British Open 2024: Feeling more ‘gratitude’ in his 21st Open start, Justin Rose opens with bogey-free 69

TROON, Scotland — The fresh-faced 17-year-old who charmed a nation by pitching-in for birdie on the 72nd hole of the 1998 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale is gone. In his place at Royal Troon in 2024 is a grayer-haired, but still commendably thin father-of-two who will turn 44 on the 30th of this month. But at least one thing links those two Justin Roses. More than a quarter of a century on from first achieving the feat, the now former U.S. Open champion again successfully pre-qualified for what is now the year’s final major.

Back in ’98, rounds of 74 and 72 at Hillside saw the teenage Rose finish T-2 amongst the 13 qualifiers and sent him next-door to Birkdale. This time around, his more mature version shot 66-68 at Burnham & Berrow to ease into what he calls “a special event for me as a Brit.”

It was a process he handled conspicuously well on the course, but a wider acceptance of his unexpectedly diminished status was perhaps just as important.

“I’m feeling a bit more gratitude just to be here,” said Rose in the wake of an opening bogey-free 69 in his 21st Open start. “I’ve had 20 years, probably-ish, ballpark where I made my schedule in December and go, OK, ‘Masters, Open, U.S. Open, PGA: how do we plan around that?’ But this year it was like, hang on a second, I'm not guaranteed in the Open or the U.S. Open at that point, either. Obviously you've got to be in them to win them. So the first part of the jigsaw puzzle was to make sure I qualified. I’ve just had to do a little bit of extra hard work to make sure I was here.”

That work is clearly paying off. Birdies at the third and seventh holes were surrounded by 16 pars and left the South Africa-born Englishman satisfied with his morning’s work. Well, as happy as any golfer ever is at least. Following a well-worn script, Rose felt he could have gone a little lower in relatively favorable conditions that saw the often-ferocious back-nine play downwind.

“I’m definitely happy to keep it clean out there,” he said. “Bogey-free is probably the thing I'm happiest about. Obviously we all walk off a golf course going, ‘oh, it could have been better,’ but I actually felt like there was three or four out there for me today had I been a little bit warmer with the putter. But I hit a lot of good putts, too, so I just kind of had to stay with it. Felt like I had a good handle on the course. I felt like I knew where the course was playing tough, where the opportunities were. I stayed focused enough to hit a lot of good shots today.”

Still, for all that he lapsed into that mild bit of moaning, Rose’s depth of experience will surely inform him that this might just be a week for the older heads in the field. The aforementioned wind switch offered a different challenge from the practice days and, to an extent, not many would have predicted, seemed to confuse and befuddle more than a few. All of which provoked Rose into a brief bout of introspection.

“When you come in the first couple of times I played the Open I was soaking in the experience,” he said. “Now I know what to expect. It's not like you can just come in 20 years later and go, ‘oh, should be a good week and we'll just learn from it.’ But history would suggest that the Open offers you [the more experienced player] an opportunity [to win] maybe more than some of the other majors. I still feel confident that I can actually improve tomorrow versus today.

“I still believe I can win,” he continued. “I've been around long enough to know that I can. I know I'm capable. I know how I'm feeling in the moment and can get inspired by the situation. I’ve been pretty good in my career at winning the special ones. What I've been really working hard for the last two, three years is to have the opportunity late in my career to have a couple of special opportunities. That's what's keeping me going. Will I compete week in and week out at the very, very, very highest level at 44? Who knows? But I still feel like I'm a good enough golfer to find my spots and find my angles and have my weeks where it all comes together.”

Fighting talk indeed, but not surprising. For Rose, like every other citizen of the United Kingdom, the Open is the one he wants to win most.

“It's the one I've dreamed about winning ever since I was a kid,” he confirmed.

Indeed, his 17-year-old self would surely approve of what we’ve seen so far.

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Is it the British Open or the Open Championship? The name of the final men’s major of the golf season is a subject of continued discussion. The event’s official name, as explained in this op-ed by former R&A chairman Ian Pattinson, is the Open Championship. But since many United States golf fans continue to refer to it as the British Open, and search news around the event accordingly, Golf Digest continues to utilize both names in its coverage.

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