Cam Young opened the British Open with a 3-under 67 on Thursday at Royal Birkdale and finished the day two shots off the lead, a sharp turn after a stretch of results that had felt ordinary by the standards he set earlier this season. His round was rescued at the end by a 15-foot par putt on the 18th hole, the kind of save that kept a good day from slipping into a merely decent one.
The timing matters because Young arrived in England after winning the Players Championship in March and the Cadillac Championship in May at Doral, then following that with a run of finishes that dipped well outside the top 10. He tied for 10th at the Truist, then tied for 26th at the PGA, tied for 46th at Memorial, tied for 43rd at the U.S. Open and tied for 47th at the Travelers, a sequence he said could be frustrating even while this week felt like a reset.
Young did not dress up the change in form. “It is hard, (and) I feel like I’m inclined toward frustration generally when I don’t perform really well,” he said, adding that performances can swing from feeling easy to feeling like the game is working against him. At Birkdale, he said, “You never know what you’re going to get here conditions-wise — totally different styles, different shots. It’s a really nice chance to just take things as they come and see each shot as its own thing.”
The last hole showed why a Thursday score at a British Open can be more fragile than it looks. Young called the 18th one of the hardest holes he has played in professional golf and said, “It’s a beast. I just made a bad mistake. I just made a poor swing. I was really happy to get out of there with a par.” On a course where the margin between a clean card and a stumble can disappear in one swing, that par mattered as much as any birdie.
Jackson Suber led after a 5-under 65, which left Young with ground to make up but still very much in the mix after one round. The question now is not whether Young can contend for a day; it is whether the reset he described can last long enough to turn a bright opening into four steady rounds, the only path that matters at a British Open.
