The Open’s Best-Kept Secret: Why Golf’s Most Exclusive Courses Deserve Their Shot at Glory

After 35 years covering professional golf—and having carried Tom Lehman’s bag through enough Open Championships to know the difference between links that merely look good on television and those that actually test a champion’s soul—I’ve learned something invaluable: the courses that *should* host The Open are rarely the ones that *do*.

That’s not a criticism of the R&A’s selection process, mind you. It’s logistics. It’s infrastructure. It’s the traveling circus that Martin Slumbers himself acknowledged needs proper accommodations. But it’s also, frankly, a missed opportunity that says something revealing about how we’ve come to define major championship golf.

The Rankings Game Tells a Story

Look at the Top 100 Golf Courses list that anchors this discussion. Royal County Down sits at number one—not number two, not number three. *Number one*. And yet, as the article notes with understated accuracy:

“Royal County Down is without doubt the best course not to have held The Open, probably also a Major. Having not played here before I played here last summer and it went in comfortably as my new No. 1.”

I’ve walked that course. The Mourne Mountains backdrop alone would make any championship committee weep. But here’s what strikes me most: the fact that we’re having this conversation at all means the R&A has quietly accepted that their rotation has become somewhat predictable, somewhat safe. That’s not sinister—it’s human nature applied to institutional decision-making.

When you look down the list of “best courses that will never host The Open,” you’re looking at a portrait of golf’s authentic DNA. These aren’t designer courses built specifically to cradle galleries and merchandise tents. They’re courses that evolved organically along British and Irish coastlines, shaped by wind and weather and the accumulated wisdom of generations.

The Irish Question: Portmarnock and the Future

Here’s where it gets interesting, and where the R&A is actually showing some forward thinking. Portmarnock, ranked 24th on that same list, represents something genuinely novel: the possibility—even likelihood—that The Open might leave British soil for the first time ever.

“At last year’s Open the outgoing chief executive Martin Slumbers explained that they would be supportive of the club asking the Government for help in putting together a case for taking The Open outside the UK for the first time ever. It might even happen as soon as 2030.”

In my experience, when the R&A’s leadership makes that kind of statement publicly, the institutional wheels are already spinning behind closed doors. We’ve got Birkdale this year, St Andrews in 2027, and a notable gap afterward while Muirfield and Turnberry angle for their comebacks. Portmarnock isn’t just a viable alternative—it’s the obvious next chapter in a 150-year-old story.

The brilliance of this move, if it happens, is that it doesn’t represent golf going soft or abandoning tradition. Portmarnock is *fundamentally* a links course—fair, natural, classic in every architectural sense. It simply happens to be 45 minutes from Dublin instead of sitting on the Scottish or English coast.

Royal Dornoch: The Romantic Impossible Dream

Then you have Royal Dornoch, ranked sixth overall, sitting up in the Highlands like Scotland’s best-kept secret. Here’s a course where:

“If you were able to host an Open miles from anywhere in one of the most romantic and idyllic spots on the planet, then let’s head to the Highlands… Dornoch is just a succession of brilliant holes, with the gorse lighting the course up for huge chunks, before you head back along the coastline on the back nine.”

I’ve never caddied up there, but I’ve talked to enough golfers who have—including some very accomplished ones—who describe Dornoch with an almost reverential tone typically reserved for Augusta or Pebble Beach. The problem? Getting 30,000 spectators to the northern Scottish Highlands for five days isn’t logistics. It’s fantasy.

Yet here’s the thing worth considering: what if our obsession with gallery sizes and television angles has actually made us *worse* at identifying great championship golf? I think we’ve confused “major championship” with “major production,” and those aren’t necessarily the same thing.

The Kingsbarns Precedent

Kingsbarns offers an intriguing middle ground. It hosted the Women’s Open in 2017 and regularly appears during the Dunhill Links, yet rarely gets to showcase itself in October when the weather turns truly fierce. Ranked 15th, it’s a course that’s proven it can handle championship golf without the infrastructure headaches of some older venues.

The same applies to Royal Porthcawl, which has successfully hosted The Senior Open three times since 2014. These aren’t experimental venues anymore—they’re proven championship stages that the R&A has simply deprioritized in favor of traditional rotation.

What This Actually Means

What strikes me after three and a half decades covering this game is that this article isn’t really a complaint. It’s a celebration of abundance. We have more genuinely world-class links golf available to us than ever before in history, and we’re slightly frustrated that we can’t play them all. That’s a pretty good problem to have.

The conversation about Portmarnock hosting The Open in 2030, if it happens, won’t represent The Open abandoning its heritage. It’ll represent The Open finally acknowledging that its heritage extends beyond one island. That feels like progress wrapped in tradition—and in golf, that’s usually the best kind.