You couldn’t but pick up the whispers at Royal Troon, they were on the breeze in between all the breakers, warbles, claps and caws. “Jon Rahm birdied the first three holes!” said the one lad who had managed to get reception on his phone to the two either side of him while he flicked his thumb down along the scoreboard.
“How’s Rosey doing?” his mate asked. “He’s just teed off.” The other cut in: “Here comes Scottie Scheffler now.” He waited a beat. “Who’s that with him?” The three of them squinted into the middle distance at the man strolling down the fairway. Blue sweater, blue slacks, white cap. No one spoke.
“Who’s that?” is a question a lot of people have been asking lately about Dan Brown. Four days ago, you needed to have been paying pretty close attention to the outer reaches of the DP World Tour to know anything much about him.
Brown, a 29-year-old journeyman from Northallerton, was ranked 272 in the world coming into the Open, and had missed the cut in six of his past eight tournaments. But it has been a long old week on the links, and a lot has changed. Brown said himself that he would have been delighted if you had told him on Monday he was going to be tied 10th.
But after rising as high as first place with 20 holes left to play, he found he was disappointed to wind up where he did, nine shots off winner Xander Schauffele. “It’s a little bit,” he paused for a moment, searching for the words. “I wanted to do better and be higher up the board.”
Even Brown has seemed a little surprised by how well he has played this week. He said it helped that he has got used to failing on the DP World Tour, so he isn’t scared of it any more. “I suppose a lot of people probably thought I was going to be shaking this morning and really nervous, but I’ve been absolutely fine,” he said on Saturday night. “I didn’t know myself, I didn’t know last night if I was going to wake up this morning, be nervous, sweaty, whatever it might be, but I think I felt all right.”
His own mother booked a hotel up here only for the first night of the championship. She’s superstitious, and didn’t want to bet he’d make it to the weekend. Which was a shame. She would have got fair odds given he was 750‑1 to win the thing.
Everyone kept waiting for the moment when Brown was going to look down and see the ground was gone from underneath his feet because he’d run so far over the cliff. But it never came. You wondered if it might happen on Saturday night, when he dropped three shots playing the final two holes, and wondered again on Sunday morning, when he was seventh on the leaderboard at the start of the final round, and paired with Scheffler, the world No 1 golfer. Scheffler is a few inches taller, $69m richer, and 271 places higher in the rankings. But Brown took it all in his slow and steady stride, only stopping for a quick pull on a cigarette now and then.
He said he was a little thrown by the wind, which had flipped on the front nine. He dropped a shot at the 1st when he missed a putt from 10ft after playing out of a greenside bunker. And he had a bad run of back-to-back bogeys at the 4th, 5th, and 6th. But he made birdies on the 2nd and 7th, which meant he kept his foothold on the first page of the leaderboard. Scheffler passed him on the way. The American pulled himself up to third place by reaching four under after eight holes. But he scored a double‑bogey six by three-putting the 9th, and there was no coming back from that.
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Brown covered the back nine, which is as hard a stretch as any in major golf, in level par, which was a stroke better than Scheffler managed. The gap between the two of them wasn’t as big as you might think. When you rise as high as the hundreds in the rankings, the margins get pretty slim.
Brown is about to take three weeks off when, you can only hope, he’ll finally be able to enjoy what he achieved at Royal Troon this week. He did it in conditions that broke some of the best golfers in the game. He has also almost made more money in these four rounds (€291,576/£245,580) than he has in the first four years of his professional career, and earned a good chunk for his 19‑year‑old brother Ben, who has been caddying for him. For a man who once had to borrow money off his grandmother to pay to travel to a tournament in Switzerland, it’s a life-changing sum. More importantly, he’s won himself an exemption for the 153rd Open at Royal Portrush too.
So Cinderella didn’t get to marry the prince. But at least she can treat herself to a new pair of shoes, and come back for another shot next year.
