Muirfield

Muirfield

The Open at Muirfield in July 2013
Club information
Location in Scotland Show map of Scotland Location in East Lothian, Scotland Show map of East Lothian
Location	Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland
Established	1744 (1891)
Type	Private
Total holes	Golf:18
Events hosted	The Open Championship The Amateur Senior Open　Championship
Website	http://muirfield.org.uk
Designed by	Tom Morris Sr.
Par	71
Length	7,245 yards (6,625 m)
Course rating	73 [1]

Muirfield is a privately owned golf links which is the home of The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. Located in Gullane, East Lothian, Scotland, overlooking the Firth of Forth, Muirfield is one of the golf courses used in rotation for The Open Championship.

Muirfield has hosted The Open Championship sixteen times, most recently in 2013 when Phil Mickelson lifted the trophy. Other past winners at Muirfield include Ernie Els, Nick Faldo (twice), Tom Watson, Lee Trevino, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Henry Cotton, Alf Perry, Walter Hagen, Harry Vardon and Harold Hilton. Muirfield has also hosted The Amateur Championship (ten times), the Ryder Cup in 1973, the 1959 and 1979 Walker Cup, the 1952 and 1984 Curtis Cup, and many other tournaments including the Women’s British Open.

Muirfield has an unusual layout for a links course. Most links courses run along the coast and then back again leading to two sets of nine holes, the holes in each set facing roughly in the same direction. Muirfield, however, was among the first courses to depart from this arrangement and is arranged as two loops of nine holes, one clockwise, one anticlockwise.^[2] This means that assuming the wind direction remains the same throughout a round, virtually every hole on the course has a different apparent wind direction from the tee. No more than three consecutive holes follow the same direction at any stage. The course borders on Archerfield Wood, which features in "The Pavilion on the Links", the short story by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Jack Nicklaus won three Open Championships, the first at Muirfield in 1966, which completed the first of his three career grand slams. Nicklaus has described Muirfield as "the best golf course in Britain."^[3] He later developed a championship golf course and community in Dublin, Ohio, a suburb north of his hometown of Columbus. Opened in 1974, Nicklaus named it Muirfield Village; it has hosted his Memorial Tournament, a top invitational event on the PGA Tour since 1976.

Muirfield has halted two post-war attempts at the grand slam, denying the third major of the year to winners of the first two, the Masters and U.S. Open. Nicklaus was runner-up by a stroke in 1972 to Trevino, and Tiger Woods ran into gale-force winds and rain in the third round in 2002 and shot an 81; he rebounded with a 65 on Sunday to finish at even-par, six strokes out of the playoff in a tie for 28th place.