British Open Sleeper Picks – The 152nd Open Championship will take place at the Royal Troon Golf Club in Ayrshire, Scotland. The club, which dates back to 1878 when it started as a five-hole course, now boasts 45 holes. The Old Course at the Royal Troon will be in play for the tournament. James Braid, a five-time Open champion, oversaw a course renovation in 1923, adding nearly sixty bunkers. The course has remained largely unchanged since then, except for its length.
Royal Troon is located on the southwestern edge of Scotland near the Firth of Clyde, approximately 30 miles southwest of🧔 Glasgow and near Northern Ireland. Like all Open links courses, weather will be a primary factor influencing the game.
For the upcoming championship, the course will be a par-71, measuring 7,385 yards on the scorecard, almost 200 yards longer than when Troon last hosted the Open in 2016. More than half of the holes have been lengthened since thওen, particularly the fourth hole, which has increased from 555 to 599 yards, and the 17th hole, which has grown from 220 to 242 yards.
Royal Troon is renowned for being home to the longest and shortest holes in the Open rota. The sixth hole, known as “Turnberry,” is 623 yards long, while the eighth hole, named “The Postage Stamp,” is just 123 yards, featuring a green surrounded by five bunkers. It could potentially play as short as 99 yards at some point during the tournament.
Fairway positioning and keeping the ball in play off the tee is essential for success at Royal Troon. The club motto here is ‘As much by skill as by strength.’ Due to a high penalty for missing fairways, pounding away with a driver comes with plenty of peril. With potentially windy conditions, anything too high in the air with excess spin will disappear into the deep foot-long fescue rough. The same result can also happen on low-binding shots that run through the fairway due to a poor angle off the tee. Fairway bunkers are among the course’s biggest defenses and are a true one-stroke penalty. They are dotted around the landing area, making strategy and accuracy off the tee paramount.
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2024 British Open Sleeper Picks and Longshots
Louis Oosthuizen
We don’t get much Louis Oosthuizen in our lives these days after he moved to LIV Golf, but the 2010 Open Champ is playing really well right now and is perfectly suited for the test that lies ahead at Royal Troon. Oostey is one of the most accurate off the tee players in the world, and that’s continued on LIV where he ranks fourth in driving accuracy this season.
He’s coming off of a T4 finish at last week’s Andalucia event, which is his fourth T4 or better finish in his past eight LIV events (he WD from LIV Houston). Oosthuizen also won back-to-back DP World Tour events back in December, but his string of excellent golf has been out of sight, out of mind for most. That’s why he opened at 110/1 for this year’s Open, which should lead to some excellent (albeit useless) closing line value this week.
Russell Henley
Russell Henley doesn’t have a pristine track record at Open Championships, but he’s just too good to be 170/1 in any field. He does have multiple top-10 finishes in majors, including the last time out at the U.S. Open, where he finished T7, along with a surprising T4 at the 2023 Masters.
On paper, Henley’s game is perfectly suited for what I believe Royal Troon is going to demand. He’s going to keep the ball in play off the tee, and he’s an exceptional iron player. His short game is vastly improved, and when you think about the scrambling element at an Open Championship, it closely resembles what golfers faced at Pinehurst (and Augusta National) with the shaved runoffs and short grass around the greens. You can make the case that he’s a better finishing position bet than a true contender, but the Open Championship has brought us down the betting board before, including Brian Harman last season, and there are a lot of parallels to Harman’s game and form heading into this year’s Open Championship for Russell Henley.
