THE 154TH OPEN

July 16, 2026

Alex Smalley

Mixed Zone

Q. Alex, nice round. Not how you wanted to finish obviously.

ALEX SMALLEY: It's not?

Q. I'm guessing. Not trying to mind read. Tell me about your day. Tell me about what you did well and the conditions and everything like that.

ALEX SMALLEY: I felt like I gave myself a lot of birdie looks. I had a pretty decent plan off the tee coming into this week that I thought might suit me well, it might leave myself some longer shots into the greens, but with it as dry and firm as it is, you have to play for the roll, especially on the downwind holes.

So I hit a number of irons off the tees. Didn't have a whole lot of stress until the last hole obviously. Had a lot of birdie looks, didn't have a whole lot of chips, which was good. Made a number of putts early, which was nice to see, and just tried to go from there.

Q. Talking about that strategy, Stewart Cink was in here basically saying it is the play to kind of take irons off the tee, but there's some danger if you hit the rough, that all of a sudden it doesn't roll.

ALEX SMALLEY: Right.

Q. It's like you do have to hit it, but really playing for the roll seems like the smartest thing to you?

ALEX SMALLEY: For me at the least. You can hit driver around here. No one's telling you you can't, but you can find a world of hurt pretty quickly.

I think in the practice round days the wind was in a direction where most of the holes were either straight down or straight into, and then at least for me the last five or six holes, there were a lot of crosswinds. When it switches out of almost due north, there's a lot of crosswinds on the holes, which makes it difficult because you have to first figure out if you're going to hold it into the wind or let it ride it. Then obviously what you hit off the tee then kind of determines that kind of shot.

So there's a lot that goes into it. It's not as simple as some might think it is. There's certainly a lot of thought when the ball is rolling out this far.

Q. How familiar are you with links golf?

ALEX SMALLEY: I played the Walker Cup at Hoylake in 2019 at Liverpool. Before then, the team actually, we came out here and played here for a day. So I've been on property. I think it was before the changes. I really don't remember a whole lot of the holes, to be honest with you.

So I played here before. I played Royal Liverpool. I played the Scottish Open four times. I know some people don't really consider that a links course, but it's a lot closer than anything we're going to get in the states. So fairly familiar with it, but this is my first Open.

Q. What went wrong on 18?

ALEX SMALLEY: I just hit it right, and it got up to where the ball was supposed to be and was told it hit a spectator fence and kicked another 15 yards right out of bounds. All three of us in our group actually hit it over there, and mine just got an unlucky break. You can look at it as if I hit it straight, there wouldn't have been a fence for it to kick out of bounds.

I hit a really good second tee shot, put it in the fairway, and then hit a great 5-iron from 211 to 12 or 13 feet and just didn't make the putt. So poor tee shot, poor break. Sometimes that's how it goes.

Q. Bob MacIntyre was saying that he's taking a similar strategy of playing short, and on the longer holes, if I don't reach the green or whatever, I'm just trusting myself to scramble. Is that kind of like the risk/reward payoff where if you play conservative, there may be times where you have long shots into the greens and maybe aren't putting for a birdie?

ALEX SMALLEY: I played with Padraig Harrington last week in Scotland. He gave me some insight and told me there might be some complaining from players this week because you might have a lot of 180- to 220-yard approach shots if you want to take all the bunkers out of play, but honestly I didn't really feel like that was the case for me. 18 is a hard hole. You just have to hit a good shot. There's bunkers everywhere.

On 13 today I hit 3-iron off the tee, and the pin was up front, and I had 210, which is a 5-iron. I think I hit -- yeah, I hit 5-iron on 13. Other than that, I didn't really feel like I had too many shots where I was really hitting 6-, 7-, 5-iron into greens. I had a number of 9-irons, a number of wedges. Even if you do lay back, it's not like you're hitting 4- or 5-iron into the green on every hole.

There's some hole locations where you're not really trying to hit it at the hole. You're trying to put it 20 feet left or right of it and just putt over to it. So it can be difficult to get the ball close to the hole, especially with how firm it is. The ball just won't stop rolling.

I actually thought the greens were relatively soft. I found more ball marks today than I did in the first three days combined.

Q. Why do you think that is? Because it didn't rain.

ALEX SMALLEY: It didn't. I'm not really sure. I don't know if my ball just hit in spots that was a little greener on the greens and I could just see the pitch marks. I'm not really sure because we get e-mails every morning that tell us the firmness of the greens a certain measurement, and the firmness has been the same the last three days, I think.

I don't anticipate it's going to get any softer, though.

Q. Anything you've been working on since PGA to try to get a little better?

ALEX SMALLEY: Not really. I'm trying to do the same thing. Obviously the last three or four weeks haven't been as good as the previous five or six.

Q. What's been going on?

ALEX SMALLEY: I typically play a draw, and there have been times when my ball would start right and maybe turn a little right and then some would still draw. So I kind of had a problem of trying to figure out where to aim because I didn't know which way it was going to be turning.

Then on the greens, I felt like I was hitting a lot of good putts, but they were missing by less than an inch a lot of the times. There's nothing you can really do when they're that close. Just felt like I wasn't getting a whole lot of great breaks, putts weren't going in, wasn't hitting it the best. It just kind of adds up.

My warmup today was really good. Kind of found a little key on the driving range, and I felt really comfortable hitting the ball, and I felt like before I even teed off, it was going to be a pretty good day.