watson and his caddie, Neil Oxman, known to Watson as “Ox,” took pleasure in winding their way south through mid-Wales driving through villages with names such as Llanidloes, Llandeilo, Llandrindod and Llandovery, to reach the destination of Royal Porthcawl Golf Club, where Watson competed in that year’s Senior Open. “I like the challenges of coming over here,” Watson said.
“But other than that I love everything – the food, the people, the golf, the history. When I sit down to watch and cover the Open it’s a bit like sitting down to watch ‘Casablanca.’ It seems black and white when you watch it over here [in the UK].” – Brandel Chamblee
The challenges include minor inconveniences. “There’s only one thing that is not so great about covering the Open Championship,” Chamblee said. “I am very, very fond of sleeping in temperatures of about 65 degrees. When it gets hot [in Britain] I’m like, ‘Look, you had a 10,000-year head start on us and you still don’t have air conditioning.’ I would love some A/C over here.
“But other than that I love everything – the food, the people, the golf, the history. When I sit down to watch and cover the Open it’s a bit like sitting down to watch ‘Casablanca.’ It seems black and white when you watch it over here [in the UK].”
Lerner finds that visiting the United Kingdom for an Open tends to make him a little more grounded than usual. “The world is spinning in ways that I can’t fathom,” he said. “Maybe that’s because I’m getting up there in years now. I like how moody the weather is. I like the commitment to the game that I sense from fans over here. I always get the sense that time stands still when we come over here. The Open is as it was and it’s always great.”
Yet there is still one aspect of life in Britain he struggles to master. It has to do with the washing arrangements in the U.K. “I’d like a little more height in the showers,” the 6-foot-4 Lerner said. And as for baths, well don’t even mention baths to him.
“Somewhere along the line I was at a hotel, small hotel, small town, that only had a bathtub. I haven’t taken a bath since I was 9 and I got in and everything fell. It was rather humbling. I don’t mean I fell. Everything on my body fell. It was a little humbling.”
He laughed as he told this story and Chamblee laughed as he heard it. “We just love it,” Lerner said. “It’s very much of the game and it’s all about the game. It’s wonderful.”
Chamblee added: “I am often asked, ‘What’s your favourite tournament to cover?’ and that’s a bit like asking who your favourite child is. I certainly have a reverence for the Open Championship. I used to come and hang out at the bookstore for hour upon hour. I’d hang out in the Bollinger tent with Peter Alliss who came in and bought us college kids champagne and regaled us with stories of long-ago Open Championships.
“I first started covering at Royal St George’s in 2003 when Ben Curtis won. The Open is nostalgic and every single thing that’s great about golf is embodied by links golf and the Open Championship.”