The secret to links golf? It’s not technical

July 11, 2026 · Yahoo Sports

The assorted tales of bad bounces in golf could double as campfire ghost stories.

There’s Joe Daley at Q School in 2000, whose bogey putt dropped into the dead center of the 17th hole, but then improbably ricocheted off the bottom of the cup and popped out. Daley ended up missing his PGA Tour card by one. There’s Tiger Woods at the 2013 Masters, whose approach into the 15th hole hit the flagstick, his ball caroming into the water and ending his chances.

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But bad bounces are most synonymous with the Open Championship. In 2009 at Turnberry, a 59-year-old Tom Watson nursed a one-shot lead on the 72nd hole. From the fairway, he flushed an 8-iron on line with the pin, but the ball caught a downslope and rolled off the back of the green. Watson never recovered, eventually losing in a playoff to Stewart Cink.

One bad bounce deprived the golf world of what might have been the most unlikely major win in history, but Watson recognized it was what he had signed up for. He had won five claret jugs between 1975 and 1983—all weeks where he got bad breaks, but plenty of favorable ones as well. The same shot he hit in Turnberry in 2009 was the one that held the green in 1977, leading to a clinching birdie.

The reductive view of the oldest major championship is it’s the one most subject to chance, the confluence of firm, sandy terrain and erratic weather turning a game of precision into a white-knuckle hit-and-hope lottery. Only some of this is true. If the Open invites more unpredictability, it also emphasizes a certain skill that Watson long recognized as essential.

“The ultimate links golfer is one who can accept the bad bounces with the good bounces,” Watson said. “Because they’re going to even out.”

Most golfers at least understand the concept. The game is played outside, on uneven surfaces, by imperfect people. But the cruel irony of this challenge is you can’t overcome it with effort or skill. The better the golfer, the greater their command of the ball, the tighter the dispersion of their misses. Especially now with reliance on launch monitors, certain players have enough information about their tendencies they can reasonably expect the ball to behave a certain way most weeks of the year.

Often, though, the more control you believe you should have, the less willing you are to surrender it. It’s why Scottie Scheffler was so visibly frustrated earlier this year when the wind carried an approach shot into the water, or why he griped about mud balls last year at the PGA Championship.

“You spend your whole life trying to learn how to control a golf ball,” Scheffler said. “And all of a sudden, you now have absolutely no control over where that golf ball goes.”

Open conditions render many of those expectations useless. Sports psychologist Bhrett McCabe calls this the competitive paradox, in which high-pressure environments lead players to crave control precisely when it’s out of their grasp.

“When they play overseas, and most notably in a link-style setup, players have to learn to relinquish as much control as possible, knowing that ball strike does not always equate to outcome,” McCabe said. “To play their best, they have understand that the variability of the game is going to test their acceptance and their ability to not carry shots forward.”

Most successful links players say this is the most underrated part of links golf. It’s not just about controlling the trajectory of your shots in the wind, or learning to bump balls into slopes from 60 yards off the green. You can have all of those shots dialed, and something new will emerge. To paraphrase an old proverb, “You plan, and the golf gods laugh.”

“In general, I think people come to a links golf course and think that there should be some perfect way of playing the course, that there should be something that avoids everything, but that might not be the case,” said two-time Open champion Padraig Harrington. “So it's that little bit of lack of familiarity that leads to a little bit of doubt in the decision-making for sure.”

The secret is less technical and more a mindset. It’s not as if players who thrive on links courses attract better bounces. They’re just more willing to navigate through the challenge of the moment.

“It's not like I've just played great over there. I'm still trying to learn, but one thing I do have is I have a very high level of fondness for links golf,” Cink said. “I really think it's just pretty fascinating. So part of playing over there and playing in the Open Championship, if you don't have a real high level of fondness for links golf, that's when those bad bounces start to hurt. And I just think it's a really awesome, natural way to play golf.”

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