THE 154TH OPEN

July 16, 2026

Ryan Gerard

Mixed Zone

Q. How was it out there today?

RYAN GERARD: Yeah, it was hard. I think the golf course, it was kind of gettable my first five or six holes, I think, and once the wind switched to kind of north-northwest, which it'll be the rest of the day, that is going to make a big difference. I don't necessarily know if it's going to make it too much firmer or too much more difficult in terms of, like, actual playing conditions, but I think that's a tougher wind direction. The speed is picking up. Just the level of precision that you have to have on where you land your golf ball on certain spots for the unpredictable bounces, it just makes it so when you're hitting a golf shot into a certain area, it's a lot more difficult to land it in that area.

I think those guys out this afternoon are going to be playing proper golf.

Q. What would you say the hardest parts of playing on that ground when it's so burned out are?

RYAN GERARD: You know, I don't really think it's easy to launch it into the sky, especially with chip shots and stuff like that. It's hard to get launch. There's not a lot of friction between ball and ground, so it almost kind of comes out low and kind of skiddy. These greens are firm enough where you're not really able to check and rip shorter shots.

I at least am seeing the golf ball come out a lot lower from a trajectory standpoint, just on a stock shot. If you have something kind of tucked or somewhere you need to carry a bunker or get it to stop over a little ridge or something coming into a green, especially on pitch shots, chips around, you've got to really use the ground, use your imagination and be precise with where you want to land it because there's not a lot of room for error.

Q. When you're in the rough, it looks like it's so burned out; how does that change how you play shots like that?

RYAN GERARD: I think the rough isn't too bad. You can kind of get through it easily enough. But a lot of times the rough kind of comes out fluffy, maybe with not a lot of spin on it, but it comes out fluffy and there's not a lot of fliers so far, at least not that I've seen. So you can gauge it pretty well. But you're not being able to control the start line quite as well.

Q. Since that wasn't proper links turf last week, what did you learn in the three days before today?

RYAN GERARD: That's a great question. I think you learn that the ball wants to almost accelerate into some of these sand traps and these bunkers, and avoiding them at all costs seems to be very important. But the turf specifically, I felt really comfortable with my ball-striking. I went from hitting more stock high shots to hitting more kind of just standard -- we would call it a window lower, but it's more just like a -- you feel like you just put it a hair back in your stance and kind of hit a normal 7-iron and it comes out five, ten feet lower than a stock one. We found out probably on Monday that the consistency of the strike is a lot more repeatable when you put it a hair back in your stance and let the ball do what it wants to do.

Obviously when you have to hit it high, you have to hit it high. But like I was saying, there's not a lot of friction between the golf ball and the ground, especially like I was in a crosswalk where a million people have trampled it and you're kind of guessing how low and how hot it's going to come out at times.

The proper thing is just make sure you're hitting it with as good a contact as possible, and just whatever shot you're going to play, you really commit to it because if you get stuck between guessing whether it's going to come out one way or not and you try and judge between the two, that's when it's going to get up in the wind and end up in a bad spot.

Q. Did you find a bunker today?

RYAN GERARD: I did not.

Q. Off the tee, that often means just taking irons, right?

RYAN GERARD: Yeah.

Q. There are a lot of people talking about if an iron hits a downslope, whether it hits the fairway or doesn't, it's kind of a cautious approach?

RYAN GERARD: It can be. It can almost be -- like I know some people have talked about bomb and gouge this week, but you're almost taking away the worst bunker on the hole. A hole like 8, for example, there's a bunker on the corner on the left side that you really just can't be in. But the ones on the right side are okay. I wouldn't say they're great, but they're okay.

I saw the two guys in my group kind of lay back with iron, and we were just taking that one bunker out of play. If you hit a good shot, awesome. If it ends up just in the rough or ends up in the far bunker, it's okay. But it's more about taking the worst options out of play and understanding where the fescue might be a little lighter or there might be a hill that can kind of help your ball.

But a hole like 1, a hole like 10, you're really just blowing it over those cross bunkers unless the wind changes into a different direction, specifically because a shot from a light lie in the fescue from 60 yards is infinitely easier than a shot from 130 yards in the fairway with the firmness of the greens and the surrounds.

Q. That's as close as you can get on 10, 60 yards?

RYAN GERARD: I got it real close yesterday, but it flipped back in, too. Did Bryson drive the green?

Q. He was probably 20 yards to the right.

RYAN GERARD: But if it gets -- in the morning when it was blowing east, kind of northeast, you could probably get it all the way there. But if it was back into, I don't have 195 ball speed. It's going to be about 50, 60 yards short.

Q. This one is your first links; you didn't take a summer vacation we don't know about?

RYAN GERARD: I mean, I played Kilspindie when I was like 12, but it's been a while. It's a true links test. It was like a US Kids golf tournament, junior event, a long time ago.

Q. In Scotland?

RYAN GERARD: In Scotland. It was cool. It was awesome.

Q. Going back to what you said before, Bob MacIntyre was talking about basically on every hole, he understands what the terrible side is. Do you have that in your head, like kind of a map where it's like, this is a dead zone?

RYAN GERARD: I like to be positive, so I like to think of things as proper side and less proper side.

No, I think you understand inherently -- obviously some areas are dead. There's an X in your yardage book; you cannot hit it here.

Going back to, like, picking the angle, picking the shot shape off the tee, a lot of it just comes down to what number can cover a bunker, what number needs to stay short of a bunker and just making sure you're on that half of the fairway.

Q. Having played practice rounds and just understanding what the wind was going to be today, the strength of it, did you have in your mind what a good score was today?

RYAN GERARD: I thought anything under par, based on conditions that I saw on Monday and Tuesday, was going to be a good round this week. Yesterday I felt like it was a little easier when I got out there. Maybe the wind was less or something like that.

But I think if you can get around this course under par any given day, that's a solid round. The green complexes, especially the new ones, are fairly unforgiving, and 25-footers aren't easy to make on grass that is kind of -- it's cut tight, but it is fescue, and when the wind gets involved, it's a lot of guessing, educated guessing on putts with seeing how much the wind might help or hurt it.