Cameron Smith Won a British Open. He’s Glad He Has Mostly Forgotten How.

It is feasible that one among final July’s prospects on the Dunvegan Hotel, which fancies itself solely a 9-iron away from the Old Course, remembers extra of Cameron Smith’s British Open than he does.

It wouldn’t take a lot, as a result of Smith just lately recalled roughly this concerning the Sunday that left him a significant match champion: teeing off, lacking a putt on the ninth gap, studying he had seized the lead, then ending to “the feeling of not really joy, but the feeling of relief.”

He considers this, a reminiscence largely unburdened by brilliance or blunder, a power.

“That’s one of my greatest assets: hitting a golf shot and forgetting about it,” Smith stated in an interview. He has mates, as each skilled golfer does, who can “remember every single shot from every single tournament they’ve played in.”

“But that’s something,” he continued, “I’ve never been able to do.”

He is the one who has spent the final yr filling the Open winner’s claret jug with beer — Australia’s XXXX Gold, he concluded, tastes finest — and passing it round.

Now comes his first main title protection, which is able to start on Thursday at Royal Liverpool, the English course that’s the website of the 151st Open.

Assessing Smith’s yr to date is an train in choose-your-own-adventure evaluation. The Masters Tournament, the place he had completed within the prime 10 for 3 consecutive years, yielded a letdown in April, when he tied for thirty fourth on the solely main match the place he has by no means did not make the weekend.

But Smith’s May outing at Oak Hill was his finest P.G.A. Championship efficiency of his profession (a tie for ninth), and after lacking three U.S. Open cuts in 5 years, he left Los Angeles with a fourth-place end. Less than two weeks in the past, he received a LIV Golf match close to London, his second particular person victory since he joined the Saudi-backed circuit final summer season. The occasion was, maybe, distinctive preparation for the taunts and terrors of Royal Liverpool, even for a previous Open champion.

“The wind is very different, I feel like, in England and Scotland,” Marc Leishman, one among Smith’s LIV teammates, noticed this month. “It’s a lot heavier. Getting used to that is pretty important, taking spin off the ball. Cam is very good at that time, and throw his wedges and putting on top of that, and he’s a pretty formidable opponent.”

Smith’s droop — a relative time period — on the yr’s begin in all probability had its origins in a vacation break that was the longest of the 29-year-old’s profession. He had received the Australian P.G.A. Championship, missed the lower on the Australian Open and was desperately in want of a reboot after years of pandemic tumult and a rush into the worldwide highlight. Even now, he says, he’s an expert athlete who would “prefer that people don’t know me.” If he had his approach, he’d in all probability be out fishing.

And so although the hiatus was a wonderful, very important salve for his thoughts, it was, no less than within the interim, a hex on his golf sport. Once he returned to competitors, the shortcomings of his preparation have been clear. He had middling finishes in two of the primary three LIV occasions of the yr, and he missed the lower at a match in Saudi Arabia.

He nonetheless most well-liked to apply laying aside a mirror in his Florida workplace (there, as an alternative of on a inexperienced, “because I’m lazy”) however accepted, nevertheless begrudgingly, that his driver was in want of larger work. By the time he arrived in Los Angeles for the U.S. Open in June, he was eagerly embracing an old-school strategy: Don’t fear an excessive amount of about distance, attempt to land the ball within the fairway, have an opportunity for birdie.

He completed fiftieth in driving distance however had 19 birdies, tied for second within the subject and equal to the winner, Wyndham Clark. At Augusta, he had been thirty first in driving distance and tied for thirty seventh in birdies, with 13.

“I feel like I worked on that quite hard, and the golf has been really good, and then it was just a case of letting go and letting stuff happen,” he stated of his resurgence. “And for sure, the last couple of majors it’s started to feel really good.”

But Smith’s at-ease sorcery, so plain to anybody who goes on-line and spends a minute watching him conquer the Road Hole on the Sunday he received the claret jug, flows largely from his equilibrium. He attracts it from his mom, he thinks, maybe not shocking for a participant whose early PGA Tour years have been marked by homesickness.

The pandemic didn’t assist. When he received the tour’s Players Championship in March 2022, his mom and sister have been at T.P.C. Sawgrass, having simply reunited with Smith after greater than two years of border restrictions. Six months later, he was ranked second on the planet and was one among LIV’s most hyped signings.

But he has to date managed to keep away from being seen like fairly a lot of a villain, even earlier than final month’s shock announcement of a possible détente between the warring circuits. He has spent solely a lot time airing grievances in public. He has acknowledged shortcomings in LIV’s fields in comparison with the PGA Tour’s. When his world rating tumbled, which was inevitable since LIV tournaments haven’t been accredited, he didn’t lash out as a result of his shot at reaching No. 1 was fading.

“I made my bed, and I’m happy to sleep in it,” he stated in an interview in March. Now, with a tentative peace maybe taking maintain in skilled golf, he’s questioning whether or not he can have a shot, in any case.

“Don’t get me wrong: I want to beat everyone else,” he stated. “But there’s no reason why you can’t do it with a smile on your face.”

He will face 155 different males this week, all of them clamoring to disclaim him one other yr with the claret jug. Now ranked seventh on the planet, and making ready for a subject that features greater than a dozen fellow Open winners, he has a backup plan for his drinks.

“The Aussie P.G.A. Trophy is pretty cool,” he stated. “You can definitely fit a lot more beer in that one.”

Still, he stated this week, his eyes welled with tears when he returned the claret jug to the Open’s organizers.

“I wasn’t, like, not letting it go,” he stated at a news convention on Monday. “But it was just a bit of a moment that I guess you guess you don’t think about, and then all of a sudden it’s there, and, yeah, you want it back.”