This was the third time Royal Portrush had hosted the Open. The first was 1951, when Max Faulkner won and the championship was for the first time held outside Great Britain. The second was 2019, when Shane Lowry won by six in a wind that almost blew the gallery off the dunes. Six years later, the Open was back. For decades after 1951, the question of whether the Open would ever return to Portrush had no good answer. By 2025, the question was when it would come again - and the club was hosting like a regular on the rota.

The first-day draw had a clear morning side and a friendlier afternoon side - a difference of about 1.3 strokes in scoring average. By the end of Thursday, five players were tied for the lead, the most since six shared the first-round lead in 1938. Scheffler shot a three-under 68. McIlroy, born up the road in Holywood, opened with 70, alongside 2019 champion Lowry and Genesis Scottish Open winner Chris Gotterup. Gotterup was twenty-five years old, in his first Open, and would be celebrating his twenty-sixth birthday in the third round.

Friday changed the shape of the week. Scheffler shot 64 - the low round of the championship to that point - and led Matt Fitzpatrick by one. It was the first time a world number one had held the 36-hole lead at the Open since Tiger Woods in 2006. The cut came in at one over par, exactly where it had landed in 2019. Out went 2021 champion Collin Morikawa, 2022 champion Cameron Smith, and five-time major winner Brooks Koepka. None of the nine amateurs in the field made it to the weekend, which meant the Silver Medal would go unawarded for the first time since 2019. The Open had stopped being a tournament about who would emerge and become a tournament about whether Scheffler could be caught.

He could not. Scheffler shot a bogey-free 67 on Saturday and led by four. It was his fourth 54-hole lead in a major; he had won the previous three. Li Haotong, ranked 111th in the world entering the week, shot 69 to sit solo second, the kind of leaderboard improbability the Open occasionally manufactures. McIlroy, playing for a crowd that needed only the smallest excuse to roar, shot 66 - which included a moment when he hit a shot out of the rough and uncovered a hidden ball buried beneath his own. He bogeyed the eleventh, then holed a 56-foot eagle putt at the par-five twelfth. John Parry made the first hole-in-one of the tournament at the thirteenth. The scoring average for the round was 69.97, the first sub-70 round average at the Open since the final round of the 2022 Open.

Scheffler started the final round four ahead of Li. He hit his approach on the first to within two feet, made birdie, made two more on the front nine, and at one point led by seven. The eighth caught him - a tee shot in a bunker, a second shot that hit the lip and stayed in the sand, a double bogey, his first since the second round. The lead was four again. He responded by birdying the ninth and getting up and down from off the green for a birdie at the par-five twelfth. He reached seventeen-under. He parred the last six holes. No one got closer than four. Harris English holed a 33-foot eagle putt at the twelfth, then a 42-foot birdie putt at the par-three sixteenth, then birdied the seventeenth to finish second at thirteen-under - his second runner-up finish to Scheffler in a major that year. Gotterup, on his twenty-sixth birthday, parred his last five holes and finished alone in third. McIlroy double-bogeyed the tenth, recovered with two birdies, and finished tied seventh at ten-under. Bryson DeChambeau matched the week's low round with a closing 64.