1. The Open Championship is golf’s greatest event because it’s the oldest and has the game’s greatest pedigree.
Hell, it’s the granddaddy of all modern sporting events. It began more than a century before the first Super Bowl.
The Open was first contested by eight hardy Scots playing three 12-hole rounds in a single grueling day in 1860. How old is this event? Some perspective: the U.S. flag had only 33 stars. The Civil War hadn’t happened and World War I was more than 50 years away. The Pony Express started the same year as the Open but the tournament pre-dates automobiles, the Wright Brothers, Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb, Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Harry Potter and Nike.
That’s old.
5. When you’re the biggest, baddest and best championship in the world, you make your own rules.
Golf was invented in Scotland, so even after Americans took up the game a century or two later and used a slightly larger golf ball, Great Britain and the Open Championship continued to use its original model, which became known in America as “the small ball.”
That forced U.S. players like Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus who came over to play in the Open to make adjustments. The United States Golf Association decreed in 1932 that a golf ball must be 1.68 inches in diameter but the R&A, Britain’s ruling body, retained its standard, 1.62. The smaller ball was the preferred model to use in the Open because it bored through the winds better and, Jack Nicklaus noted years later, “went 50 yards farther.”
The British small ball was finally disallowed from Open Championship play in 1974 and dropped from all usage in 1990.
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