8 things I learned from pros at the 2026 British Open

SOUTHPORT, England — Ryan Fox didn't start playing competitive golf until he was 17. That a golfer who started that late would go on to become a major champion seems, on the surface, like some kind of miracle.

It might've actually been the best thing that ever happened to him.

Around the time 39-year-old Fox was starting to get into golf as a hobby, there was a common refrain emerging in the broader sports science world: That if a junior wanted to get good at a specific skill, like golf, they needed to commit early. To specialize. To pick one sport early and pour in the hours.

It was an era where people had just enough information to be dangerous, and on an intuitive level, this one made sense. Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers popularized the "10,000 hours" rule, and one-sport child phenoms-turned-pros like Tiger Woods and the Williams sisters seemed to prove the model.

It was only years later, when sports scientists started tracking the long-term outcomes, that they made a startling discovery: That for every success story the early specialization system churned out were thousands of others left burned out.

Heaps of studies now find that early specialization for juniors correlates with all manner of worse outcomes once they reach adulthood. Higher burnout rates, more injuries, stagnant long-term improvement, and worse general movement quality.

They couldn't run as fast, jump as high, throw as far, and were generally less coordinated. Of the 30 studies examining the topic of early specialization, 15 found it led to worse overall performance, and nine more found no significant difference.

The focus now is on helping juniors build general athleticism and put off specializing in one sport until about the age of 16. And Ryan Fox is a fantastic example.

Fox didn't play serious competitive golf until he was 18, and was a 2-handicap up until the age of 17. He always loved golf, but in an interview with Fried Egg Golf he said the sports he was most focused on as a junior were…

"Probably cricket, rugby, then tennis, in that order. Though looking back, I always had the most fun playing golf."

But thinking Fox wasn't improving at golf during this time would be the wrong way of thinking about it. Fox was improving all the essential skills that others were overlooking, that would help him get really good at golf the moment he flipped the switch.

Fox doubles as one of the longest hitters on tour. He can bench press almost 300 lbs and deadlift hundreds of pounds more. He's been largely injury-free, and has whatever intangible skills help him execute under pressure on the biggest stage.

"I spent a lot of time building my hand-eye coordination and it's pretty good now," Fox says. "I see things fast. I was the same when I was playing cricket growing up. I played almost every sport growing up, and tennis I wanted to hit the ball hard, and cricket I wanted to hit the ball hard. Everything just happened fast. I was never methodical at anything, to be honest, and it just carried over into golf…For me it's not that difficult to pick a shot and pick a club. I get in there, and it all happens quick."

And now, unlike so many others in his age group, Fox isn't striving to stay at the level he once was. He's a 39-year-old professional golfer who keeps getting better.

"I was a rookie on the PGA Tour at 37 and now a major champion at 39. I'm definitely not following the trend at the moment. But if I can keep getting better a little bit every year, I'll be pretty happy."

1. Height is an underrated weapon

On the Wednesday before the tournament, I was lucky enough to be part of a panel discussion for Mastercard's One Club hosted by PGA professional Alex Elliot and including former Open Championship winner at Royal Birkdale Ian Baker-Finch, and former World No. 1 Luke Donald.

Along the way, Donald said something interesting: That modern players often overlook the value of hitting higher chip shots.

"Good short game players will grab a lob wedge or a sand wedge before they would a putter. I think they feel like it takes some of the variability out. But I would say today's players, the way they pitch around the greens, it's a lot of those low ones that have a skip or two and then stop. You don't see too many players hitting that high one and using height to stop it. I feel like I don't know why that shot has kinda gone away in our game, but you kinda need it here at certain times — especially into the wind, not a lot of green to work with, use height. And I think people feel, even the good players feel, when the ground gets a little firm the club can bounce in there a little bit, and sometimes that high one can be a lower-percentage shot. But it's just as important."

A high descent angle as the ball approaches the turf is the best way to get the ball to stop on firm and fast greens, and you can only get there with higher shots. Bailing out by rolling your ball along firmer and faster green surrounds is essential at the Open, but knowing how to go high when you need to, as Donald says, isn't a tool you can ignore.

2. Keep your stock shot in the guard rails

Though all three faded by Sunday, the 2026 Open Championship saw three players with among the highest left-right bias in golf pop into contention. Off the tee, Jackson Suber is one of the biggest draw-bias players on tour. So is Bryson DeChambeau. Alex Fitzpatrick, meanwhile, hits fades almost all the time.

The ball flight is different, but the goal is simple: Don't try to learn a shot you don't have, but work on keeping the one you do have within the guard rails. That means managing your face-to-path. As Rory explained, when each of those starts pointing too far in the opposite direction, the gentle draws and fades turn severe.

Bryson and Suber each say their swing path gets too severe when this happens. Suber has worked on getting his path more zeroed (his tendency is to swing too far in-to-out). Bryson monitors his intensely. During a pre-tournament range session, he told me he likes his face to be about 1.5 degrees open, and his path just to the right of that.

Alex Fitzpatrick hits cuts almost exclusively off the tee. His tendency is to swing too far left, which makes his fades too low and wipey. To counteract that, he tries to feel like Cam Young: A longer pause at the top, which helps keep his arms closer to his body. That prevents the path from getting too left.

"I've always loved playing fades. A long time ago I really struggled with driver because I basically couldn't get the ball in the air off the tee," he said. "In all honesty, it's just trying to feel more extreme with my left arm. The best example is I'm good friends with Cam Young, and one of the things we looked at with him is he pauses a lot, and I started to pause more, and that felt like after seeing him, that was how he kept his left arm in, and basically just copied him."

My takeaway: Don't stress about the shot you don't have. Stress about tightening up the one you do.

3. When stats and gut feeling disagree, trust your gut

There was nothing in Min Woo's putting stats that seemed a cause for concern. For the past two seasons he's been a safely above-average putter and slightly better than average from shorter range. Yet something didn't feel right.

"I would be streaky on and off, and I would be nervous on a three, four-footer, but stats-wise I'm actually not bad at short putting, but in my head, I feel like I'm going to miss the putt," he said.

So he decided to make a change.

After the U.S. Open, he swapped his left-hand low grip of five years for a conventional hold, the good vibes returned, and the results ticked up too. He ended the 2026 Open Championship inside the top third in SG: Putting, and snapped his back-to-back missed cut streak because of it.

"Tempo work, face angle work, everything pretty much. It seemed like it matched up — has been matching up really good. So I'm glad to find it."

It's funny; a lot of people in that situation would look at the stats and try to convince themselves they were a good putter. He tried that for a while, but Min Woo trusted his gut, and there's a lesson there. Let your gut be your guide, and sanity check it with stats. That's what Min Woo did, and he seems to be getting the best of both because of it.

4. Give yourself busy work

Watch closely and players do this thing where, before important shots and after bad shots, they'll bury their face in their yardage book. They'll scribble an essay of notes along the way. You could see Cam Young doing it the moment he found the greenside bunker on the 72nd hole on Sunday.

What are they doing?

Funnily enough, I got a first-hand look at this during the backup on the 14th tee on Thursday. Spieth was waiting for the group ahead of him to tee off. It was a solid 15-minute wait until it was his turn to play, so he whipped out his yardage book to kill the time. A few things I noticed:

• He double-checked he had correctly marked every score of the player whose score he was keeping
• He plotted the exact pin position in his yardage book
• He placed "Xs" in ideal green locations around that pin
• Some quick napkin math on distances to different locations — the distance to that bunker, for instance, and the distance from that bunker to the green
• Double-checked all of the above

It's busy work, by any definition, but it serves an essential purpose: It distracts the mind from intrusive thoughts getting in.

5. Neergaard-Petersen's one-shot pop quiz

Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen just notched his best performance, and first top-10 finish, in a major championship. I'm increasingly Denmark-pilled when it comes to their golfing prospects (they're producing some very, very good young players right now), and Neergaard-Petersen's longtime coach Andreas Kali said something interesting from the grounds at Royal Birkdale.

"We practice the nine windows on the range, trying to hit all shots, but there's one shot in particular we want to make sure he can hit," he says. "It's a slightly higher, baby, lean draw. It's in the top right of the middle window. If he can hit that shot, we know he's hitting the ball well. If he can't, we'll work until he can hit that shot."

Interesting stuff again from one of my favorite coaches in the game. Neergaard-Petersen doesn't attempt to hit every shot on the course, and he shapes it just one way with his driver, but he treats shaping sessions as a pop quiz. One shot type. If he can hit it on command, he can confirm he's where he wants to be. It's a good framework for the rest of us. Find one shot that we can treat as a stamp of approval for our game.

It should be different for everyone. Maybe it's a straight 3-foot putt. Or a standard chip shot. Maybe it's even an (intentional) monster slice. It doesn't need to be pretty, it just needs to be something validating that you can do. A north star. If you can ace the test, you can have some closure about the work you've done on the range, and click into course mode.

6. JT's simple rule of thumb

I've said this before and I'll say it again, but I love the ability top pros have of identifying the really important stuff, and making it so much simpler than the rest of us do.

For instance, Justin Thomas. Avoiding bunkers is really, really important at Open Championships. That was tricky at Royal Birkdale when the fairways were rolling out as much as they were. But tricky doesn't mean complicated:

"You just kind of have a couple rules of thumb," Justin Thomas said. "If you feel like there's any chance you might get there [to a bunker], take one less club. We just have to use our golf IQ and instincts as much as we can."

Remember the first, most important rule of the round—which in this case is avoid bunkers. If there's even a chance of violating that, take one less club. There's no point pushing for more.

7. Setup tweaks can be the easiest fix

Notice how much Ryan Fox flares out his left foot. The reason is simple: It helps him open up his hips more, which he needs because of his strong grip. More hip turn opens the clubface, and a stronger grip tends to close it. Put the two together, and you've got something close to straight. Flaring out his left foot is a simple, easy-on-the-body solution. He doesn't need to think about turning more. He just does this, and it happens.

8. Tyrrell Hatton's concentration trick

On a similar theme: The first and second rounds were slow. Very slow. Close to 6 hours. How do you stay focused when play is crawling at such an annoyingly glacial pace?

"You only need to concentrate when you get to your ball, don't you?," Hatton said. "There's a lot of downtime, but those were the times when you just have a good chat before you have to start focusing on the next shot."

Don't focus on what you can't control, and don't focus on what you can until you have to. Just have a chat.