I hated the dark as a kid. A television in a dark room was even worse — I saw “Poltergeist” too young, I suppose. Now, though, it’s the setting for my favorite sports viewing experience of the year.
My first pre-dawn appointment with the Open Championship was 2011, two years after Tom Watson’s near-miss at Turnberry. I woke up in the middle of the night for a drink of water, and just out of curiosity, I tiptoed to the living room and turned on the TV to check on the early scoring. Watson had just aced the sixth hole. My heart leapt into my throat. There was no going back to sleep. I settled in with a cup of coffee, kept the lights off, and turned the volume down almost as low as it would go. It was no later than 4 a.m.; even the cat went back to bed.
Watson eventually faded — it was his last finish inside the top 50 at the Open or any other major. But I haven’t missed the Open’s early coverage since.
Maybe it’s the reality that one’s idea of fun gets lamer in middle age. Maybe it’s the increasing rarity of solitude that comes with moving deeper into a career. Life generally gets more complicated the longer it goes on; time only gets harder to slow down. Whatever it is, there is something about a dark, quiet house, a pot of coffee, and a viewing appointment with the world’s greatest golf tournament. It’s simple, but I suppose that’s the point.
I rarely set an alarm; I just go to sleep with the understanding that whenever I wake up (and I will), I’ll get up for good and put the coffeemaker to work.
I’m not alone. Normally a near-silent medium between the hours of 11 p.m. and 5 a.m., Twitter springs to life during the Open’s early hours. With no breaking political news or other sports to get in the way, the platform becomes a nearly golf-exclusive feed of snark and sleep-deprived delirium for a few hours. It’s the hardest of golf diehards, all half-awake but fully basking in the calendar’s most surreal viewing experience. It’s golf’s version of the first two days of the NCAA basketball tournament, set about 12 hours earlier in the day.
And in recent years, the Open has made its broadcasts so available that coverage is not so much pre-dawn as it is nearly overnight. This year, Thursday’s broadcast begins at 12:30 a.m. for those of us in the Central Time Zone. Out west, coverage starts at 10:30 p.m.; you could stay up late and watch instead of getting up early, if you wanted. In-N-Out Burger is still open at that hour.
In the eight years since Watson introduced me to the coffeeist of coffee golf, I have missed the Open’s pre-dawn coverage just once: in 2016, when I attended the tournament at Royal Troon. We had tickets to Friday’s round, so after a week of golf, we traveled to nearby Glasgow and caught the late afternoon coverage live from a pub. It was an alien experience: watching the Open live, in the early evening, beer in hand — the sun making its way down toward the horizon, but live golf still being played. It was exact opposite of the way I’ve come to favor watching the tournament.
Maybe it’s because it gives American audiences a taste of the greatest element of golf on the British Isles: community. The game, the tournament, and the courses on which it’s played bind their communities together in a way that no American event — and few, if any American courses — does. When we imported golf to this country, we neglected to bring along its best parts. Who wouldn’t wake up in the middle of the night for a glimpse at that?
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