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Billy Horschel leads British Open after wind and rain at Royal Troon

Billy Horschel leads British Open after wind and rain at Royal Troon

TRON, Scotland — All that futuristic golf equipment, the pariah of those concerned about its potential to ruin the sport, has here become a scapegoat against a force even more capable of power: Mother Nature. You bring your fancy clubsshe seemed to say at this 152nd British Open, and I’ll show you what I think of your so-called driving distance.

She got confused with her wind directions on Thursday. She got so erratic on Friday that Justin Rose said, “It’s really not in the yardage book.” Saturday, after a break in the morning and afternoon, she went for the wind-and-rain exacta until the wind came back and the rain started coming down hard and the world’s best players started using their words drastically.

“I think this is probably the toughest nine holes I’ll ever play,” said top-ranked Scottie Scheffler.

“I mean, the back nine holes are, I think, the toughest nine holes you can play in golf right now,” said two-time major winner Dustin Johnson.

“You stand there on the 18th tee,” said 2019 champion Shane Lowry, “and you wonder if you can actually hit the fairway, if you can get to the fairway, and it’s 250 yards to the fairway.”

So what had seemed like a normal Saturday — with American Sam Burns and South African Thriston Lawrence shooting 65s, with Lowry leading at 8 under and Daniel Brown at 7 under — turned into a matter of exhaustion and retreat. By the end of the cold evening, England’s Brown had led at 5 under going into the par-4 No. 18 but had double-bogeyed, Ireland’s Lowry had languished all the way to 1 under over the last 11 holes, and it seemed that no one would take the lead but that someone, in this case Billy Horschel, would inherit it. After Brown felt the cold wind on his closing 6, Horschel stood alone at 4 under.

That’s the 37-year-old Floridian in his 43rd major tournament without a single memorable battle, and that’s the man who said, “I’ve always enjoyed the difficulty of everything,” and “I get tired of golf where you take full swings and you lean into a certain (distance) number and (the ball) stops.” Whatever happens to nature on Sunday, he’ll start with a cavalry right behind him.

The six players on 3 under after Saturday were Lawrence and Burns, but also Rose and PGA Championship winner and longtime contender Xander Schauffele, as well as Russell Henley and the debuting Brown. The one player on 2 under, Scheffler, is simply the runaway king of the sport at this point. And then there’s Lowry on that 1 under. Major winners Adam Scott and Justin Thomas, forgotten for most of the day, finished on even par and viable when everyone came back to them.

Golf was a rare event with descriptions of inadequate equipment and stories that are rarely told anymore.

Scheffler stepped up to the microphone and said he hit a driver and a 3-wood “really solid” on the par-4 No. 15 and — come on! — missed the green. Lowry said he played a par-3 with a driver and hit “driver, driver” on No. 15. Brown, who held his own amid that 3-under crowd in his first major on 29, hit a driver on the par-3 No. 17. Here’s Schauffele on that hole: “So I literally hit a 3-wood, kind of off the heel, and thin in the wind and rain, and it went 218 yards or something. So that was pretty humbling.” Said Johnson, a long hitter for a long time: “He’s so long, I could barely make the par-4s. I had to hit two to get there.”

Rose, 43, said he was definitely a junior the last time he “played a round of golf where I hit a 4-iron in 10, a 2-iron short in 11, an 8-iron in 12, a 3-wood in 13, a 4-iron in 14, a 3-wood in 15… a 3-wood in 17, a 2-iron in 18. Yeah.”

What fun, and to top it all off, Scheffler said he once got distracted because “raindrops falling off the front of the cap hit me right in the middle of my swing.” The weather hadn’t delivered all it promised, at least not in the way the seasoned Rose had imagined, “and it became an absolute test of survival out there.”

He said, “I think I survived it all right,” and closed with a nervy six-foot par putt that kept him from bogey-bogeying and gloomy Saturday night. He rejoiced afterward under gray skies, and the remaining guests in the stands chanted his name in the 59-degree cold as if they were at a Boxing Day football match.

He had taken part in the test to ward off the pain.

“I really had a hard time enjoying the crowd today,” he said. “I really had a hard time enjoying the day. I felt like it was a good energy from the crowd, but of course nobody’s clapping with everybody with umbrellas; everybody’s yelling and cheering, people want high-fives. Normally I’m into that kind of stuff; today I just kept my head down. I wasn’t interested in anything. I just tried to walk around the golf course today and get through it.”

And so, with 11 consecutive pars from hole 5 to hole 16, “I felt like I was hanging on by my nails.”

That meant the mental part meant even more than usual. “It means everything,” Schauffele said. “It’s a real test. It’s a long day and you and your caddie are basically a team. He’s going to need an extra arm. I need an extra hand sometimes. We’re just basically trudging around the course. You try to get lost in the process.”

And so: “There are times when you have to have good posture.”

Horschel certainly has, as he approaches his first Sunday in this situation with enough years to turn around and imagine himself “ecstatic” if he wins or “getting back on the horse” if he doesn’t. He’s won 10 times on the two tours across the Atlantic, and he’ll find a Sunday with who knows what’s coming from far out over the ocean and across the Firth of Clyde. It’s been that kind of British Open, the kind that says, Damn, what gear, and the kind that makes Schauffele say, “If you look at the flow of an Open Championship, this is a classic for me.”