​My Open Championship season is crowded with unusual challenges for players heading overseas—and one irritating swing flaw that tends to surface. Every year, the British Open seems to have a stubborn habit of unsettlling golfers’ swings. There are two main culprits: more wind and firmer ground. That combination creates an environment ripe for bad habits to creep in, and with many coaches opting out of the two-week Scotland-to-Open Championship swing, the task becomes a race to fix issues before they take hold. Here are some of the problems that frequently arise—and how the pros adjust.
Ball position tends to drift back. The most common bad habit is ball position sliding backward in the stance. This happens when players try to flight the ball lower and ensure they strike the ball first on firm lies. Most of the time it’s subconscious; ask a player about it and you’ll hear about returning stateside and noticing their irons fly lower than usual while their driver spins more. A farther-back ball position means they’re hitting down on the ball more than normal. It happens to the best, even to someone like Scottie Scheffler: “If we’re playing a bunch of windy weeks in a row and all of a sudden I get back home my ball position will just move back because I’ve been flighting it down for so long… I’m always trying to make sure I get those fundamentals down to try to keep my neutral, neutral.”
Weight pushes too far onto the front foot at setup. Related to the same idea is players shifting too much weight onto their front foot. This is the basic knockdown formula: keep the ball down by moving your weight forward and drawing the ball back in the stance. The windier it gets, the more this tendency shows up, often without deliberate intent.
Swinging against the wind. An interesting dynamic is how players subconsciously fight the wind with their swing. If the wind blows from right to left and a player tends to hit a fade from left to right by swinging left, the wind can nudge them toward a stronger leftward path, making the fade larger. The problem is these shots often appear straighter when the wind is blowing, but once the wind dies, players face noticeable slices. As Sepp Straka puts it: “I think that’s part of why the Postage Stamp is such a great hole. Today you had seven holes in a row where the wind was straight off the right. You just grooved into that, your swing kind of adapts to that, and all of a sudden you’re standing on the 8th tee, you’re elevated, and the wind is now into and off the left. It’s very challenging. It makes switching really hard, because all day you’ve been starting it so far right, and then to see that ball starting left is really tough to do.”