Amateurs At The Open And The Silver Medal Explained
The story behind the silver medal the Open amateur contenders play for, how amateurs get into the field, and the players who have won it and gone on.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished The Open22 min read
- Awarded to
- Leading amateur
- Requirement
- Complete all 72 holes
- Last amateur champion
- 1930
- Governed by
- The R&A
At Royal Birkdale in 1998 a seventeen-year-old holed a pitch from thick grass short of the last green, and the noise that followed it was the loudest of the week even though the shot did not win anything. Justin Rose finished tied fourth. He collected the Silver Medal as leading amateur, turned professional the following day, and took none of the prize money that his finishing position would otherwise have been worth. That combination — a genuine contender who legally cannot be paid — is what makes the amateur presence at The Open different from a token invitation.
The medal itself is a small thing, presented quietly before the Claret Jug at the closing ceremony. What sits behind it is a set of exemption categories, an entry route open to anyone with a low enough handicap, and a body of rules governing what an unpaid competitor may and may not accept during the week.
What the Silver Medal is and who is eligible to win it
The Silver Medal goes to the amateur who returns the lowest 72-hole aggregate. That is the whole test, and the qualifying condition attached to it is the one that catches people out: the amateur has to complete all four rounds. Missing the cut means no medal, however well the first two rounds went, and in years where no amateur survives to the weekend the medal is simply not awarded.
That happens more often than the romance of it suggests. The cut at The Open takes the field down to the leading players and ties after 36 holes, and an amateur playing a firm links in a strong wind against the best professionals in the world is doing well to be on the right side of the line. A year in which three or four amateurs make the weekend is a good year for the amateur game.
- 72Holes that must be completed
- 3Amateurs to have won The Open
- 1930Year of the last amateur win
Fixed features of the award and of the championship's history, not figures from any single year.
Eligibility rests on amateur status as defined by the Rules of Amateur Status, which the R&A and the USGA write jointly. A player who has taken prize money above the permitted limit, or who has otherwise forfeited status, is a professional for these purposes regardless of what they call themselves. The status is assessed as at the time of play, which is why the decision about when to turn professional carries real consequences for anyone with an Open place in hand.
The medal in its present form dates from the years after the Second World War, when the championship formalised a recognition of the leading amateur that had previously been informal. Before that, the amateur presence at The Open needed no special prize, because amateurs were winning the thing outright.
Exemption routes that put amateurs in the field each year
Most amateurs who tee up at The Open are there by exemption rather than by qualifying. The R&A publishes the exemption categories ahead of each championship, and the amateur categories sit alongside the far longer list covering professionals.
| Route | Basis | Standing condition |
|---|---|---|
| The Amateur Championship | Winner of the R&A's own amateur championship | Must still be an amateur when The Open is played |
| US Amateur Championship | Winner of the USGA's equivalent title | Must still be an amateur when The Open is played |
| Other elite amateur titles | Winners of designated international amateur championships | Categories are reviewed and republished annually |
| World amateur ranking | Leading player in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, recognised by the McCormack Medal | Awarded on the ranking at a published cut-off date |
| Regional and Final Qualifying | Open to any player meeting the handicap limit | Status maintained through to the championship |
The precise list moves. Categories are added and retired as the international amateur calendar changes, and anyone planning around a particular route should take the current criteria from the R&A rather than from memory. The full picture of how the field is assembled, professionals included, is set out in our guide to the Open Championship exemption categories.
The condition that recurs in every amateur category is the same one: the exemption belongs to an amateur, not to a person. A player who signs a professional contract between winning the qualifying title and the championship itself loses the place. Several winners have deliberately postponed turning professional until the Monday after The Open for exactly this reason, and a few have gone the other way and given the place up.
The Amateur Championship and the reward attached to winning it
The Amateur Championship is the R&A's own championship for amateur golfers, and it is the single most valuable week in the amateur calendar for a British player, because of what winning it opens up.
The format is the reason it is hard. Stroke play qualifying reduces a very large entry to a match play bracket, and the bracket is then played out over successive days, with the final traditionally extended to 36 holes. A player has to survive a strokeplay cut and then win match after match, often against opponents from very different golfing cultures, on a course they may have seen for the first time on the Monday. It rewards durability as much as ball-striking.
What the winner receives
The champion's name goes on a trophy with a very long history, and with it come exemptions into major championships — The Open among them, subject to remaining an amateur. That combination has produced a familiar sequence in the British amateur game: win The Amateur in June, play The Open in July as the reigning champion, and make the professional decision afterwards with a major appearance already on the record.
The championship is played at a different venue each year and the rota takes in links courses across Britain and Ireland, including several that host or have hosted The Open. Playing the championship on that kind of ground is itself part of the preparation, because it means the winner arrives at The Open having already competed on the surface rather than only practised on it.
Why match play changes who wins it
A strokeplay championship rewards the most consistent player over a set number of rounds. Match play rewards the player who wins holes, and the two are not the same skill. A competitor who makes four birdies and two double bogeys will lose a strokeplay event and can comfortably win a match, which is why the Amateur roll of honour contains names that never dominated the strokeplay circuit and omits some who did.
The practical effect on an Open place is that the exemption is not always awarded to the amateur ranked highest in the world at that moment. It goes to whoever handled a week of knockout golf best, and that unpredictability is part of what has kept the championship interesting for well over a century. It also means the amateur in the Open field is frequently a player the professional game has not heard of, which is a better outcome for the amateur game than a system that simply promoted the highest-ranked player would produce.
Qualifying as an amateur through the domestic route
The exemptions are the visible route. The larger one, numerically, is qualifying, and it is genuinely open.
Entry to The Open is open to any player, amateur or professional, who meets the published handicap requirement — a mark at or very near scratch, with the exact limit stated on the entry form each year. That entry leads into Regional Qualifying, played across a set of inland courses, and the players who come through Regional Qualifying join exempt entrants at Final Qualifying, played over 36 holes in a single day at links venues shortly before the championship.
The compression of Final Qualifying is what makes it brutal. A limited number of places at each venue, decided in one day, against a field containing tour professionals, club professionals and the best amateurs in the country. There is no cushion for a poor start.
- EntryAny player at or below the published handicap limit enters before a deadline that falls months ahead of the championship.
- Regional QualifyingPlayed at inland venues around the country, reducing a very large entry to those who go forward.
- Final Qualifying36 holes in a single day at links courses, alongside exempt entrants, for a small number of places at each venue.
- ChampionshipThe qualifier joins the field, with amateur status assessed as at the time of play rather than at entry.
The structure of the entry system rather than any one year's dates, venues or place numbers.
Amateurs do come through it. A county player or a university golfer with a scratch or better handicap who plays two exceptional rounds on the right day is in The Open, with no exemption and no ranking behind them. It is one of very few routes in professional sport where the door is genuinely unlocked, and the mechanics of it are set out in detail in our guide to Open Championship qualifying.
The practical obstacles
Entry closes months before the championship, which means committing early. Regional and Final Qualifying fall in the middle of the domestic amateur season, so a player may be choosing between qualifying and a county or national championship they have a realistic chance of winning. And the travel and time off required is real for someone who is, by definition, not being paid to play golf. Employers and universities are not obliged to be accommodating, and many amateur entries are made by people using annual leave.
Notable Silver Medal winners and what happened to their careers
The medal has a habit of being won by players about to become famous, which has given it a reputation as a leading indicator.
Tiger Woods took it at Royal Lytham & St Annes in 1996, in the last summer before he turned professional. Justin Rose won it at Royal Birkdale in 1998 with the tied-fourth finish that remains the benchmark for a modern amateur at The Open. Rory McIlroy won it at Carnoustie in 2007, the year before he established himself on tour. Matteo Manassero won it at Turnberry in 2009 at sixteen, having come to the championship as the reigning Amateur champion.
The pattern is not universal, and it is worth stating plainly. Plenty of Silver Medal winners have gone on to solid professional careers without winning majors, some have made their living in the club game or in coaching, and a number have stayed amateur by choice and gone on to represent Great Britain and Ireland or to build a record in national championships. The medal marks a very good week at a very young age. It does not forecast anything.
What it does reliably do is change the player's own sense of scale. Several winners have described the value of the week as the discovery that the gap between elite amateur golf and major championship golf is narrower than it looks from outside — that the difference is in scoring under sustained pressure rather than in the quality of the striking.
Amateurs who have contended on the weekend and the records they hold
The deeper history is more remarkable than the medal, because for a long stretch of The Open's existence amateurs did not merely contend. They won.
| Player | Achievement | Status at the time |
|---|---|---|
| John Ball | Won The Open in 1890 at Prestwick | Amateur |
| Harold Hilton | Won The Open in 1892 and 1897 | Amateur |
| Roger Wethered | Tied in 1921 at St Andrews, lost the play-off | Amateur |
| Bobby Jones | Won The Open in 1926, 1927 and 1930 | Amateur |
| Frank Stranahan | Runner-up in 1947 and 1953 | Amateur |
| Justin Rose | Tied fourth at Royal Birkdale in 1998 | Amateur |
Ball's win in 1890 was the first by an amateur and the first by an Englishman, and Hilton followed within two years. Jones's three victories came inside five seasons and included the 1930 championship at Royal Liverpool, part of the year in which he won the four major titles then available to him before retiring from competition at twenty-eight. No amateur has won The Open since.
Wethered's 1921 tie at St Andrews is the near-miss that gets retold most often, partly because of the story attached to it — he was said to have trodden on his own ball during the championship and taken the resulting penalty, which cost him the stroke that would have avoided the play-off. He lost the 36-hole play-off to Jock Hutchison.
Stranahan's two runner-up finishes, at Royal Liverpool in 1947 and Carnoustie in 1953, came in an era when the American amateur game was extremely strong and when staying amateur was still a viable long-term choice for a wealthy player.
Rose's tie for fourth in 1998 stands as the best amateur finish of the modern era, and the circumstances make it harder still to match: he was seventeen, he had come through qualifying, and he did it on a links in a strong wind.
Why an amateur winning again is unlikely rather than impossible
The reason the run stopped after 1930 is structural rather than mysterious. In Ball's and Hilton's era, and to a large extent in Jones's, the strongest players in the world had no financial reason to turn professional, and several of the best chose not to. Professional golf was a trade rather than a career with sponsorship behind it. Once that reversed, the top of the amateur game became a transit lounge rather than a destination, and the very best players pass through it in their late teens and early twenties.
What follows is that the amateurs in an Open field today are, on average, younger and less experienced than the amateurs of a century ago, and they are competing against professionals whose preparation and equipment are optimised in ways an unpaid player cannot match. None of that makes a win impossible. It makes it a four-day outlier rather than a plausible season's ambition, and the honest way to describe the modern amateur target is the medal, not the jug.
How the Silver Medal compares with the amateur prizes at the other majors
Three of the four majors make room for amateurs. The fourth does not, and the reason has to do with who owns the championship rather than with any view about the amateur game.
Augusta National has had amateurs in the field since the tournament began, which is unsurprising given that Bobby Jones founded it. The invited categories have widened over the decades to take in the winners of The Amateur and the US Amateur along with the champions of the Asia-Pacific and Latin America amateur championships, both of which the club helped to establish precisely to widen the pipeline. The leading amateur to complete four rounds there receives a silver cup, and the amateurs in the field are offered accommodation in the clubhouse itself for the week — a piece of ceremony The Open has no equivalent of.
The US Open works on the same logic as The Open. Exemptions for the leading amateur titles, then a qualifying system open to any player who meets the handicap requirement, and a medal for the low amateur at the end of it. The American route runs through two stages, local and sectional, rather than the two the R&A uses, and the sectional day is the same brutal 36-hole compression that Final Qualifying is here.
The US PGA Championship is the exception. Its field is drawn entirely from professionals, because the championship belongs to the PGA of America and one of its purposes is to give that association's club professionals a major to play in. An amateur cannot enter. The consequence is a small piece of golfing history that gets glossed over: the four titles Jones won in 1930 are not the four a player would need today, because two of them were amateur championships and the modern set replaced them. The differences between the British and American championships more generally are set out in our guide to The Open compared with the US majors.
Of the three that admit amateurs, The Open is the hardest place to win the amateur prize, and the reason is the ground rather than the field. A young player who has grown up on inland courses can strike the ball well enough to compete anywhere and still be beaten by a firm links in a crosswind, because the shot that gets a ball close on a soft green is the wrong shot entirely at Royal St George's in a breeze. The AIG Women's Open, which the R&A also runs, makes its own award to the leading amateur on the same principle, and the pathway behind it is covered in our guide to the Women's Open.
Rules and status issues an amateur must respect during the week
An amateur at The Open is competing under two rulebooks at once. The Rules of Golf govern play. The Rules of Amateur Status, written jointly by the R&A and the USGA, govern everything else, and a breach of the second can end a career in the amateur game as decisively as a disqualification.
The core restriction is on prize money. An amateur may not accept prize money above the limit set in the rules for a scratch competition, and the limit is a modest figure by professional standards. An amateur who finishes high enough at The Open to be in the money simply does not receive it; the prize fund is redistributed among the professionals. The specific figure has been revised over time and should be checked in the current rules rather than assumed.
The rules were substantially rewritten in 2022, and the rewrite relaxed a good deal that had become anachronistic. Restrictions on expenses for adult players were largely removed. The treatment of sponsorship and of employment in golf-related roles was modernised. What survives is the principle that an amateur does not play for money and does not use their golf skill for payment, and the detail of how that principle applies to any particular arrangement is the part worth reading properly before signing anything.
The decision about turning professional
For an amateur with an Open place, the timing question is unavoidable. Announcing a professional career before the championship forfeits an exemption that was granted to an amateur. Waiting until afterwards preserves the place but delays access to prize money and to whatever sponsorship arrangements have been negotiated.
Most players in this position take advice from their national governing body, which has seen the situation many times before, and from the R&A, which administers the status rules and will answer a direct question about a specific arrangement. Guessing is a poor strategy, because status decisions are not easily reversed and reinstatement as an amateur takes time.
Getting amateur status back
Reinstatement runs the other way, and it is slower than almost anyone expects. A player who has forfeited status applies to their national governing body — England Golf for a player based here — which considers the application under the same jointly written rules. A waiting period follows, and its length is tied to how long the player spent outside the amateur game and at what level. A summer of taking small prize money is not the same case as four years on a professional circuit, and the rules allow the period to be extended for the second.
During the wait the applicant is expected to observe the amateur rules without yet holding the status. Amateur prizes cannot be taken, county selection is closed, England squads are closed, and every exemption category that leads to The Open is closed with them. For a player who turned professional at twenty-one and reconsidered at twenty-three, that is a further season gone on top of the ones already spent, which is the plainest argument for making the original decision slowly and with advice.
The R&A publishes the procedure and the national bodies administer it. Neither will give a general answer to a specific arrangement, and both will give a specific answer to a specific question, which is the way round most players discover too late.
Caddies, expenses and the practical side of playing as an unpaid competitor
The logistics of an amateur's Open week look nothing like a tour professional's.
Caddies are the clearest example. A professional arrives with an established caddie who has walked the course, made a yardage book and worked the same links in previous years. An amateur typically arrives with a parent, a sibling, a county coach or the club professional from home. Some are allocated or introduced to an experienced local caddie, which is an enormous advantage on a course where the correct line is often nowhere near the flag, and where local knowledge of how a particular hollow feeds is worth more than any distance-measuring device.
Accommodation and travel are arranged by the player rather than by an agent. The Rules of Amateur Status, as revised, permit adult amateurs to receive expenses far more freely than the old regime did, and many national bodies and county unions will support a player's costs for a major championship appearance. That support is not automatic and it varies considerably by county and by country.
Practice arrangements are another difference. An amateur has the same access to the practice ground and to practice rounds as anyone else in the field, but far less experience of using them under championship conditions — of the crowd, the tented village, the television towers and the sheer amount of walking between facilities. Several former Silver Medal winners have said the practice days were more disorienting than the championship itself.
Equipment is the last practical gap, and it is wider than it appears. A tour professional arrives with clubs built to measured specifications, a ball chosen for the conditions and a manufacturer's technician on site to adjust anything that moves. An amateur is playing whatever they own. Manufacturers do provide fitting support at major championships, and an amateur may accept it within the limits the status rules allow, but there is a difference between having a driver checked on the range on Tuesday and having spent a winter testing shafts. On a links where flight control in wind decides scores, that difference shows up on the card.
How British amateurs prepare for a first major appearance
Preparation for a first Open, for a player who has never competed in a major, breaks into three separate problems.
The first is the golf course. Amateur championships in Britain are frequently played on links, so the surface is usually familiar in kind if not in detail. What is unfamiliar is the setup — fairways and greens prepared to a firmness that no club or county event will have matched, run-offs shaved to fairway height, and hole locations chosen to repel approaches from the wrong angle. Practice rounds on a course being prepared for a championship are the only way to see it, and even then the course firms up further between Monday and Thursday. Our guide to Open Championship course setup covers what actually changes.
The second is scheduling. An amateur playing The Open in July is usually in the middle of a domestic season with national championships, county matches and possibly international selection at stake. Building a run-up that arrives at The Open sharp, without abandoning the events that determine selection for representative teams, takes planning that most amateurs do alone or with a county coach.
The third is the environment. Tee times at The Open are announced in advance and an amateur with a recognisable story will be watched. Playing partners are drawn from the whole field, so a first competitive round can be alongside a major champion in front of a full grandstand at the first tee. Nothing in the amateur game prepares anyone for that, and the standard advice from those who have done it is unglamorous — arrive early, walk the course in the quiet of a Monday morning, and treat the first round as four hours of golf rather than as an occasion.
The pathway from county and England Golf squads to an Open tee time
For an English player, the route into the amateur elite runs through the county unions and through England Golf, the governing body for amateur golf in England.
Club golf feeds county golf. Counties run their own championships and select teams for inter-county competition, and strong county performance brings a player to the attention of regional and national selectors. England Golf runs national championships and operates squads that provide coaching, competition and access to sports science support that an individual could not fund alone. The structure and remit of the body itself is covered in our guide to England Golf and what it does.
From the national squad, the next step is international selection. England play in home internationals and in European team championships, and the highest level available to a British or Irish amateur is selection for the Walker Cup team against the United States, which is chosen jointly across Great Britain and Ireland. Selection is heavily influenced by performances in the leading domestic strokeplay events and in The Amateur Championship, and by position in the world amateur ranking. The competition itself is explained in our guide to the Walker Cup.
Two things about the pathway are worth stating honestly. It is not the only route — university golf, particularly in the United States, has become a substantial parallel track for British players, and several have reached elite amateur level entirely through it. And it is not a conveyor belt. Selection is discretionary at several points, the number of places is small, and a very good county player can spend years just outside the national picture without any single failure being identifiable.
What the medal has come to mean inside the amateur game
Within amateur golf, the Silver Medal occupies a strange position. It is not a championship. Nobody sets out a season with winning it as a target, because being in the field at all depends on an exemption or on two rounds of qualifying that cannot be planned for. And yet it is the most widely recognised thing an amateur golfer can win, because it is won in front of the audience that watches The Open rather than the much smaller one that follows amateur events.
That visibility has a practical consequence. A Silver Medal is a line on a curriculum vitae that opens doors — with sponsors for a player turning professional, with selectors, with tour schools and with the invitational events that fill a few places by discretion. For a player who intends to stay amateur, it is the thing that gets mentioned first for the rest of their playing life.
It also matters to the clubs and counties behind the player, in a way that is easy to underestimate from outside. A Silver Medal winner is a member of somewhere, coached by somebody, and selected at some point by a county that took a chance on a teenager with an awkward swing. Those institutions run on volunteers and on subscriptions, and a week in July when the club's name is read out on television does more for junior recruitment than any amount of open days. The amateur game's economics are thin enough that this is not a sentimental point.
There is a quieter effect too. Every year the medal is contested, a handful of unpaid golfers spend four rounds inside the same ropes as the best professionals in the world, and a proportion of them discover that they belong there. Occasionally one of them finishes fourth. The championship has been open to all the world since 1861, and the medal is the mechanism that keeps that word honest. More on the sport across England sits on our England hub.