Brexit causing ‘significant concern’ to R&A over Open’s return to Royal Portrush

Martin Slumbers, the R&A chief executive, revealed the impact the Brexit issue is having on The Open during a media briefing in St Andrews. Picture: R&A

While excited about the prospect of the game’s oldest major being staged at the County Antrim venue for the first time since 1951, Slumbers admitted during a media briefing in St Andrews that the Brexit issue was giving him a major headache, one that is unlikely to ease if Britain does, indeed, leave the European Union with a no deal on 29 March.

“Like every business, and I think about The Open as such, the lack of certainty about the rules, the law in which we are operating under post-29 March has caused us significant concern,” he said. “In hindsight, would I be wanting to do Portrush in the year that we would be potentially leaving the European Union without a deal? No.

“We as a management team have spent a lot of time looking at contingencies and what we need to do. The future of the (Irish) border is the No 1 concern. We have over 2000 containers to get across the Irish Sea and we start building on 2 April. So we have a lot of material to move over there and we are determined to put on the best Open as we possibly can.

“The border is a concern, but it’s one of a series of things that every businessman is sitting worrying about at the moment. We have engagement with ministers and Parliament, but the concern is all around certainty. If you know the rules you’re playing by then you can play, you optimise what you’ve got.

“The problem is we don’t know whether to reschedule to bring all our containers in through Dublin, whether to move them through Belfast, whether to ship them out of the UK now.

These are all questions that we need to work through, but there are other aspects that make Brexit potentially very complex.

“It doesn’t threaten the staging, we will make it happen. It’s just more complex than we anticipated. Someone said to me when I was out for the Latin American Amateur, ‘you must be looking forward to Portrush’ and I said, ‘well actually I’ll be quite pleased when it’s over’.”

Unprecedented demand for the event’s long-awaited return to Northern Ireland saw tickets for the four championship days sell out last August - 11 months in advance. Asked if the issue with Brexit had perhaps taken some of the shine off the R&A management team’s preparation for the tournament, Slumbers added: “For the insiders it’s a bit harder but for everyone outside it won’t impact at all, they won’t notice. We are fully sold out for the championship days and 70 per cent of the spectators are Irish. I think it will be very noisy and pretty exciting, especially if a few Irish players start to really perform.

“It will be a commercially successful staging that will add a venue that is well through the 200,000 attendance mark that until recently we only used to get at St Andrews. That’s important to me because big-time sport needs big-time crowds. We’ve had that at the last couple of Opens and we’re certainly going to get that next July.”

After revealing that the 2022 Open will be held at Royal Liverpool, other topics addressed by Slumbers in his annual sitdown with golf writers included the new set of rules introduced at the start of the year.

Rickie Fowler called for the one that deems a penalty drop should be taken from knee height rather than shoulder height to be scrapped after the American was penalised a shot in the WGC-Mexico Championship at the weekend for falling foul of that change.

“There have been some unfortunate situations, there’s no doubt about that,” admitted Slumbers, seeming to be at odds with Mike Davis, his USGA counterpart, after he said that felt the new rules had been a “huge success” in an interview last week.

“I had huge sympathy with Rickie. To see it happen to him was very unfortunate. The intention for the knee drop rule is to get the ball back in play quickly in a prescribed area without as many redrops. If you come back to shoulder height, it lands with more speed and bounces off.

“If I was honest, it hasn’t gone as smoothly as I would have liked. But I’m a realist around this. We’ve made the biggest change in a generation to the rules of golf.

“The big picture here is to modernise the rules, to take out unexpected penalties. I remain completely committed to this being the right thing for the game and we will work through any further issues.”

Allowing the flag to be left in when players are putting is another of the rule changes. “I’m somewhat surprised how many players on the tour have left the flag in for the short putts,” admitted Slumbers.

“It wasn’t intended as a rule to improve performances, it was intended to improve pace of play primarily for the amateur game. But this is not the time to make knee jerk reactions.”  He also revealed that greenkeepers had reported holes being damaged in club competitions through that particular change. “We weren’t expecting that,” he admitted.