The NFL’s new kickoff rules are expected to revive one of the most exciting plays in the game while decreasing the risk of injury with fewer high-speed collisions. The plan is for the XFL-style setup to open up possibilities for return men.

Unless it doesn’t.

One factor that could limit what return teams do is the NFL allowing the coverage unit to begin its pursuit when the ball hits the ground or when the returner touches the ball (like in the XFL). The XFL had too many false starts and misjudgments of when the ball was possessed. The coverage team would try to time its start with when the returner picked up the ball, but it often jumped early, disrupting the game flow.

“The rules basically incentivize you to kick the … weirdest, s—tiest kicks you can kick,” one NFL special teams coach told The Athletic. “Any ball that can hit the ground is now artificial hangtime. And so the rules are incentivizing variations of squibs and wild kicks. And it’s going to be a s— show.”

Part of the reason for the major changes in kickoffs was to make the play a spectacle again, but if teams can consistently get the ball on the ground and muck up the play, the league may consider adjusting this rule. In practice, teams have found that when the ball hits the ground, it’s nearly impossible to block anyone.

This is partially why the Kansas City Chiefs are experimenting with former rugby star Louis Rees-Zammit and safety Justin Reid as kickers. The kicks don’t have to be high quality, and a bad one that lands in the proper zone can create this artificial hangtime.

(Drew Jordan / The Athletic)

The other reason is that kickers are more involved in tackles. Longtime Chiefs special teams coordinator Dave Toub estimated that XFL kickers were involved in 25 to 40 percent of tackles on kickoffs — even if they weren’t making the tackles themselves, they had to do their part in making the returner change direction. Considering how valuable a good kicker is, special teams coaches may want to keep them out of harm’s way.

There was some creativity with return teams in the XFL, but a majority were vanilla and there weren’t a lot of big returns. Adding a second returner and having better-quality players to work with could open up the possibility for more creativity. But there’s a chance that once the new rules are being used, there won’t be much willingness to deviate from regular returns. Special teams coaches are conservative by nature because their units’ blunders are often magnified.

Despite the potential for the new rules to be a dud, there’s still plenty to be optimistic about because coaches used OTAs and will use training camp to find the best strategies. While some teams may want to play it safe, plenty will be trying to find advantages.

Teams know the new rules can open up a world of strategy. Special teams coaches will keep working on it into the season, but one thing is for sure: everyone is still learning. After OTAs, teams know more, but the experimenting and information-gathering process is ongoing.

“The team that figures it out kickoff-wise and kickoff return-wise is going to excel early,” Toub said in May. “We want to be that team.”

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The Chiefs embrace outside-the-box thinking under head coach Andy Reid, which is why it was interesting that they signed Rees-Zammit. Toub said they’ve tried Rees-Zammit out as both a kicker and returner.

The new kickoff format requires a different type of returner. Returners typically have been small, shifty and good in open space. Now, with every member of the coverage unit on one line, more running back body types will be returning the ball. New returners will have to be able to get upfield, break arm tackles and get through the first level, like they would when running through an offensive line. Also, since the NFL will allow two returners rather than one as the XFL did, the returner who doesn’t get the ball must be a good blocker.

The Rees-Zammit signing got me thinking about whether some rugby strategy can be applied to the new kickoff return. I reached out to some rugby coaches and an NFL special teams coordinator to see if some of these ideas are feasible. I spoke to Golden State Retrievers head coach Kelly Griffin, former U.S. national rugby team head coach Gary Gold and former English rugby star Mike Tindall.

The new kickoff format gives the returner more space because the kickoff team can’t start until the ball is caught or hits the ground. So there’s a buffer for some creative actions with the returners initially.

One interesting idea that came up was using what is called a switch.

😍 Not much better than when a classic switch play comes off!pic.twitter.com/8EtuOuuE8k

— Planet Rugby (@PlanetRugby) January 11, 2024

Griffin drew up a play in which the return team would leave one of the inside coverage team players unblocked, have the returner draw him in one direction and then execute the switch. It would resemble a hook-and-ladder play in football.

(Drew Jordan / The Athletic)

The first XFL touchdown return was essentially a switch, but if you leave one coverage player unblocked like in Griffin’s design, you can get a double team at the point of attack or a blocker on the kicker. Also, this could be easier to execute with a second returner because he would be closer to the returner catching the ball and might even be able to get in position for an option-style pitch.

An NFL special teams coach I talked to thought throwbacks would be much more prevalent.

“I like throwbacks because they’re very low-risk,” he said. “So I feel like you’ll see more throwbacks this year than the last 20 years combined.”

It’s time for the 𝕎𝕖𝕖𝕜 𝟙𝟚 ℙ𝕝𝕒𝕪 𝕠𝕗 𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕎𝕖𝕖𝕜.

We give you @UMichFootball‘s @mikebarrett_MB1-to-@AJHenning3 trick play kick return TD. 💥

📍 @OldTrapper pic.twitter.com/91rqNCfqgm

— Big Ten Network (@BigTenNetwork) November 21, 2021

There will be more distance for the returners to recover if there is a botched execution on a throwback, but the blockers up front will have more chaotic jobs because once the coverage team starts, there are only about 5 yards between them. There isn’t much time to pass off twists and switch releases.

“Every time we practice, we learn something new,” Toub said. “I draw up a play and it looks great on paper — and you can’t do it. You can’t get to certain blocks you think you can get to, so you throw it out. And it’s (on to) the next thing.”

One coach compared trying to block the coverage team to trying to cover receivers in the low red zone where teams play a lot of man and have to have techniques or systems to pass off switch releases.

The blocking up front will be key to whether teams can get creative on the back end. Still, the idea of leaving one man free for a potential lateral or option pitch is interesting if the returners can get in position and everyone else can be reasonably blocked.

A positive is that teams have gotten a good number of repetitions in practice because of the low impact and shorter distance players now have to run on kickoffs. The special teams staffs that come up with the most effective ways to kick the ball, cover, block and return will have big advantages over teams that lag behind. The learning process will surely extend throughout the season as well.

(Top illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Dan Mullan / The RFU Collection and Justin Tafoya / Getty Images)

The telling bit in the video of Enzo Fernandez and other Argentinian players singing a racist song about France following their victory in the Copa America final is the voice you can hear just at the end.

“Corta (el) vivo,” someone says — “stop the live stream.”

They know. They know what they’re saying. They know that what they’re saying is profoundly offensive, and they know what will happen if the outside world hears it.

This isn’t one of those things that can be equivocated. It’s not something that can be denied. The words are clear, and we know the words because it’s a song that has been around for a couple of years.

The words to the chant were: “They play for France, but their parents are from Angola. Their mother is from Cameroon, while their father is from Nigeria. But their passport says French.”

The song in question came from a group of Argentina fans before the 2022 World Cup final, which was flagged at the time by French anti-racist protestors as an “expression of a far-right ideology”.

Frankly it’s bad enough that Argentina, presumably insulated from a PR perspective by their victory at the World Cup, didn’t seek to distance themselves more from the song, but the fact the players seem to have incorporated it into their celebrations is so much worse. If nothing else, it speaks to an unpleasant collective mentality and pervading culture that a group of players, at a moment of triumph, would choose this song as part of their celebrations.

It’s also worth noting, without wishing to detract from the blatant racism, the transphobia that is at play here too. The full lyrics of the song make reference to French players being “cometravas, like Mbappe.” “Cometravas” is a slang term that essentially translates as “someone who has sex with transgender people”.

Football in general has made positive steps to make the game more welcoming for LGBTQ+ people. Players who actively choose not to participate in anti-homophobia campaigns are thankfully few and far between, and those that do are often punished — like Monaco midfielder Mohamed Camara who, after covering up an anti-homophobia message on his shirt last season, was suspended for four games.

Things like this song, however, do not help and in fact actively harm the effort to make football a more inclusive place.

But if the song itself and the gleeful willingness of the players involved to sing it was not depressing enough, the aftermath has been almost as bad.

Fernandez himself issued an apology of sorts, claiming that he got “caught up in the euphoria of our Copa America celebrations” and the song did not “reflect my character or beliefs”. He also said, rather laughably, that “I stand against discrimination in all forms”. Let’s just say that when he is inevitably forced to participate in some sort of anti-racism campaign in the weeks or months to come, his words will ring hollow.

Chelsea themselves reacted in fairly responsible fashion, putting out a statement that set out their own position and values, saying they will use this as “an opportunity to educate” and that they have started an internal disciplinary procedure.

It will be interesting to see what comes of that process, given that if Fernandez was a fan and was caught singing that song in the stands at Stamford Bridge, he would be looking at the ugly end of a fairly lengthy stadium ban.

Beyond that though, things have been very quiet.

Wesley Fofana, the French Chelsea defender, called it “uninhibited racism”. David Datro Fofana, the club’s Ivory Coast striker, put a statement on Instagram saying that “racism in all its forms should be condemned in the strongest possible terms” and that the fight against racism “needs to be taken seriously by everyone involved in the sport”.

David Datro Fofana has also condemned the incident (Craig Mercer/MB Media/Getty Images)

It’s the last bit that feels the most pertinent. Because aside from those two responses, plus a picture posted by Nicolas Jackson of Fernandez hugging a black child, the meaning of which is open to interpretation, there’s not been much else.

Only black players have acknowledged the incident publicly so far. No white players have condemned the song. Perhaps some of Fofana’s white team-mates have offered private support, but as things stand there has been nothing beyond that.

As will be depressingly familiar, it is the black players that have been left to do the emotional work, to carry the mental baggage of having to deal with a racist incident. It enforces the idea that racism is a problem only for black people, when it’s a blight that shames us all. It isolates the black players, suggesting that it’s not something that anyone else has to worry about.

Imagine the power that would come from a white player standing up, unprompted, and condemning the song. It would provide a valuable symbol, but it would be more than just a surface-level thing. It would have genuine import.

The clubs of the other players in the video have, at the time of writing, decided not to comment. It is, in fairness, a little tricky to definitively identify exactly who is singing in the video, but everyone seems to be trying their best to ignore the issue entirely.

Perhaps we could give them the benefit of the doubt and say that, in time, they will speak to their Argentinian players and remind them of their responsibilities — not as footballers or representatives of a club, but as human beings. But at the moment it would seem that they are just hoping the whole thing goes away.

Even if it is tough to identify the individuals doing the singing, anyone who sat in silence while such a racist song was being sung probably could do with at least a talking-to. Surely the least we can expect from the clubs is for them to acknowledge the incident, that they will investigate and if it is found that any of their players were involved, they would face the appropriate punishment.

Chelsea are the only club to have said anything so far, not that we should necessarily be handing out extra credit for that: after all, they couldn’t possibly have avoided it.

Elsewhere though, crickets. For all the glossy campaigns and well-intentioned initiatives and solemnly shot ‘No to racism’ UEFA videos, when so much of the game is silent at moments like this, the idea that football is serious about combating racism is very hard to take seriously.

(Header photo: Peter Joneleit/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Follow live coverage of day one at The Open 2024 from Royal Troon today

HOLYWOOD, Northern Ireland — About 3,000 miles from here, Rory McIlroy walked along Manhattan’s West Side five weeks ago; shoulders pushed up, head slung down, earbuds in. He strolled the High Line, a repurposed freight rail running from Gansevoort Street to 34th Street. The 1.5-mile footpath towers 30 feet over 11th Avenue, above the fray, but through the noise of America’s busiest city.

That’s where McIlroy went to get away from it all.

He needed to process the latest close call in a career coming to be defined by them. This one? Especially cruel. Pinehurst. Three bogeys in the final four holes. Those missed putts. Two feet and 11 inches on the 16th. Three feet and nine inches on the 18th. A solo runner-up finish at the U.S. Open. Again.

McIlroy wanted the blur of a big city, where everything is fast, faceless. It’s what he prefers nowadays. He walked alone, hidden under the brim of a baseball cap, then dipped into Milos, a world-class Mediterranean restaurant in Hudson Yards. He elbowed up at a bar seat, checked his phone and opened a text message from a close friend.

That message? It asked if he’d just been walking the High Line. Apparently, McIlroy had been spotted. Word got around.

“It’s hard to get any sort of privacy these days,” he says. “But it’s nice to try to blend in as much as possible.”

Ages ago, McIlroy found solace along the narrow streets of Holywood, this small town where the butcher knows the baker, and the bartender knows the banker, and the bookmakers know the bookkeepers. They all live here, tucked between Belfast and Bangor, along the shoreline of Belfast Lough, the inlet connecting this section of Northern Ireland to the Irish Sea. A little more than 10,000 people. Solidly middle-class. Wealth around the edges. A mix of Protestant and Catholic. They’re abundantly proud to have raised generations of kids well isolated from the religious tensions that long defined the region.

As one local puts it: “A lovely little town. Everybody has grown up with everybody.”

Holywood was the early proxy used to explain Rory to the world upon his arrival in 2008 as a potential superstar. Sportswriters and broadcasters traveled here like pilgrims. More and more from his breakout U.S. Open win in 2011 to his thunderclap in 2014 — winning his third and fourth majors in succession at age 25.

The visitors drove rental cars down High Street. They squeezed into parking spaces and popped into one business after another. Holywood’s main strip is dotted by coffee shops, cafes and retail shops. You can’t read a story from back then without a mention of Skinners Bakery, where owner Valerie Baker designed biscuits and buns with Young Rory’s face. In 2014, after McIlroy’s win at the PGA Championship, she told the Belfast Telegraph: “It’s become something of a tradition now. This is the fourth time we’ve baked our special Rory biscuits. They always sell out.”

Next door to Skinners is Orrs Butchers. That’s where writers found Stephen Moore. He’d say how much the town was buzzing. How Rory put little Holywood on the map. How he was going to win the next major, and then the next one after that.

Inevitably, the visitors would head up the hill, deeper into town, to Holywood Golf Club. Where Rory learned the game. Where local liquor laws were winked at as family and friends watched final rounds of major tournaments long after last call. Where television cameras broadcast them cheering their boy, Rory. He would win, return to town with a trophy, and everyone would be together again.

Today, things are different, but Holywood remains.

It’s a Friday afternoon and Paul the barman is looking for the key again.

Two Americans are coming off the 18th hole and want their turn. Rory’s Corner, a mini custom-built McIlroy museum in the middle of Holywood GC’s clubhouse, is open to the public. The walls are covered. Pictures of a 15-year-old with big freckles and bigger hair. Framed newspapers of long ago wins. Plaques. Memorabilia.

So for the umpteenth time today, the trophy case is opened, and replicas of the Claret Jug and Wanamaker Trophy are handed over. Big smiles. Pictures snapped.

Later, two Aussies will come in to do the same. Paul will fetch the keys, take them to the trophy case, pop it open again.

Shortly after that, near sunset, a sightseeing bus from a docked cruise ship will climb the hills of Holywood, turn down Demesne Road, and pull onto Nun’s Walk, the tiny road leading up to the clubhouse. The Home of Rory McIlroy is a stop on the tour.

“All day, every day, seven days a week,” says Stephen Tullin, president of Holywood Golf Club.

You can make a reasonable case no club is so associated with a player it produced as Holywood is with Rory. Arnold Palmer and Latrobe Country Club? Jack Nicklaus and Scioto? It’s a short list.

“I don’t know what course Tiger Woods was involved with as a lad,” says Tony Denvir, a Holywood GC member. “But everyone knows Rory McIlroy was, and is, a member of Holywood Golf Club.”

The reason, it seems, is the fairy tale, one told so many times. Born in 1989 to Gerry and Rosie McIlroy, Rory McIlroy was immediately a prodigy. His parents worked multiple jobs, trading night and day shifts, assuring the boy every opportunity. Gerry, a fine player in Belfast’s amateur golf leagues, taught his son the game and let him loose at Holywood. He was so good, so soon, the club made him a member at age 7. Rory left high school at 16 to focus on a game that grew larger than life. The result was a young lad coming from a working man’s club to conquer the world.

“Nobody was ready for what happened,” says Barry Dobbin.

Now 78, Dobbin still seems to be wrapping his head around it all. A lifetime ago, he owned a timber-frame housing kit company and employed Gerry as an insulation installer. He, Gerry, and Gerry’s father, Jimmy (Rory’s grandfather), played golf together. Dobbin drove Gerry and Rosie to their 1988 wedding, then to the reception at Pips International, the best-known nightclub in Belfast.

He remembers Rory as a baby.

And he remembers that baby suddenly becoming the biggest story in the golfing world.

“It all happened so quickly,” Dobbin says. “And suddenly we were this magic place.”

The waves of tourists that come through today want exactly that. A piece of magic. Americans, Canadians, Swiss, French, Japanese. They fork over greens fees to play what amounts to a simple, short, 120-year-old parkland course. They ask to hear all the stories. They take pictures of the sign in front of Rory’s reserved parking spot.

On this day, a nondescript sedan is parked there.

“Oh, that’s Paul’s,” Denvir says.

The sound on the 18th green at Pinehurst last month was guttural. A gasping, shrieking, sighing, moaning anguish. The thousands of fans surrounding the final hole of the 2024 U.S. Open couldn’t believe McIlroy missed that putt. At the same time, they absolutely could believe it. They’ve seen it before. That’s how a major tournament winless streak goes from 36 to 37.

In Holywood? All was quiet that night.

“Back in the day, Rory in contention at a U.S. Open, this place would’ve been jam-packed for that,” Denvir says. “Bar would’ve been full. Overflow seating in the other room. Would’ve been fantastic craic.”

That was back when the bar stayed open late and the cameras came out. BBC, Sky Sports. Maybe ESPN. Photographers snapping away.

“That’s died off a wee bit,” Denvir says.

Instead, everyone watched the misadventures of Pinehurst from home.

Blank faces in front of the flickering screens.

“Pinehurst was … ” Denvir says, lifting his hands and dropping them. “You really could tell that the wee lad just wanted to stand there and cry. He was obviously heartbroken. It was so hard to watch.”

Sitting on a deck perched over Holywood’s 18th green, Denvir looks over at Tullin, who has known McIlroy’s family for 50-some-odd years. Tullin remembers watching Rory play junior competitions when the bag was taller than the boy, when he’d step to the tee and the whispers would begin. “Who’s this now? Oh, that’s Rory McIlroy.”

“We were heartbroken as well, yeah?” Tullin says, looking back at Denvir.

“Absolutely. Just stunned,” Denvir says, pausing, thinking, “Ten years now, since he’s won a major? Ten. Just incredible.”

“It is incredible.”

“2014, yeah? That’s just…“

“Crazy, isn’t it?”

These are the conversations that have replaced the parties at Holywood Golf Club. The lover’s lament, so to speak. It’s impossible to change the topic when there’s only one topic. So pints are poured and Rory is discussed. The keening of near-misses or summoning of old times. Eventually, inevitably, his face pops up on the TV screen and everyone stops.

The whole town is subscribed.

“Hi, I’m wondering if Stephen Moore is here?”

“Ah, s—,” the old man says, eyes pressed closed, hands atop the cold metal of a butcher’s display, “what’ve I done now?”

Meet the most popular man in Holywood. Moore was born here in 1965, took a job at Orrs at age 15, bought the shop years later, continued working, sold it a few years ago, and now shows up each Saturday, pulling on an apron, mainly so he can still see everyone, and so they can see him. Moore can not go more than two minutes without being interru…

“Hi, Tommy!” he hollers.
“Stephen!”
“You good?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good man.”

Moore was interviewed by the likes of ESPN and the Washington Post back in 2011, when Rory was on the rocket and the Open Championship was on its way to Royal Portrush, only 60 miles from Holywood.

“It was a phenomenon,” he remembers.

Moore went to school with Brian McIlroy, the youngest of Rory’s uncles, and worked at Orrs alongside Eva McIlroy, Rory’s grandmother. She drove a Volkswagen Beetle, but couldn’t park it. So she’d arrive at work, leave the VW in the middle of the street, and tell Young Stephen to go park it. Later, Moore’s sister married Colm McIlroy, another of Rory’s uncles.

Today, all the McIlroys still live in Holywood. Colm runs a pressure-washing business and plays golf out of HGC. Gerry and Rosie split time between Northern Ireland and the United States. When they’re in town, Gerry can be found each morning on the 4-mile stretch of beach from Seahill to Holywood. He likes to walk alone, Moore says.

“Down to earth, solid people,” he adds, waving to a passerby.

“Heyyy, Sam.”
“Hello, Stephen!”
“You get that thing sorted?”
“I did, I did.”
“Good, good. Cheers.”

Moore remembers both childhood Rory bouncing down High Street as a kid and, only a few years later, a freshly famous Rory drawing crowds and newspaper photographers when stopping for coffee. He couldn’t imagine such attention.

“Hi, Stephen!” a passing woman says.
“Hi, Annie! Go sit in your garden and enjoy this weather, would ya!”

Moore watched the U.S. Open at his house. A few mates. A few beers. They thought it was over as Rory teed off on 15. The boys damn near began celebrating.

“Two silly putts,” he says. “Everyone was heartbroken.”

It’s odd, like storms in one sea changing the currents upon another shore. Even though he’s not there — and hasn’t been here in at least a year or two — as Rory goes, so goes the Holywood. There’s the buildup to each major, that this will be the one. Then the letdown. McIlroy has 11 top-five finishes in the 37 majors since his last win, including three second-place finishes in the last three years. It didn’t seem like anything could be more wrenching than the near-miss at St. Andrews in 2022, but Pinehurst was somehow worse.

So here sits Holywood, waiting for time to change.

“I think it’d just be a relief, to tell you the truth — to just see ‘em get it off his back,” Moore says. “I think he’s just trying too hard sometimes. Who can blame ’em? He’s won loads of championships, but this major thing is just following him around.”

At The Maypole, a pub in Holywood’s town center, you’ll find things can begin to feel odd after 10 or 15 minutes. Then it hits you — the bar is full, but also quiet. Everyone is talking, but not shouting. No music is playing. No TV is on. A sign by the door reads: “In the interest of good conversation and serious drinking, please refrain from using mobile phones.”

This place is a free competition of ideas, and when it comes to Rory, everyone has an opinion.

One local philosopher, eyebrows raised toward the ceiling, slows his brogue to say McIlroy needs to stop speaking to the media and only worry about playing golf.

Others have their own varying thoughts, namely, the man is worth multiple hundreds of millions, so, yeah, it’s tough to feel too bad. “Poor Rory?” one said. “I don’t think so.”

But even those cynics want to see McIlroy win again, if only for a change of conversation.

Plenty in town are suspicious of an out-of-towner. Antennae are up, assuming questions about golf will lead to questions about Rory’s personal life, one month after he withdrew his petition to divorce wife Erica Stoll after a seven-year marriage. Seeing a notebook, plenty in Holywood kindly scooted away.

The instinct, of course, is to protect.

He is theirs, not ours.

Walking off the 18th green at Royal Troon on Monday, 21-year-old Tom McKibbin folded his arms, thinking about home. He grew up in Newtownabbey, across the Belfast Lough, about 12 miles from Holywood. Growing up, he spent his days playing on Rory’s old course, training in facilities installed by Rory and, after developing into an elite talent, answering constant questions about being The Next Rory.

McKibbin turned professional in April 2021 at age 18, just as Rory did. This year, he won the European Open in Germany — his first tournament championship on the DP World Tour. Cameras returned to Holywood to capture members’ reactions.

This week, McKibbin is appearing in his first Open Championship. He says he feels comfortable. A top-40 finish in last month’s U.S. Open — his first career major — was reassuring. Plus, he’s getting older and is out on his own more. While McKibbin lives at home with his parents in the summer, he now spends part of the calendar in Dubai and is eying an eventual move to the States — “hopefully someday soon.”

On a recent return trip home, he got a glimpse of how such success changes things.

“Suddenly a lot more people know you at home,” McKibbin says. “I guess that’s sort of what you sign up for.”

McKibbin is a product of what McIlroy means to Holywood. There’s been charitable work — both seen and unseen. There’s been loads of money made off his draw to the town. According to those at the club, he helped keep the place afloat during COVID-19 and single-handedly put €800,000 into clubhouse renovations. He pumped financing into an expanded junior program, thinking that, if every kid in the area wants to be Rory McIlroy, they should be able to practice where he played.

Part of the clubhouse renovations Rory paid for included the installation of a modern gym, one for him to use when in town, whenever he visits the massive property he owns. Though it’s been awhile, he’s been known to show up at the club in shorts and T-shirt, wearing earbuds, to get in a workout. “He’s totally normal when he’s here,” Tullin says. “Like he just wants to be normal.”

But that’s the hard part. The longer he’s gone, the harder it is to be normal.

“When you go home seldomly, it’s almost like you’re more of a novelty,” McIlroy said last week. “It’s sort of counterintuitive.”

Perhaps there needs to be a reason for a proper reunion.

And perhaps this could be it.

Stephen Moore says he played a round at Holywood with Colm McIlroy the day after the U.S. Open. The two smacked shots and recounted that impossible ending at Pinehurst. According to Stephen, Colm decided to fire off a text message to Rory. Something like, “Well, nephew, get ‘em the next time.”

The phone dinged back. Rory replied that the loss only made him more determined to win at Troon.

Wouldn’t that be something? After all this time? As of now, the plan is for the bar at Holywood Golf Club to stay open on Sunday. Maybe this is the one.

(Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; photos: Brian Lawless /PA Images, Luke Walker, Saype / Belfast Photo Festival)