History Of The Open Championship: 1860 To The Modern Era

There was no Championship at all in 1871. Young Tom Morris had won three in succession, and under the terms Prestwick had set when it put the Challenge Belt up for competition, three consecutive victories meant the belt went home with the winner permanently. It did. The club had no trophy left, no money set aside for another, and no agreement with anyone else about who should pay for one. The oldest championship in golf simply skipped a year because the prize had been given away.

That is a useful way to understand the first two decades. The event was improvised, locally funded and administratively fragile, and almost nothing about it was designed. What follows is the record of how an afternoon competition among eight professionals on the Ayrshire coast turned into the championship that closes the golfing summer.

Prestwick, 1860, and the eight men who entered

The first Championship was played on 17 October 1860 over Prestwick's twelve-hole course, three circuits of it, thirty-six holes in an afternoon. Eight professionals entered. Willie Park Snr, from Musselburgh, went round in 174 strokes and finished two clear of Old Tom Morris, who was Prestwick's keeper of the green and the man most closely associated with the club.

The restriction to professionals was deliberate and immediately regretted. Golf in Scotland at the time was played seriously by gentleman amateurs and served by a small trade of professionals who made clubs, made balls, caddied and played for stakes. Excluding the amateurs made the competition less representative rather than more, and from 1861 the entry was opened to all comers. That single change is what put the word "open" in front of the Championship and it has been the defining principle ever since, however elaborate the exemption structure has become.

The early format bears little resemblance to the modern one. There was no cut, no qualifying, no entry fee for the first few years, and no gallery worth the name. Scores were kept by markers drawn from the players themselves. The prize for winning was the loan of a belt.

What Prestwick did establish, almost by accident, was the idea that a national championship should be settled by stroke play over a fixed distance rather than by match play. Every other significant competition of the period, including The Amateur Championship when it arrived, used matches. The Open counted every shot from the beginning and has never done anything else.

The equipment they were playing with

Scores from the first Championships look alarming until you account for the ball. In 1860 the sport was in the middle of a transition from the featherie — a stitched leather sphere stuffed with boiled feathers, expensive, fragile and useless when wet — to gutta-percha, a moulded ball made from the dried sap of a Malaysian tree. Gutta-percha was cheaper, more durable and could be remoulded when it split, and its arrival in the middle of the century did more to spread golf than any competition did.

The clubs were wooden-headed for the long shots, with hickory shafts that twisted under load and forced a swing that would look loose and long to a modern eye. Irons were heavy, hand-forged and used sparingly. There were no numbered sets, no loft gapping and no consistency between two clubs made by different hands.

The rubber-cored ball arrived at the turn of the century and changed the sport again. Sandy Herd won the 1902 Championship at Hoylake using one, and the gutta-percha ball disappeared from serious play within a few seasons. Every subsequent debate about distance, course length and whether the ball should be restricted is a descendant of that moment, and the governing bodies have been arguing about it, on and off, ever since.

Willie Park, Old Tom Morris and the first dynasties

The first fifteen years of the Championship were dominated by two families and, effectively, two towns. Willie Park Snr won four times, in 1860, 1863, 1866 and 1875. Old Tom Morris also won four, in 1861, 1862, 1864 and 1867, and the rivalry between the Musselburgh and Prestwick camps supplied the event with its first genuine narrative.

Old Tom's 1867 victory made him the oldest Champion Golfer at forty-six, a record that has never been beaten. His winning margin in 1862 was thirteen strokes, which also remains the largest in the Championship's history and is unlikely to be seriously threatened in a modern field.

Both men were professionals in the nineteenth-century sense: they made feather and gutta-percha balls, they made and repaired clubs, they laid out courses, and they played challenge matches for money put up by patrons. Old Tom's later career as keeper of the green at St Andrews, and as a course architect whose work survives across Scotland and beyond, gave the Championship an institutional anchor at exactly the point when it needed one.

The competitive standard of those years is hard to assess honestly, and it is worth saying so. Fields were small, the equipment was primitive and inconsistent, the courses were maintained by grazing animals as much as by greenkeeping, and scoring on a windy day could run to numbers a good club golfer would find embarrassing today. What the early record demonstrates is durability rather than depth.

Young Tom, the Challenge Belt and the trophy that replaced it

Young Tom Morris won the Championship in 1868 at seventeen, which makes him the youngest champion in its history and, given the modern qualifying structure, likely to remain so. He is credited with the first hole-in-one recorded in the Championship in the same year. He won again in 1869 and 1870, and the 1870 victory triggered the clause that took the Challenge Belt out of circulation for good.

The gap year that followed was resolved by a joint arrangement. Prestwick, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers agreed to share the cost of a new trophy and to rotate the staging between their three courses. The new prize was a silver claret jug, properly the Golf Champion Trophy, and it has been the Championship's trophy ever since.

There is a small chronological quirk that catches people out. Young Tom won again in 1872, taking his run to four consecutive Championships across the missing year, but the jug had not been completed in time and he received a medal instead. The first player physically handed the trophy was Tom Kidd, who won at St Andrews in 1873. Young Tom's name nevertheless heads the list engraved on it. The story of the trophy itself is worth reading alongside this, because the object has its own history of replicas, thefts and near-misses.

Young Tom died in 1875, at twenty-four, a few months after his wife died in childbirth. He had won four Championships before his twenty-second birthday. It is the single most affecting fact in the sport's early record, and it closed the first chapter of the Championship as decisively as any administrative change could have done.

Leaving Scotland: the rota widens and England joins

The three-course rotation held from 1872 until the end of the 1880s, by which time it was clearly too narrow. Musselburgh staged its last Championship in 1889. The Honourable Company moved to Muirfield, which took over in 1892 and immediately hosted the first Championship played over 72 holes rather than 36.

England arrived two years later. Royal St George's at Sandwich staged the 1894 Championship, the first held outside Scotland, and J.H. Taylor won it to become the first English professional Champion Golfer. Royal Liverpool at Hoylake followed in 1897, where the amateur Harold Hilton won.

It is worth pausing on what those two decisions represented. Moving the Championship south acknowledged that English golf had grown into something the Scottish clubs could no longer ignore, and it committed The R&A's predecessors to a principle they have maintained since: the venue must be a links, wherever it is. The Kent coast and the Lancashire coast supplied that ground, and the guide to the English venues that have hosted sets out the full list, including the courses that have dropped off it.

Milestone	Year	Venue
First Championship	1860	Prestwick
Amateurs admitted	1861	Prestwick
Rotation begins, Claret Jug introduced	1872 onwards	Prestwick, St Andrews, Musselburgh
First 72-hole Championship	1892	Muirfield
First held in England	1894	Royal St George's
Prestwick's last Championship	1925	Prestwick
One round a day, four days	1966	Muirfield

The rota has contracted as well as expanded. Prestwick, the founding venue, held its last Championship in 1925, defeated by crowds and traffic its site could not absorb. Royal Cinque Ports at Deal and Prince's at Sandwich each staged Championships in the first third of the twentieth century and have not returned. The pattern is consistent: courses leave the rota for reasons of space and access rather than golfing quality.

How the field stopped being a free-for-all

As entries grew, the Championship had to invent an entry system, and the record of exactly when each element arrived is patchier than you might expect. A 36-hole cut became standard well before the modern era, reducing a large field to a manageable number for the closing rounds. Pre-qualifying, played over nearby courses in the days before the Championship, followed for much the same reason.

The significant change came in the 1960s, when an exempt list was introduced. Before that, leading players were expected to pre-qualify along with everyone else, and champions were occasionally embarrassed by failing to. The exempt list separated the field into players with a right to be there and players who had to earn a place, which is the structure still in use, though the categories themselves are rewritten regularly.

The consequence worth noting is that the Championship has managed to grow without abandoning the 1861 principle. There is still a route from a regional entry to a Championship tee, and the field still contains club professionals and amateurs who played their way in. Very few sporting events of comparable stature have kept that door open.

The Great Triumvirate and golf's first mass audience

Between 1894 and 1914, three players won sixteen Championships between them. Harry Vardon, from Jersey, won six, in 1896, 1898, 1899, 1903, 1911 and 1914. J.H. Taylor, from Devon, won five. James Braid, from Fife, won five. They were routinely referred to as the Great Triumvirate in their own lifetimes, which tells you something about how thoroughly they dominated.

Harry Vardon6wins

J.H. Taylor5wins

James Braid5wins

Career totals for the three players. Every one of the sixteen was won between 1894 and 1914.

Show the numbers

The Great Triumvirate's Championships

Item	Value
Harry Vardon	6wins
J.H. Taylor	5wins
James Braid	5wins

Vardon's six wins remain the record. The overlapping grip that carries his name was not his invention, but his use of it made it standard, and his swing was studied and imitated in a way no golfer's had been before. Braid went on to a long second career as a course architect whose work is scattered across Britain. Taylor was central to the founding of the professionals' association and to the professionalisation of the trade generally.

This was also the period in which the Championship acquired an audience. Rail travel made it possible to follow the event, newspapers reported it in detail, and the gutta-percha ball and then the rubber-cored ball put the sport within reach of a much larger middle class. Golf in England expanded enormously in these decades — a broader story picked up in the timeline of English golf — and the Championship was the sport's shop window while it happened.

The interwar years and the travelling American champion

The Championship resumed in 1920 after five blank years, and within a decade the balance of power had crossed the Atlantic. Jock Hutchison, Scottish-born but by then American, won at St Andrews in 1921 and took the trophy to the United States for the first time. Walter Hagen won four Championships during the 1920s. Bobby Jones, still an amateur, won three, at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 1926, at St Andrews in 1927 and at Hoylake in 1930. Gene Sarazen won at Prince's in 1932.

The American run was ended by Henry Cotton, whose 1934 victory at Royal St George's was received in Britain as a national event rather than a sporting one. Cotton won again at Carnoustie in 1937 and, after the second war, at Muirfield in 1948. His significance to English golf goes beyond the three titles: he pushed hard for professionals to be treated as something other than tradesmen, and the improvement in their standing in Britain owes a good deal to him.

The interwar Championships also fixed the modern shape of the event's reporting. Photography, cinema newsreel and detailed press coverage turned individual shots into shared national memories, which is a precondition for the way the Championship is consumed now.

Two wars, and rebuilding twice

The Championship was not played from 1915 to 1919, or from 1940 to 1945. Those gaps are the only interruptions in its record until 2020, when it was cancelled for the first time in peacetime because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The practical damage was greater than the missing years suggest. Courses were requisitioned; several links were used for military training, gun emplacements or airfields, and dune systems were dug up. Greenkeeping staff were conscripted, machinery was requisitioned and materials for maintenance were unavailable. Clubs came out of both wars with damaged courses and depleted memberships.

Rebuilding a links after military use is slow work, because the turf takes years to knit and the dune profile does not return on its own. That several rota courses were playable again within a few seasons of 1945 is a considerable and largely unacknowledged piece of greenkeeping.

There is a human cost in the record too, and it does not show up in the results. Two generations of players lost their peak years. Professionals who might have won Championships in their late twenties came back in their late thirties, if they came back at all, and the trade of clubmaking and ball-making that had supported the professional class was permanently altered by rationing and by the industrialisation of equipment manufacture that followed.

The resumption in 1946 was deliberately unglamorous. The Championship went back to St Andrews, the entry was smaller than it had been, and the practical business of feeding, housing and transporting a field in a rationed country took as much organising as the golf did. What matters is that the Championship restarted at all, with its format unchanged, in a country that had far more pressing things to attend to.

The post-war revival and the men who made it global again

The immediate post-war Championships belonged to players from the Commonwealth. Bobby Locke, from South Africa, won four times between 1949 and 1957. Peter Thomson, from Australia, won five between 1954 and 1965, including three in a row. Max Faulkner's win at Royal Portrush in 1951 was the only British success in a long stretch.

The Americans, meanwhile, had largely stopped coming. Prize money at home was better, the travel was long, and the links style was unfamiliar. What changed that was Arnold Palmer's decision to enter in 1960, the centenary staging at St Andrews, where he finished second. He won at Royal Birkdale in 1961 and at Troon in 1962, and the effect on American entry was immediate and permanent.

From there the Championship's modern era runs through a familiar sequence. Jack Nicklaus won three, at Muirfield in 1966 and at St Andrews in 1970 and 1978. Tom Watson won five between 1975 and 1983. Seve Ballesteros won three, twice at Royal Lytham and once at St Andrews, and did more than anyone to make continental European golf a serious force. Nick Faldo won three, at Muirfield in 1987 and 1992 and at St Andrews in 1990.

The 1966 Championship at Muirfield is a structural landmark as well as a sporting one: it was the first played over four days with a single round each day, replacing the 36-hole final day that had been standard since the nineteenth century.

Why the field's geography changed

The internationalisation of the Championship happened in three distinct waves, and lumping them together obscures how different they were. The first, in the 1920s, was American and driven by a small number of exceptional players who could afford the crossing. The second, after the war, was Commonwealth — South African, Australian and later New Zealand professionals for whom a British summer was a natural extension of a career already spent travelling.

The third wave, from the late 1970s, was continental European, and it changed the sport's centre of gravity in Europe rather than in Britain. Ballesteros made professional golf a mainstream interest in Spain, and the effect spread through Germany, Sweden and Italy over the following two decades. A Championship field that had once been overwhelmingly British and Irish with a handful of visitors became something closer to a genuine world event.

More recently the qualifying structure has done deliberately what the earlier waves did by accident, by allocating places at events in Asia, Australia, South Africa and the United States. The effect is that the field's geography is now a matter of published policy rather than of who could afford the journey, which is a meaningful difference in kind from the Championship's first century.

How a tie for the Championship has been settled

Golf's oldest championship has never used sudden death. When two players finished level after 72 holes, The Open's answer for most of its history was to send everyone home and play again the next day, which meant the grandstands, the marshals and the whole apparatus of the week stayed in place for two men and whatever gallery could get the Monday off.

1. 1A replayed roundFor most of the Championship's history a tie meant coming back the following day and playing again.
2. 2Thirty-six holesThe replay ran to two rounds in the earlier decades, a full extra Championship day contested by two players.
3. 3Eighteen holesIt was later cut to a single round, which is how Nicklaus beat Sanders at St Andrews in 1970.
4. 4The aggregate play-offIntroduced at Royal Troon in 1989 over four holes, decided on the combined score rather than hole by hole.
5. 5Shortened sinceThe R&A has reduced the number of holes, so take the figure from the current conditions rather than from memory.

The sequence of formats across the Championship's history. The current number of play-off holes is set in each year's conditions of entry.

The replay ran to 36 holes in the earlier decades. Bob Charles beat Phil Rodgers over two rounds at Royal Lytham in 1963, the last time the Championship was settled at that length. It was afterwards cut to a single round: Jack Nicklaus beat Doug Sanders over eighteen holes at St Andrews in 1970, the morning after Sanders had missed from three feet on the last green to win it outright, and Tom Watson beat Jack Newton the same way at Carnoustie in 1975.

The problem with a replayed round was never the golf. It was everything around it. A Monday finish emptied the links of the crowd that had built through the week, left broadcasters with a scheduling hole, and asked a championship that had just spent four days climbing towards a Sunday afternoon to do it again in front of a few hundred people.

The aggregate play-off arrived at Royal Troon in 1989, when Mark Calcavecchia, Greg Norman and Wayne Grady finished level and played four extra holes with the total score deciding it. Aggregate rather than sudden death was a considered choice, and a defensible one. A single hole rewards one shot and can be won with a bounce; four holes across a links, with the wind doing what the wind does, is a small championship rather than a coin toss. The R&A has shortened the play-off since, and anyone who wants the current number of holes should take it from the conditions of entry for the championship in question. The rest of the modern structure, from the halfway cut to the order of the tee times, sits in the format guide.

The oddest tie in the record was never played out at all. In 1876 at St Andrews, Bob Martin and David Strath finished level, and Strath declined to take part in the play-off while a dispute over a rules incident on the seventeenth remained unresolved. Martin walked the course alone and was declared champion. The contemporary accounts do not entirely agree on the detail, which is characteristic of the period, but the outcome is not in question: one Champion Golfer decided by a walkover.

Records that still stand

Some of the Championship's records are effectively unbreakable, and it is worth separating those from the ones that move.

• 6Most victories
• 46Oldest champion
• 17Youngest champion
• 13Largest winning margin

Figures from the Championship's own record. Early scoring detail rests on contemporary reports and is a weaker order of evidence than a modern card.

Vardon's six victories have stood since 1914. Old Tom Morris's thirteen-stroke margin in 1862 and his status as the oldest champion at forty-six have stood since the 1860s. Young Tom Morris's title at seventeen has stood almost as long, and a modern seventeen-year-old would have to negotiate qualifying to get anywhere near it.

The scoring records are more recent and more likely to fall. Branden Grace shot 62 at Royal Birkdale in 2017, the first round of 62 in any men's major championship. Henrik Stenson's 264 at Royal Troon in 2016 is the lowest 72-hole total. The lowest score in relation to par is 20 under, achieved by Stenson at Troon and matched by Cameron Smith at St Andrews in 2022 over a par-72 course.

Record	Holder	Detail
Most victories	Harry Vardon	6, between 1896 and 1914
Oldest champion	Old Tom Morris	46, in 1867
Youngest champion	Young Tom Morris	17, in 1868
Largest winning margin	Old Tom Morris	13 strokes, 1862
Lowest single round	Branden Grace	62, Royal Birkdale, 2017
Lowest 72-hole total	Henrik Stenson	264, Royal Troon, 2016

A caution about the older figures is warranted. Record-keeping in the nineteenth century was inconsistent, contemporary reports occasionally disagree, and one or two early details are carried forward on the strength of a single account. The broad shape of the record is not in doubt, but a stray stroke in an 1860s total is not the same order of evidence as a modern scorecard.

Comparing scoring records across eras is close to meaningless, and anyone presenting them as a straight ranking of ability is selling something. Equipment, ball technology, agronomy and course setup have all changed beyond recognition. The nineteenth-century records survive because they measure things technology cannot help with: age, and how far ahead of the rest of the field a player finished.

English champions and the moments that lodged

England's relationship with the Championship is longer than the modern record suggests. John Ball won at Prestwick in 1890, the first amateur and the first Englishman to take the title. J.H. Taylor's five and Henry Cotton's three followed. Between them they cover most of the sport's transitions from Victorian professional golf to the post-war game, and the wider record of English winners in the majors puts those achievements in context.

The two that lodged hardest in the national memory came later. Tony Jacklin won at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 1969, the first British champion since Faulkner in 1951, at a point when British golf had convinced itself the Championship was no longer winnable from home. Nick Faldo's three between 1987 and 1992 confirmed that it was, and his final round at Muirfield in 1987, played in poor weather without a dropped shot, is the round most often cited when English golfers are asked what discipline looks like.

Royal Lytham has an unusual number of these moments attached to it — Jones in 1926, Jacklin in 1969, Ballesteros twice — and the course guide to Lytham explains why its closing stretch produces them. Royal Birkdale, Royal St George's and Royal Liverpool each carry their own set.

The Championship's return to Royal Portrush in 2019, after a gap of sixty-eight years, was a reminder of how long these absences can run and how completely the atmosphere returns when they end.

The amateurs who kept turning up

The amateur thread runs through the whole record and is easy to lose. John Ball, Harold Hilton and Bobby Jones all won the Championship without ever turning professional, and Jones did so twice in the 1920s when the professional game was already well established. Nobody has managed it since, and given the modern structure of the sport it is difficult to imagine anyone doing so again.

The Championship still marks the amateur presence formally. A Silver Medal is awarded to the leading amateur who completes 72 holes, which requires surviving the cut, and the medal has become a reliable early indicator of who is about to turn professional. The detail of the Silver Medal and the amateur categories covers how the places are allocated.

For an English amateur the route in has real substance: the exemption categories include winners of significant amateur championships, and Regional Qualifying is open to players below a handicap threshold. In practice a small number of amateurs make the field most years, and a smaller number still make the weekend, but the possibility is not decorative.

From eight entrants to a broadcast operation

The Championship's growth is easiest to see in the machinery that surrounds it rather than in the golf. The field is now capped at 156 and filled by a published set of exemption categories supplemented by qualifying, a structure explained in the guide to Open exemption categories. In the 2010s The R&A formalised an international qualifying series so that leading finishers at designated events around the world earn places directly, which broadened the field's geography considerably.

Television arrived in the 1950s, with the BBC providing British coverage for decades before live domestic rights moved to a subscription broadcaster in 2016. The move was contentious and the arguments on both sides were reasonable ones about reach against investment.

The physical operation has grown to match: a temporary town of grandstands, catering, merchandising and broadcast compounds assembled on land beside a members' golf club and removed afterwards. That is the practical constraint that governs which courses can host, and it is why the rota is short and why founding venues have left it.

What has not changed is the core of the thing. Seventy-two holes, every stroke counted, on links land, in whatever weather July provides, with a small silver jug at the end of it and the winner announced as the champion golfer of the year. The 1860 field would recognise all of that, and probably very little else. More English golf reading is collected on the England hub, and the wider sport is covered in the golf section.