5 early views from the floor at Royal Birkdale

SOUTHPORT, England — If your character sees a golf course that will serve as a golf center for the next seven days, he might as well move on.

What is brown and yellow and hard as rock? Royal Birkdale Golf Course. Fairways and “greens”. On Monday. In this 154th Open Championship. The color is already gone – and if you’re a fan of the lovely Kentucky Bluegrass and green colors, you won’t want to see it come Sunday afternoon.

And as strange as it sounds, that’s exactly why we’re excited.

It takes a bit of effort to get to Birkdale, a small British town on the west coast of the country, about an hour outside of both Manchester and Liverpool. The roads are narrow and winding, and there are more rural areas than commercial developments in the wider area. And yet that’s what the R&A has done repeatedly over the decades, bringing more modern openings to this golf course than all but the Old Course at St. Andrews. The reason is the golf course, which is a wild and aggressive beast – a true “test of bravery” – on the worst days.

And on the best days?

Well, it looks like it was on Monday afternoon, when dozens of golf fans arrived at the venue for the first time, including the GOLF.com crew. Here’s what we learned on Monday at the Open Championship, starting with the lesson.

1. It is black and red

The reason we love links golf is because it changes our view of the sport as we know it. Bad is good here, and green is brown. After a long, hot summer and an amazing rhythm without rain, this is exactly where we arrived.

I have been fortunate enough to attend the last four Open Championship golf tournaments, and have seen the tournament contested under all kinds of conditions. I don’t remember seeing courses as brown as Royal Birkdale was on Monday. And it’s Monday. The weather forecast does not call for any rain. There is a chance that the brown could be yellow.

The reason we love an oddly colored golf course is because, in the minds of the most refined golfers, bouncy, dead grass embraces uncertainty. It takes creativity. It asks a different kind of question. New and different questions make for interesting golf. And, well, who doesn’t like that?

2. A new type of competition

The Open Championship held the first event of its kind for a major tournament on Monday: The Qualifiers. As many of the players in the field are learning the lesson for the first time, a few top pros and novices are fighting for one last spot on the field. The purpose of this tournament – called the Last Chance Qualifier – was to give players who were very close to the Open spot another chance to enter the field.

At the Royal Birkdale site, the energy for the new event was surprisingly high. Hundreds of galleries follow the players as they reach the final stage, following hard and cheering with great enthusiasm.

In the end, the winner was Joe Dean, a former truck driver and aspiring champion, whose two-under score topped the 12-man field. But the real winner has been the R&A, which has added a dose of free tournament golf to a sleepless day in the major tournament calendar – and has done so without greatly expanding or impacting the rest of the field here at Royal Birkdale.

3. Practice miracles

One striking line of the Open Championship rota: the driving range is draw from the first tee box. Much of this is driven by the history of golf courses, where the land is at a premium and where the practice areas are often less about pushing as many holes of golf into as little space as possible.

Not at this week’s Open, and for good reason: golfers use the distance at Hillside, one of several neighboring golf clubs to Royal Birkdale, and just a short walk from the clubhouse at Royal Birkdale. The reason for the change is simple: It just makes more sense for the Open Championship. But the result is important: Hillside is also the home course of the Open Championship’s native son, Tommy Fleetwood.

4. Speaking of the clubhouse…

There has never been a more impressive host clubhouse for the Open Championship than this week – an Art Deco style design that looks almost like a 1970s scale spaceship. The clubhouse takes a back seat here at Birkdale, and provides a great frame for the rest of the action at this week’s event.

The story and clubhouse are equally worthy. It was designed in 1935 by architect George E. Tonge to look like an ocean liner traversing the sand dunes of the area. And, happily, it is the third clubhouse in the club’s history – rebuilt after it was discovered that the clubhouse was built on a neighboring property.

At the Open, the weirdness is part of the fun. At Royal Birkdale, the fun begins on earth.

5. Duel in the sun?

It wasn’t exactly the weather for the Open Championship on Monday at Birkdale … ​​and it won’t be the weather for the Open Championship at the end of tournament week, when temperatures are expected to be in the mid-70s and mid-80s … and the sun is expected to shine throughout.

There is a chance, given the conditions and weather, that this week will give us the darkest Open Championship final round in many years – perhaps since Tiger Woods’ victory at Royal Liverpool back in 2006.