SOUTHPORT, England Sam Burns began the Open Championship in a place from which the tournament is not usually won. His opening 73 left him tied for 106th, outside the top hundred, far from anything resembling contention. Three days later he holds the golf tournament. A third-round 65 at Royal Birkdale carried him to ten under par and a two-shot lead with eighteen holes to play, the final act in one of the more improbable climbs the championship has offered in years.
Only once has a player won this championship after sitting outside the top fifty following the first round. Mark O'Meara did it in 1998. Burns is now trying to become the second.
The unlikeliest leader
The arc of Burns's week reads like three different tournaments. The 73 on Thursday was the round of a man headed home early. The 62 on Friday tied the all-time major eighteen-hole scoring record and pulled him from the margins to the edge of contention. The 65 on Saturday finished the climb, and left him at 200 for 54 holes, the lowest three-round total he has ever posted in a major, better than the 206s that carried him through the U.S. Open and the Masters.
There is a Birkdale echo in the climb. The last player to open the Open Championship with a 73 or worse and go on to win was Padraig Harrington, who did it on this same course in 2008. Burns is making only his sixth appearance in the championship, and his best finish in it is a tie for thirty-first; a victory on Sunday would arrive in his twenty-sixth major start.
For all of that, the number that matters most is the one still missing. This is Burns's 199th start on the PGA TOUR, and he has never won a major; five TOUR titles sit on his record, the last of them the 2023 match play, but the majors have offered only near misses, a runner-up finish at this year's U.S. Open the closest of them. He has held or shared the 54-hole lead on TOUR five times before this and converted once. He has led a major through 54 holes once before, at the 2025 U.S. Open, and finished tied for seventh. The history is not encouraging, and it is also not the point. He leads the Open by two.
The third 62
Birkdale has spent this week rewriting its own scoring records, and on Saturday it gave up another. Ryan Fox went out and shot 62, the third round of 62 this championship has seen in three days and the fourth in its history, matching the lowest single round ever recorded in a major. Seven players have now reached that number across the history of the majors, in eight instances, and only one of them, Xander Schauffele at the 2024 PGA Championship, went on to win the week he did it. Herbert and Burns had done it on Friday. Fox did it on Saturday, and it lifted him into a tie for second at eight under, two behind the lead.
Fox arrives at the final round with a distinction of his own to chase. No New Zealander has won this championship since Bob Charles in 1963, and at fifty-sixth in the world Fox would be its lowest-ranked champion since Darren Clarke in 2011. He shares second with Si Woo Kim, who has quietly assembled three rounds in the sixties and stands one good day from becoming the first player from Asia to win the Open, a milestone the championship has waited its entire history to record.
The players who moved
A shot behind the pair at second, at seven under, wait two more with stories worth telling. Ryan Gerard, playing his first Open, is three off the lead and one round from becoming the eleventh player to win this championship on debut, the most recent of them Collin Morikawa in 2021. And Lucas Herbert, who a day earlier had matched the major scoring record, remains within range at seven under despite a third-round 71 that gave some of Friday back.
The players who slipped
Not everyone made Saturday a friend. Herbert's 71 cost him the outright lead he had earned with the 62, though it did not cost him the tournament. Tommy Fleetwood, the Southport native, sits at five under, five back, his bid to become the first English champion since Nick Faldo in 1992 now requiring help he cannot give himself. Jackson Suber, who led after Thursday, has drifted to six under and a share of sixth, still chasing the distinction of being the first eighteen-hole leader to win the Open since Jordan Spieth in 2017.
The steepest fall belongs to the man who arrived with the most to defend. Scottie Scheffler, the world number one and the defending champion, sits at four under and trails by six, his pursuit of the first successful Open title defense since Padraig Harrington in 2008 now closer to arithmetic than to expectation.
What tomorrow demands
Burns leads by two, and the number in front of him is history in more than one direction. A win would make him the fourth consecutive American to lift the Claret Jug, after Brian Harman, Xander Schauffele, and Scheffler, and the first streak of four American champions since the stretch from 2003 to 2006. It would also extend the championship's run of first-time winners to thirteen, unbroken since Phil Mickelson in 2013. And it would give a player 199 starts into his career the major that has eluded him.
What stands against him is his own record with a lead like this one, and a Sunday at an Open that has spent three days proving how low it will let the field go. Ryan Fox has already shown he can shoot 62 here. So has the man in front of him. The lead is two, the history is heavy, and Royal Birkdale has one more day to decide which way all of it falls.