The 146th Open Championship starts Thursday at Royal Birkdale on the North West English coast. It’ll be the 10th time the links course has hosted the championship and the first since 2008, when Padraig Harrington won it by four strokes over Ian Poulter.
2017 British Open schedule: TV and streaming times at Royal Birkdale
How to watch The Open Championship.
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
British Open 2017 TV schedule
Live streaming is available on the Golf Channel’s official site and the Golf Channel app.
Thursday, July 20
1:30 a.m.-4 p.m. ET, Golf Channel
Friday, July 21
1:30 a.m.-4 p.m. ET, Golf Channel
Saturday, July 22
4:30 a.m.-7 a.m. ET, Golf Channel
7 a.m.-3 p.m. ET, NBC
4:30 p.m.-6 p.m. ET (encore), NBC
Sunday, July 23
4 a.m.-7 a.m. ET, Golf Channel
7 a.m.-2 p.m. ET (edited), NBC
The Open should be great, just like usual.
Birkdale bills itself as “one of the truest tests of links golf,” and it lays out similarly to the other eight courses in the Open rota. Its narrow holes and deep bunkers, plus the potential for high winds, make it a typically challenging Open track. The course will play at around 7,156 yards and is a par-70, but the conditions and course layout make it brutally challenging anyway. In 2008, Harrington’s winning score was 3 over par, and only four players stayed within nine strokes of even over the full 72 holes.
World No. 1 Dustin Johnson is a slim favorite entering the event, with No. 3 Jordan Spieth and No. 7 Jon Rahm just behind him. Johnson has three wins in 12 starts this year, but he’s struggled through the first two majors. He withdrew from the Masters in April with a reported back injury, and he missed the cut at the U.S. Open in June.
Rahm is the sport’s fastest-rising star, a first-year professional who ended 2016 ranked 125th in the world. He’s coming off an Irish Open win on the European Tour and also won the Farmers Insurance Open. Rahm hits a huge golf ball and has been stunningly consistent at 22 years old. In 15 starts this year, he’s got nine top-10 finishes against two missed cuts. It’s hard to imagine him not playing well at Birkdale.
As usual, The Open’s schedule doesn’t mesh well with American time zones. Televised action on Thursday and Friday will happen in the middle of the night on the East Coast, before things push backward a little bit on Saturday and Sunday. Final-round play runs from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. ET on Sunday, so viewers in the United States can watch that easily. There are also encore presentations throughout the tournament.
Mike Tirico will anchor much of NBC’s live coverage, rotating with Terry Gannon and Dan Hicks as a play-by-play host.
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