WHAT ACTUALLY MAKES A LINKS COURSE DIFFERENT, AND WHY IT MATTERS FOR THE OPEN

Published: 15/07/2026 | By: Alex Courbat

Watch any hour of Open coverage and you'll hear the word links used constantly, usually to explain why a shot that would sit down obediently on American television every other week of the year has just bounced sideways into a gorse bush. It gets used loosely, sometimes as a stand in for any course near the coast, but a true links course is a very specific thing, and understanding what separates it from a parkland or a desert course explains most of what makes the Open unlike the other three majors.

The word links actually comes from the old Scots term for the sandy, undulating ground that links, or joins, the coastline to the more fertile farmland further inland. This land was historically useless for farming, too sandy and exposed for crops, which is exactly why golf ended up being played on it in the first place.

Nobody designed the earliest links courses in the way we think of course architecture now. The ground was shaped by wind and sea over thousands of years, and early golfers simply found holes within it, working with dunes, natural hollows and firm, fast turf rather than building around them.

That natural origin is what still defines a links course today. The turf is typically fescue and bent grass, growing on sandy soil that drains fast, which means the ground plays firm and fast even after rain, very different to the softer, more absorbent turf of an American parkland course. Fairways tend to be wider than inland golf but far less forgiving once you're off them, since the rough is usually thick native grass, gorse or scrub rather than the manicured cut you get elsewhere. Bunkers on a links course are often deep, revetted pits cut into the faces of dunes, built to punish rather than simply collect, and greens tend to be smaller and firmer, designed to be run onto with a low chasing shot rather than flown in high and stopped with spin.

Wind is the other defining feature, and arguably the biggest one. Most links courses sit exposed and close to the coast, which means players are dealing with constantly shifting conditions that can turn a course from gentle to brutal in the space of a few hours. This is why you'll often hear commentators talk about the need to flight the ball low and use the ground as part of the shot, bump and run approaches that would look strange on a soft American parkland green but are essential on turf this firm.

Parkland courses, by contrast, are the more familiar setup for most casual golfers. They're typically inland, built through trees and grass rather than dunes, with softer, greener turf that holds a ball where it lands rather than bouncing it forward. Fairways are usually more clearly defined and rough is more uniform. Desert courses, common across the southern United States and the Middle East, go the other way entirely, built on arid ground where irrigation creates a strip of green fairway surrounded by sand and native scrub, closer in feel to a links in terms of punishing wayward shots but without the same weather volatility or turf firmness.

None of the other three majors are played on true links courses. The Masters is parkland golf at its most manicured, the US Open rotates between tough, tree lined parkland and the occasional exception, and the PGA Championship mostly follows suit. That's part of why the Open feels so different to watch even for viewers who don't follow golf closely the rest of the year. It's the one major where the ground itself is as much of an opponent as the course design, where a perfectly struck shot can still end up in trouble because of a bounce nobody could have predicted, and where the players who succeed tend to be the ones most comfortable improvising rather than simply executing a plan.

That unpredictability, as much as the history or the trophy, is a big part of why the Open keeps pulling in an audience well beyond golf's usual crowd.