Imagine Seve Ballesteros playing against Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods

Innovative film brings together the greats for The Open For the Ages

Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus line up their putts in The Open For The Ages.

Imagine an Open Championship where past meets present, where golf’s greatest champions compete on the grandest stage, where 50 years of film archive combines with 21st century technology and there’s a winner at the end of it. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

Yes, of course, it won’t really replace the real thing, but, due to the coronavirus outbreak leading to the R&A deciding back in April to cancel this week’s scheduled event, the winner of the 149th Open Championship will not be crowned as planned at Royal St George’s tomorrow evening.

As a substitute of sorts, though, something called “The Open for The Ages” just might help give some people that Sunday fix from the game’s oldest major. A three-hour production, it brings together many of the game’s greatest champions for the first time to compete against each other over the Old Course in St Andrews.

It features 50 years of archive footage expertly edited and woven together with modern graphics and new commentary to deliver an imagination that the likes of Jack Nicklais, Tiger Woods, Seve Ballesteros, Tom Watson, Nick Faldo and Rory McIlroy are competing in the same event.

The winner of The Open for The Ages has been determined by a combination of a fan vote, with more than 10,000 responses, and a data model developed in partnership with NTT DATA which uses player career statistics.

“Golf is one of the very few sports where this concept can be created and brought to life,” said R&A chief executive Martin Slumbers.

“The way in which the sport is filmed allows us a truly unique opportunity to reimagine history and bring together the greatest players from many different eras on a scale which has not been done before, either in golf or in other sports.

“We are all keenly feeling the absence of The Open from the global sporting calendar this year and so we hope that this broadcast will generate real interest and enjoyment for the millions of golf and sports fans who closely follow the championship every year.”

Set for an 11am start tomorrow on TheOpen.com and The Open’s social media channels, the programme involves over 250 individual pieces of archive footage and took more than 1,000 hours in total to edit in a project involving IMG Productions.

There are more than 100 digital corrections to shots, including the removal of real life caddies and playing partners while more than 5,000 miles separated the commentary team of Nick Dougherty, Butch Harmon, Ewen Murray and Iona Stephen when they recorded it “as live” due to the fact they didn’t know who the winner was going to be as they watched it.

Paul Sutcliffe, the R&A’s content marketing manager, said: “Hopefully it goes some way to answering that age old question of what would happen if players from different generations could compete against each other.

“I really hope that the golfing audience can immerse, buy into it and realise that, while it is a work of fiction, we’ve tried our best to make it feel as authentic as possible, which is why we’ve pulled in and analysed so much data. Hopefully the broadcast creates some conversation and debate around the winner or the product.”

The data used included paper scorecards through to more recent radar information accrued at the event. “Golf is a data-rich sport and, despite the data from the 1970s being mostly scorecard data, it remains valid and trusted due to our governance measures,” said Steve Otto, the R&A’s chief technology officer.

“It was this data, and metadata, that helped us to put together the programme, allowing to automatically tag players and create an authentic golfing experience for fans.”

Swashbuckling Spaniard Seve Ballesteros was the leader after the opening round, but the final result is a closely-guarded secret. “The model employed was a combination of datasets [on The Open from 1970 to 2015] and a fan vote,” said Laurence Norman, NTT DATA UK’s vice president of sport technology.

Hinting, perhaps, that the winner might not necessarily be someone who has 
lifted the Claret Jug in more recent times helped by technology improving all the time, he added: “From the data we had available, I was genuinely surprised by how competitive the players from the 70s and 80s would have been today.”

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