British Open 2017 tee times for Thursday and Friday and Royal Birkdale

We have our tee sheet for the first two days of The Open Championship, so start plotting out your overnight routine if you’re watching from back in the United States.

As is tradition at the British Open, the entire field all plays from the first tee. If you don’t follow golf closely, that seems intuitive, right? But with a field of 156 players, the U.S. Open and PGA Championship utilize a split-tee system for the first two rounds, sending threesomes off Nos. 1 and 10 each day. The PGA Tour utilizes this every week too and sometimes with fields that are much smaller than 156 players. It’s just the most efficient way to get the field through 36 holes on time by Friday night with the potential for severe weather delays always looming in the States during June through August.

But The Open, it’s different. It is anathema to use the split-tee system and there was a murderous outcry from the European traditionalists in 2014 when the R&A decided to use it for the first time ever at Hoylake. The move paid off in a big way as severe storms pounded Royal Liverpool in the third round that day. They play in just about any kind of weather in links golf, and it’s rare to get the kind of storms that just completely wipe out play. Royal Birkdale is not far from Royal Liverpool but it’s hard to see such extreme measures put in place this week. Even with the field at a full 156, there’s no contemplation of sending them in two waves off two tees. Everyone starts at No. 1, playing as three for the first two days and as twosomes for the final two rounds.

The ample daylight in Scotland and England this time of year has always afforded the R&A this luxury and ability to keep the tradition going no matter how slow the pace of play continues to creep. At venues farther north in Scotland, you can play past 10 p.m. local in the summer. It’s not as extreme in England and at Birkdale, but there’s still a long day to work with for the 146th Open. They will start them just after 6:30 a.m. local in one long rolling wave off No. 1 tee until the last group goes around 4:15 p.m. So they’re playing golf for about 15 hours these first two rounds.

Golf Channel will be live for the very first tee shot from the very first group on what will be 1:30 a.m. ET Thursday. This is a wall-to-wall approach they put in place last year when they took over from ESPN, which used to go live around 4 a.m. ET for the first two rounds. So if you’re on the west coast, you can finish dinner, head to the bar, and watch the first wave of tee times before a late crash. If you’re on the east coast, well, you need to grind it out -- catch a nap earlier in the evening, then wake up around 1 a.m. and power through almost 11 hours of tee times.

Here are your groups and tee times -- ALL TIMES ET — for the first two rounds of The Open: