Roundup: Royal Portrush Open Championship Announcement
/Brian Keogh was there for the announcement and points out that the earliest The Open will return to Royal Portrush is 2019. It sounds like it'll take longer.
“Without going into detail, we will be spending several million pounds to bring the course and infrastructure up to where it needs to be to host Open Championship,” Dawson said.
“It’s a long time since 1951. The game has moved on. Like all of the other Open venues, we’ve had to look at the course to ensure that it provides the sort of test that an Open Championship should provide. The course can certainly do that but with some alterations, not just from a playing point of view but the also the whole infrastructure surrounding an Open Championship.”
The full R&A press release is here.
Here is R&A Chief Inspector Peter Dawson talking about the announcement:
**Keogh files a more extensive post on the press conference and some of the interesting things said about the politics of Northern Ireland.
“As the first minister has said, the political situation here has caused some reputational damage,” Mr Dawson explained, “I think everyone knows that, but we are very happy that that is in the past… If we thought there was a security problem here we wouldn’t be making this announcement.”
The announcement was the fruit, not of months, but of years of negotiations between the three interested parties and there are still several I’s to be dotted and T’s to be crossed before a date can be set.
However, Mr Dawson admitted that two things tipped the balance in favour of returning to Royal Portrush for the first time since 1951 — the sell out 2012 Irish Open and the planned course changes.
“One was the success of the Irish Open and the evident strength of the fan base for golf in Ireland and secondly it was the day with Martin Ebert, the architect here, that we finally thought, ‘This is how we can do this’,” he said. “Those were the tipping points for me from a golf perspective and an event perspective.”
