Cumulative score over par will be higher per hole on the par 3's than the par 4's most of the time.

Margin for error basically imo. With a par 4 or par 5 start you can somewhat miss your tee shot and still have time to recover. With a long-ish par 3, missing that one shot puts you in a bad spot immediately.

Basically, would you rather start on a 500 yard par 5 or a 200 yard par 3? It's obv different if you are talking about a 480 yard par 4 and a 140 yard par 3.

140 yard par 5, obv.

Even through 1!

i understand your reasoning, but isn't this kind of thinking basically just a failure of the mental game?

the course is what it is. we don't wish golf courses into existence, so whether i prefer a 500 yard par 5 with a 100 yard wide fairway doesn't really matter, because if i'm standing on the first tee wishing i was hitting a different shot, haven't i already suffered a defeat before even striking the ball?

i played badlands golf course in vegas yesterday and i remember remarking to my friend about how i didn't like the course because of the short tee shots a lot of the par 4s required. on a few of them, even my 20 degree hybrid was too much club.

but only in this moment do i now realize what a dumb comment and thought that was. if your goal is to defeat the golf course (and other people playing it), wishing the golf course were different can only set a person back. i should have been focused on the shots i actually needed to hit to succeed on the course i was actually playing.

so tomorrow morning on tee #1, won't the first advantage immediately go to the person who isn't wishing they weren't starting on a par 3?

the 1st being a par 3 was what screwed Ian Woosnam iirc in that Open, his moron caddie kept two different drivers in the bag and he would have noticed on the first tee if it were a par 4, cost him two strokes

I mean, yeah, you've got to play the course as it lays, and everyone plays the same one. For the sake of the tournament, I don't think it will matter that #1 is a par 3 (outside of Woosnam moment). Especially with everyone going off #1 this week.

But as a thought experiment, I think it's very reasonable to expect that the order of the holes plays a part in the scoring average. I think a 200+ yard par 3 being #1 will mean the scoring average will be slightly higher than if that hole were in the middle of the round. No reason to derail this thread too much, but my off the cuff thought is that a players peak performance likely falls in the middle of the round, when adjusted for hole difficulty.

would also like to see Robert Rock win this

Martin Laird, ship it

ya, probably. i knew that you already subconsciously agreed with what i was going to say but i figured it was worth saying anyway the more you know!

Robert Karlsson withdraws due to injury. Since the Open is overbooked his spot will not be filled. The current field is now 156 golfers.

R&A fulfilling their oxymoronic duties by refusing to start on 1/10 but pushing for more slow play penalties.

Careful now. How would they accomplish a two tee start if 10 tee is 2 miles from the clubhouse? One of the vagaries of UK course is that they tend to go 9 holes out and then 9 holes back making 10 tee the farthest point from the clubhouse.

BO

How is it an oxymoron to only want to tee off on the first tee and at the same time fight the good fight against slow play???

They aren't mutually exclusive. Haha.

And what BO said.

If you didn't have slow play, you wouldn't have the need to start on both tees. Besides the functional challenges of starting on two tees at a venue where #10 is so far away, forcing the slow play issue is a nice stand I think the R&A is taking.

Pebble has a similar problem and they make it work there.

if they want the rounds finish quicker then 1/10 is the best/simplest option.

What? Read my reply.