RIATH AL-SAMARRAI: Can Rory McIlroy bounce back from his US Open collapse at British Open?

For a sport obsessed with history and nodding to the years gone by, a rare chance will present itself when the 152nd Open Championship commences at 6.35am this morning.

That will be the point when Justin Leonard, the 1997 champion around these Ayrshire links, steps forward to swing the first drive. The mystery is whether one of his fellow Americans will add their name to his on the Claret Jug come Sunday.

If they do, it will also be the first time since 1982 that golfers from the United States have completed a clean sweep of the majors. 

Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele and Bryson DeChambeau have taken home the Masters, the USPGA Championship and the US Open, and there is only the oldest and grandest of the bunch still to play for in 2024.

It will therefore be a source of some intrigue when Scheffler makes the same walk as Leonard at 3.10pm and takes in that arresting view across the Firth Of Clyde. 

A strong wind is forecast to have kicked up by then, which is always fun for golf’s truest wrestle against nature and also rather appropriate for a man who has brought a storm to the game.

As the two-time Masters champion, he is developing into the dominator of an era; a golfer who, by mid-July, has already won six titles this year and been outside the top 10 only twice in nine other tournaments. To go by ball-striking statistics, he is closer to Tiger’s footprints than anyone else in the past two decades, and this is a ball striker’s course.

It was Tommy Fleetwood, chatting with media yesterday afternoon, who attempted to describe the aura Scheffler has developed in a season when stopping him has proven difficult for everyone, including the traffic cops of Louisville.

‘He’s the best player in the world,’ Fleetwood told us. ‘He’s having the most incredible season, and I think winning six times as well as being up there in contention as many times as he has been, as consistently as he has been over the last two years, is phenomenal in a game that is as unpredictable as it gets in a way.

‘I say it all the time — I think the standard is getting higher and higher and higher and the margins are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. To be up there all the time, and on top of that, to go on a win streak the way he has is incredible really. It’s amazing.

‘Like I said, from a player’s standpoint, having someone like that to chase and to look up to and to drive you forward is a great thing for us.’

Chasing Scheffler might be the theme of the week, with at least some fuel coming from knowing the world No1 has never managed better than eighth at this annual gathering. That finish, in 2021, was followed by ties for 21st and 23rd, and it is an accepted wisdom of this sport that the links are not for everyone.

But it is equally true that the art of bounces and low ball-flights can be learned with time and proof of Scheffler’s capacity to learn and adapt can be found on an astonishing number of trophies for a 28-year-old.

Having forgone the Scottish Open for some private links practice, including a couple of laps of Turnberry, he has taken to speaking like a convert. ‘I just feel like you have to be more creative here,’ he said this week.

‘I love that part of it. I feel like, when I do come over here, this is really how golf was intended to be played.’

Not everyone from the land of target golf and sculpted scenery has historically felt the same appreciation for the rugged alternative when they leave the boundaries of the PGA Tour. For all his words about warming to such quirky surrounds, there certainly seemed to be limited love from DeChambeau in his final practice loop yesterday.

At the iconic Postage Stamp, that beautiful and brutish par three of 120 yards, he hit three wedges at the green and walked off without a closer examination. When he got in a car to leave the grounds at 6pm, the mad scientist didn’t carry the look of a man who had all the answers — it was quite the contrast to the bouncing stride of Collin Morikawa, the 2021 Open champion.

Links golf can inspire those contrasting impressions and it will always be the canvas where it is tempting to wonder if Europeans have a greater chance than usual. On that front, there has been no shortage of golfers and coaches talking up the prospects of Fleetwood on the range.

Having grown up in the Open heartland of Southport, he told Mail Sport earlier this year that it is, by a distance, the one tournament he most wants to win. As he did so, he began imagining the old theme music to the BBC coverage, so this an infatuation deeply held and encouraged by finishing second in 2019 and top 10 in each of the past two years.

With a ball-striking game that is the envy of most in the field, he has the necessary weaponry to avoid the horrors of those pot bunkers that guard so many greens and bring havoc to the fairways. It might just allow him to escape the conversations around the best players to never win a major, not to mention bring an end to the 32-year curse of Englishmen at the Open. ‘I love this tournament,’ he said. ‘When I grew up, I was always practising on the range as an eight-year-old, nine-year-old, 10-year-old wanting to win the Open.’

His will be a fascinating narrative in the coming days, as will that of Rory McIlroy one month after his startling collapse at the US Open. His 10-year wait for a fifth major has seen the accumulation of vast scar tissue, so there is an interest in seeing how his otherwise magnificent talent holds up when the pressure is back on again.

His route back to the furnace was built on a period of silent reflection, both by changing his phone number and taking long walks around Manhattan. His confidence here has been clear for all to see, with his claim that it took ‘three or four’ days to move on from Pinehurst. It had the ring of a defence mechanism to it, but McIlroy was fourth on his return at the Scottish Open on Sunday and his resilience should never be underplayed.

The 2014 winner has more than enough game to be last man standing, as does Spain’s Jon Rahm, despite the nosedive in his form in the majors since joining LIV at the end of 2023. A tie for 45th at the Masters, a missed cut at the USPGA Championship and a late withdrawal from the US Open is not at all in keeping with a golfer who was Scheffler’s closest rival prior to defecting.

‘Keep an eye on him,’ the Sky Sports pundit Paul McGinley told Mail Sport. ‘People might not fancy him, but his game, his ability to play in the wind, makes him a very strong threat here.’

On the back of Carlos Alcaraz at Wimbledon and a few footballers in Berlin, that would be quite the Spanish treble at a time when the Americans hope to complete a different kind of sweep. Naturally, the links will have a strong say in who has the best claim.