“That’s the biggest difference”, said Johnson, who also won the WGC Bridgestone Invitational recently.
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Links golf course designers really like to punish a player who finds the sand, and there aren’t many traps more daunting on The Open rota than the deep, rectangular-shaped one to the right of Royal Troon’s infamous Postage Stamp green.
“I always expect to come out and perform and to contend”, he said. “I got into golf to win championships, and win major championships”.
Bach says the International Olympic Committee has to “respect the individual decisions” of golfers who pulled out citing concerns over Zika, but notes that there have also been “very different reasons” not related to the virus that have led some to skip the games.
“The game is in a great state”, said defending British Open champion Zach Johnson, one of only two players outside the Fab Four to win at the past eight major championships.
As a sign of his supreme self-belief, Johnson claimed if he brought his best game to the South Ayrshire course, there could only be one victor.
“Jack Nicklaus said he would walk to Rio to play in the Olympics and I feel the same way”. I’ve got a lot of confidence in my game. “If golf is in the Olympics and golf wants to be seen as a mainstream sport as such, it has to get in line with the other sports that test more rigorously”.
That lip there is basically vertical, and every time I tried to get it out, it would go back into the same spot. “I do get nerves or stress or whatever you want to call it, but I like it. If you didn’t get nervous, then something’s wrong because then it doesn’t mean anything to you”, he insisted.
Johnson said: “It’s a game”.
“So it’s just something that you’ve just got to figure out a way to deal with”. “On four, it’s a driver and a five iron”. “And to reach a third leg of the Grand Slam this week would be a fantastic achievement”.
Their countrymen have won the last six Opens at Troon and Patrick Reed recorded the first eagle this time around after holing his wedge approach on the third bounce at the third hole to instantly move to two under.
“I t’s mostly mental”, Spieth said. The penalty was a double bogey. “Let us wait then for this evaluation. I’m going to win more times than not”.
Twenty minutes before he teed off, there wasn’t an empty seat in the grandstand next to the first tee, where the silver claret jug was on a podium.
“But I’ve been fairly unwavering in my commitment to it. I think if I was to fast-forward 10 years, I’d like my career to read, “Justin Rose, multiple major champion and Olympic gold medallist”.
The other member of the so-called “Big Four” of world golf, Northern Ireland’s Rory McIlroy, is pleased to be back at his home Open after being sidelined previous year because of an injury he sustained while playing a friendly game of football.
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Chamblee, a former PGA Tour player, said that golf “suffers from being too expensive, too exclusionary, too slow and too hard to understand the rules”.
