Open Championship notebook dump: 5 lessons from a week in England

There’s one thing that nobody prepares you for about bearing witness to a (we’re talking golf here, so adjust the following phrase accordingly) major news event: How quickly it happens.

That was the first thought that arrived in my head on Friday night at the Open Championship, when I glanced up to see one of the tournament leaders, Bryson DeChambeau, evidently engaged in a yelling match with an official from the R&A.

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I’d had no warning that DeChambeau was in consideration for a tournament-altering two-shot penalty when I’d sat down at my desk 30 seconds earlier. But once it happened, I knew immediately and unquestionably that my night and week — and those of dozens of colleagues around me — had just changed. The question immediately became…now what?

***

It was a glorious week at Royal Birkdale for the GOLF Magazine squad — but a long week, too. We arrived on Monday morning and worked until the wee hours of the following Monday. There was golf to see, historic courses to experience, stars to write about, controversy to cover, and eventually, a champion to crown.

We worked almost nonstop creating content for you, our beloved audience. But that’s the funny part: There was still so much that slipped through the cracks.

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Today I’m picking up the pieces of the best bits and bobs you never heard about from Open week 2026 — and I’d like to start with the story behind the story of this tournament week: Bryson DeChambeau.

5 behind-the-scenes takeaways from the 2026 Open Championship

1. What really happened with Bryson

My very first day “in the field” for GOLF Magazine came on March 12, 2020 — the opening round at the 2020 Players Championship, and also the day that the world ended.

I remember getting dinner in Jacksonville Beach on Wednesday evening, March 11, with my colleague, Dylan Dethier, when the news started to break. We’d just finished up a round of golf at the Jax Beach Muni, and we were seated around a U-shaped table enjoying beers and dinner in front of the flicker of the bar TV. There were increasingly ominous chyrons crawling across the screens, but still — we had no idea we were enjoying our last few unspoiled moments before a global pandemic ripped a hole in our twenties.

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And then it happened. League after major pro sports league announced they was postponing competitions indefinitely on account of Covid. Flights were getting canceled and countries were getting banned and people were rushing to the store to buy face masks. Rudy Gobert, who hours earlier had infamously touched each of the press conference microphones in a display of defiance against the virus, was among the first players in the world to test positive.

Life as we knew it had changed by the time we stepped out of the bar. But one thing hadn’t: Dylan and I still had to do our job.

We went back to the Holiday Inn in Jax Beach that night and mapped out our approach for the following day. We would wake up early. Very early. And get through the gates to the golf tournament as soon as they’d let us. Once we were there, Dylan would set out on the range canvassing players and agents and caddies and associated members of the Pro Golf Cognoscenti for their intel. And I — on my very first day traveling for my very first big boy job — would figure out … something else.

By the end of the day, we had two stories. One terrific, in-depth, expertly reported piece covering what the hell happened. And one … talking to the fans who were trying to figure out what the hell was going on themselves. I’ll let you figure out which one I wrote.

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But the biggest takeaway to emerge from that day for me was also clear: I was a reporter. I was a news-gatherer. I was a witness to history.

***

When Bryson went ballistic on Open Championship Friday night, this was the history I leaned upon. I knew my colleague, Sean Zak, was somewhere out in the field, likely literally running to the scene of the crime on the side of No. 5. That left me to be a set of eyes and ears for our audience … somewhere else.

At first I spent a little while watching the broadcast. Typically I avoid the broadcast if I reasonably can — it’s the only thing that everybody else is seeing — but in this instance it also felt critical to our understanding of the event, because it was the only place you could reliably find footage of the ordeal in the high-grass. Once Bryson hopped back in the cart to come into scoring, I more or less leapt from my chair and ran out to the clubhouse, where I figured I might catch a glimpse of the Big Man arguing his case. I didn’t. The carts pulled in behind a back entrance and Bryson slipped into scoring right under my nose.

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Then I hustled back into the media center to see if we’d learned something about the nature of the ruling. We hadn’t. So I went back out to the area outside of scoring where I found what seemed like two-thirds of the assembled golf press, including Sean … waiting around.

This felt like a poor use of time, so while they all figured that out, I went inside to try jot down some quick thoughts on what I’d witnessed. Thankfully Bryson soon emerged again — off to the range without a whisper about whether he’d be playing in the golf tournament or not — and word soon emerged that he had, in fact, been assessed a two-shot penalty. At this point I knew that he had become the story of the night, so I hustled out to the range to find a place different enough from where Sean was posted up to conceivably capture something new and different than him.

I wound up waiting on the range for what felt like 90 minutes, but was probably closer to 45, as Bryson hit balls deep into the darkness before disappearing into the night without a word. I tried to capture a few notable nuggets for Sean, and for social media, before returning to the media center close to 11 p.m. for the third and final time.

At this point, I realized another truism about breaking news events: Often, everybody has the same exact information, or lack thereof. So I thought back to the only true differentiating factor I was certain I had: A conversation I’d had seconds before Bryson’s penalty had been assessed, way back around 8:30 p.m., with Mike Tirico, the famed sports broadcaster who — in a strange feat of broadcasting and good fortune — had also served as spotter for all 18 holes of Bryson’s round. And I decided that my Bryson story for the evening would be centered around Mike’s experience following the Bryson group for what wound up being the most consequential round of the tournament week.