It’s possible that one of the customers last July at the Dunvegan Hotel, who fancied himself only a 9-iron away from the Old Course, remembers Cameron Smith’s British Open better than he does.
It didn’t last long, as Smith recently recalled the Sunday that left him a major tournament champion: teeing off, missing a putt on the ninth hole, realizing he had the lead, then ended with “the feeling of not really. joy, but the feeling of relief.”
He considered it, a memory barely clouded by luster or error, a strength.
“That’s one of my greatest assets: hitting a golf shot and forgetting about it,” Smith said in an interview. He has friends, as every professional golfer does, who can “remember every single shot from every single tournament they played.”
“But that’s one thing,” he continued, “I can never do.”
He spent the last year filling a claret jug with the Open winner of the beer — Australia’s XXXX Gold, he says, the best tasting — and passing it around.
Now comes his first major title defense, which begins Thursday at Royal Liverpool, the English course site of the 151st Open.
Assessing Smith’s year so far has been a choose-your-own-adventure analysis exercise. The Masters Tournament, where he has finished in the top 10 for three consecutive years, produced a disappointment in April, when he tied for 34th in the only major tournament in which he did not fail on the weekend.
But Smith’s May exit at Oak Hill was his best PGA Championship performance of his career (a tie for ninth), and after missing three US Open cuts in five years, he’s gone in Los Angeles with fourth place. Less than two weeks ago, he won an LIV Golf tournament near London, his second individual victory since joining the Saudi-backed circuit last summer. The event was, perhaps, rare preparation for the taunts and fears of Royal Liverpool, even for a previous Open champion.
“The wind blows differently, I feel, in England and Scotland,” Marc Leishman, one of Smith’s LIV colleagues, observed this month. “Heavier. Getting used to that is pretty important, getting spin off the ball. Cam was very good at that time, and threw his wedges and put on top of that, and he was a pretty tough opponent.
Smith’s slump — a relative term — to start the year likely stemmed from a holiday break that was the longest of the 29-year-old’s career. He won the Australian PGA Championship, missed the cut at the Australian Open and is in desperate need of a reboot after years of pandemic turmoil and rushing into the global spotlight. Even now, he says, he’s a professional athlete who “would rather people didn’t know me.” If he had his way, he would probably go fishing.
And so while rest is a fine, essential spice for his mind, it is, at least temporarily, a hex to his golf game. Once he returned to competition, the shortcomings of his preparation were clear. He had middling finishes in two of the first three LIV events of the year, and missed the cut at a tournament in Saudi Arabia.
He still prefers to practice removing glasses in his office in Florida (there, instead of wearing green, “because I’m lazy”) but accepts, however grudgingly, that his driver needs a bigger job. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles for the US Open in June, he enthusiastically embraced an old-school approach: Don’t worry too much about distance, try to get the ball down the fairway, get a chance for birdie.
He finished 50th in driving distance but had 19 birdies, tied for second in the field and equivalent to the winner, Wyndham Clark. At Augusta, he finished 31st in driving distance and tied for 37th in birdies, with 13.
“I feel like I worked hard for that, and the golf went really well, and then it was just a case of letting go and letting things happen,” he said of his resurgence. “And sure enough, the last couple of majors started to feel good.”
But Smith’s peaceful sorcery, so obvious to anyone who goes online and spends a minute watching him conquer the Road Hole on Sunday that he won the claret jug, flows in large part from his equilibrium. He got it from his mother, he thinks, perhaps not surprisingly for a player whose early years on the PGA Tour were marked by homesickness.
The pandemic didn’t help. When he won the tour’s Players Championship in March 2022, his mother and sister were at TPC Sawgrass, reuniting with Smith after more than two years of border restrictions. Six months later, he was ranked second in the world and one of LIV’s most hyped signings.
But he has so far managed to avoid being seen as a villain, even before last month’s surprise announcement of a potential détente between the warring circuits. He just spent so much time airing grievances in public. He acknowledged the shortcomings of the LIV fields compared to the PGA Tour. When his world ranking fell, which was inevitable since LIV tournaments were not yet accredited, he didn’t make the cut because his shot at reaching No.
“I made my bed, and I’m happy to sleep in it,” he said in an interview in March. Now, with the temporary peace that perhaps grips professional golf, he wonders if he’ll have a shot, after all.
“Don’t get me wrong: I want to beat everybody,” he said. “But there’s no reason why you can’t do it with a smile on your face.”
He faces 155 other men this week, all clamoring to deny him another year with the claret jug. Now ranked seventh in the world, and preparing for a field that includes more than a dozen fellow Open winners, he has a backup plan for his drinks.
“The Aussie PGA Trophy is pretty cool,” he said. “You could definitely fit more beer in that one.”
However, he said this week, he had tears in his eyes when he returned the claret jug to Open organizers.
“I wasn’t, like, not letting it go,” he said in a news conference on Monday. “But it’s just a moment that I don’t think you think about, and then all of a sudden it’s there, and, yeah, you want it back.”
