Qualla: 2019 Open Championship

2019 Open Championship: Introduction

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Average Golfer, CC BY 3.0. It was supposed to be Rory's week. He had grown up an hour down the road in Holywood, learned the game on courses you could practically see from the eighteenth tee at Royal Portrush, and the bookmakers and the home crowd had spent months building the kind of expectation that crushes most players. On the first hole on Thursday morning, McIlroy made a quadruple-bogey eight. He missed the cut by a stroke. By Sunday evening the noise that should have been his belonged instead to a soft-spoken man from Clara, County Offaly, who hit a five-iron through the wind and rain on a closing nine that nobody who watched will forget. Shane Lowry won the 148th Open Championship by six.

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Image: Average Golfer | CC BY 3.0

2019 Open Championship: The Open Comes Back to Portrush

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nilfanion, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Open had not been to Royal Portrush since 1951, when Max Faulkner won what was then the first - and for sixty-eight years the only - Open played outside Great Britain. The Troubles closed off the question of returning for most of a generation. Then the course got serious abou...

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Image: Nilfanion | CC BY-SA 3.0

2019 Open Championship: A Course Record on Saturday

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexrk2, CC BY-SA 3.0. Lowry came into the week ranked thirty-third in the world, best known for winning the 2015 WGC-Bridgestone Invitational and for the 2016 U.S. Open at Oakmont, where he had led by four with eighteen holes to play and lost. He opened with twin 67s to share the lead with J. B. Holme...

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Image: Alexrk2 | CC BY-SA 3.0

2019 Open Championship: Sunday in the Wind

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nzeemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. The forecast for the final round was bad enough that the R&A moved tee times forward. Then the wind arrived. Lowry shot 72. In conditions that conceded almost nothing, that was a victory in itself. Fleetwood, his playing partner, could not catch him. The Englishman finished secon...

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Image: Nzeemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

2019 Open Championship: What the Locals Heard

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Average Golfer, CC BY 3.0. The atmosphere on the back nine on Sunday was not the studious hush that golf cultivates. People sang. They wept. Cameras caught Lowry's father in the gallery looking like a man who had spent thirty years waiting for one specific Sunday. Darren Clarke, the 2011 Open champion who ...

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Image: Average Golfer | CC BY 3.0

2019 Open Championship: The Driver Test

Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Average Golfer, CC BY 3.0. There was one quieter story running underneath the championship. Before play started, the R&A randomly inspected thirty drivers. Four failed the characteristic-time test, including Xander Schauffele's. The clubs had to be exchanged. It mattered because, two months earlier, fiftee...

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Image: Average Golfer | CC BY 3.0