2016 British Open tee times: Pairings for Thursday’s first round

The Open Championship is upon us with the 145th edition of golf’s oldest major set to begin at Royal Troon Golf Club in Scotland on Thursday. Players will start off the first tee in the wee hours of the morning on the East Coast.

The 156-player field features 12 Open champions, including defending champion golfer of the year Zach Johnson, who won last year’s tournament at St. Andrews, as well as newly minted major champion Dustin Johnson. This is the ninth time The Open has visited Troon since 1923, tying it for seventh-most in the rota.

Americans have won the last six Opens at Troon: Arnold Palmer (1962), Tom Weiskopf (1973), Tom Watson (1982), Mark Calcavecchia (1989), Justin Leonard (1997) and Todd Hamilton (2004). They’ve also won 41 of 144 Opens in total, but 13 of the last 21. Jordan Spieth, DJ and company will aim to make that 14 of 22.

Some notes about Troon: the last Open held there was in 2004, when Hamilton bested Ernie Els in a four-hole aggregate playoff to take the Claret Jug. The course is a little bit different now than it was then, but not drastically so. Fifteen of 18 holes have different yardages than in 2004, but none by more than 16 yards. It’s largely the same track the Open Championship has seen historically.

The course has 96 bunkers and you’ll see some carnage in those pot bunkers like you do every year at The Open. The 2004 course average was 73.2, making it the second-hardest course to par on the PGA Tour that year, only behind U.S. Open host Shinnecock Hills. It won’t be easy to post low scores at Troon, but if you want to go low, you must make birdies right out of the gate in those first six to seven holes. The inward nine is much longer and usually into a prevailing wind.

Three-time Open champion Gary Player called its back nine “the toughest nine holes in golf.”

Palmer once offered a restaurant review-like assessment:

“With postage-stamp size greens that are as bumpy and unpredictable as a Manhattan cab ride, fairways surrounded by clutching eruptions of gorse, broom and impossibly tough whin bushes dotted with ruthlessly sheer sod bunkers and deep burns, it’s a tough and scary walk to par even on the calmest sunny day.”

This is going to be hard, but it should be a fun test for the world’s best golfers.

As always at The Open, there’s no need for a split-tee start. It’s light out in Scotland well past 10 p.m. and everyone goes off No. 1 in some 11 hours of rolling tee times. Here’s a full listing of Thursday’s tee times and player groupings. All times are ET: