Exploring the Challenging Par 4, 3rd Hole at Royal Birkdale
Royal Birkdale Hole 3: a 450-yard par 4 with a left-to-right dogleg. Nailing your drive sets a strong tone for your game. Smylie breaks down the strategy.
Video Transcript
Okay, next hole, the, the third, a par four playing 450 yards this year.
Padraig notes are, "It's a dogleg left to right, but you can't quite see the right-hand side of the fairway.
If you can keep the ball in play over the first three holes and make three pars, it's a very nice start."
Yeah, I, I, I definitely, I, I found that tee shot to be a little tricky today.
It was back into the breeze.
You know, we just talked about the second hole.
It's this one plays in the opposite direction, and it actually plays a little bit higher up, too, on a, on a tee.
So it feels like, you know, when you're playing from an elevated tee back into the breeze, it feels like, you know, that ball is in the air for a, a very long time.
So if you, if you find this fairway, you've hit a very, very good drive.
And if you do, y- for instance, Sam Burns hit driver and kept it about five yards short of the 308-yard bunker, and he was left with, I believe, an eight iron into the green.
So even with a driver off of the tee, you know, he's, he's still hitting a mid iron into the green that, it slopes right to left, so when you have, some winds that are gonna be off of the left, I think that'll help hold the green a little bit.
But still, I think this third hole is a, a, a challenging one.
It's not gonna be, necessarily a pushover by any means.
I'll pause here at, at the par 3 fourth to note that one of the main design changes between 2017 and 2026 was creating more variety in the par 3s as, you know, whether it was a product of the wind direction, 2017 ended up where a lot of guys were hitting the same four or the same club on all four par 3s.
And Friday Golf did a great Q&A with Tom Mackenzie of Mackenzie and Ebert, who did this sort of renovation between the last two open championships.
And he had a great quote from that Q&A.
It said, "I think delivering the variety of tests in the par 3s is a change I'm most proud of.
The introduction of the 15th is a long downwind par 3 where you can actually run the ball onto the green, something you couldn't do on any of the par 3s before.
Then shortening the seventh, playing from a high tee to a tough green, that will be a really rin- really, really interesting test on a windy day."
so those are two par 3s- Hold on upcoming, but let's- Did they say you could run it up?
On the, on the 15th.
This is not, this is not the fourth.
Oh.
Yes.
Yeah, that was- Oh, I was like- That was a longer quote, that was a longer Yeah, no, that was, that was a longer- I was like- quote from, from Tom Mackenzie.
I'm sitting here looking at it and I was like, Yeah, if you're hitting a low-running hook, you could run it out there.
No, that was, that, that was meant to illustrate the, one of the key goals as part of this sort of change between '17 and '26 was to create more variety.
So starting with the per- the first par 3 we'll see, the fourth hole, they added a new tee.
It's playing 20 yards longer than 2017, now playing 219 yards.
A- and, Padraig says, "This might be, be a straightforward, simple design for a long par 3, but it can play havoc.
If you make par here, you're very comfortable and happy.
There's no trickery to this hole at all."
I, I, I think it's a tough hole.
I it's especially like today, it was off of the right and you couldn't really tell how much it was going to be hurting, and it was, it, you know, it's When you play links golf, when you start holding shots, and when you get north winds out on this property, which we are gonna get a north wind, for a good bit of this event, 14 of the 18 holes are gonna be crosswinds.
When you get the east northeast wind, what we had today, you're gonna get it a little bit more up and back.
But the north wind is a lot of crosswinds, and this fourth hole, was a, a great example of, today being a, a crosswind the guys were trying to hold.
But as the week goes on, I think it's gonna play a little bit more into the wind and maybe some left to right.
And it's a very, very narrow opening at the front of the green.
It's a, it's another hole that, the players are gonna have to hit d- variety of shots in their bags.
They're gonna have to hit wedges, you know, off of very, very firm turf.
But this fourth hole is gonna be one they gotta stripe a long iron.
They gotta step up there, hit it online, hold the wind.
And I think, too, you know, when you, when you think about a really, really firm golf course, you can almost psych yourself into thinking that you're not gonna be able to hold a green with a long iron.
And so I saw today countless players come up short on this hole- because they felt like it was gonna land so hard because a long iron's gonna come in on a lower trajectory, the greens are firm.
But really, because it's gonna be playing a little bit more back into the breeze this week, you can actually play it more aggressively into, into the green and actually try to take on some back flags.
Because when it's landing on the green back into the breeze, it's actually gonna land fairly soft.
But it's hard to make yourself make that adjustment where sometimes you're gonna be playing 50 yards short of the green playing a run-up shot.
And that's just the nature of this, this event is, you know, par 3s at times you might be able to fly something onto the green, like with, with a long iron and hold it to, to some back stuff
