SOUTHPORT, England The Open Championship returned to Royal Birkdale on Thursday under mostly sunny skies and a west-northwest wind that never rose above a nuisance, gusting only to fourteen miles per hour on a coast that can do far worse. It was, by the standards of this championship, a gettable day, and the leaderboard reflected as much. What it did not reflect was many of the names the field arrived expecting to see there. At the top, alone, sat a player making his first appearance in the oldest championship in golf.
Jackson Suber signed for a five-under 65, and he did it on debut.
The eagle that set the number
Suber's round had a single defining stroke, and it came late. He made an eagle at the seventeenth, the swing that lifted him clear of a crowded board and gave a clean afternoon its exclamation. The 65 carries its own history at this championship. Among the Open champions who opened with a 65 are Louis Oosthuizen at St Andrews in 2010 and Jordan Spieth, here at Royal Birkdale, in 2017. Suber is not chasing those comparisons yet. He is simply, for one evening, in front of them.
The context makes the number larger. This is Suber's first Open Championship, one of forty-four players in the field making the same debut, and it is only his third appearance in any major; he played the 2024 U.S. Open and missed the cut at this year's. He has never held or shared the 18-hole lead on the PGA TOUR before Thursday, his previous best a share of third at the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches earlier this season. A second-year TOUR member with three top-10s in fifteen starts, he arrived through the Open Qualifying Series, his place earned by a tie for fourth at the RBC Canadian Open. He becomes the first player to hold the opening lead on his Open debut since Dan Brown did it in 2024, and the last man to make a major championship his first TOUR victory was Matt Fitzpatrick, at the 2022 U.S. Open. The ground beneath the lead is unfamiliar. It is also, for now, his.
The players who moved
A shot back, at four under, sit two men who could hardly be further apart in profile. Sungjae Im posted the first sub-70 opening round of his Open career, a 66 that matched the lowest score he has managed in nineteen rounds at this championship. A two-time TOUR winner making his sixth Open start, Im has never quite carried his consistency onto links turf, and Thursday read like an argument that this week might be different. Beside him is Dan Brown, the PGA TOUR rookie whose relationship with this championship is already improbable: a tie for tenth on his Open debut in 2024, the second-best finish of his twenty-start TOUR career, and now a 66.
Then comes the crowd. Nine players share fourth at three under, a group broad enough to hold both the expected and the aspirational. Cameron Young, the world number four, is among them; he finished solo second on his own Open debut in 2022 and has more history at the event than his years suggest. So are three players still waiting for a first PGA TOUR title, each of whom will spend the weekend measuring this week against every near miss that preceded it: Alex Smalley, in his 146th TOUR start, MJ Daffue in his 60th, and Pierceson Coody in his 73rd.
The champion in the pack
The most consequential 68 on the board belongs to the man trying to do something no one has done at The Open in eighteen years. Scottie Scheffler, the world number one and the defending champion, opened two under and tied for thirteenth, a quiet start to a bid to become the first successful title defense at this championship since Padraig Harrington in 2008. Three shots covering the best player in the world and the lead is not so much a deficit as a starting position.
He shares that 68 with Collin Morikawa, the 2021 champion, who is chasing a second Claret Jug that would make him the event's twenty-eighth multiple winner and the first since Ernie Els in 2012. A shot behind them, at one under, walks the sentimental favorite of the week. Tommy Fleetwood, a Southport native making his twelfth Open appearance, returned a 69 in front of the crowds he grew up among. The reigning FedExCup champion is trying to become the first English winner of this championship since Sir Nick Faldo in 1992, and no venue on the schedule will ask him for it more loudly than this one.
The players who slipped
Not every marquee name found the gettable version of Birkdale. Rory McIlroy needed 72 in his 257th major championship round, a two-over start that leaves the world number two with ground to make up before the cut becomes a question. No player has won more majors, six, or recorded more top-three and top-10 finishes in them since 2010, and none of that ledger softens a Thursday spent going backward. Tom Kim, who won last week's Genesis Scottish Open, opened at even par, five off the lead and still within range of becoming the first player since McIlroy in 2014 to win on TOUR and take a major the following week.
What tomorrow demands
One round of an Open settles nothing, and Royal Birkdale has three more days to remember what it is capable of when the wind decides to arrive. The forecast that gave the field its opening will not hold forever, and the leaderboard after Thursday is less a prediction than a list of who used the calm well.
Jackson Suber used it best. Whether he can hold a lead he has never held before, at a championship he had never played before Thursday, against a defending champion and a former champion and a home favorite all within four shots, is the question the week now exists to answer. For one evening at Birkdale, though, the newcomer owns the number, and the eagle that made it.