30 minutes to Royal Birkdale from The Hesketh Arms at Rufford or 23 minutes from the Legh Arms, and a rugbyfootball pincer movement in between.
There’s a very particular kind of decision paralysis that sets in when The Open is being played thirty minutes up the road, and I don’t mean the golf. Royal Birkdale is hosting the 154th Open this week, which means for four days the finest links course in the north-west is sitting practically on my doorstep, close enough that I could, in theory, watch Rory McIlroy attempt to save par from a pot bunker in real life rather than on a screen. The alternative, twenty-three minutes in the other direction, is a pint at the Legh Arms with the golf on one screen and whatever else is happening on another. I have thought about this far more than a man my age should, and I have arrived, somewhat sheepishly, at “the Legh Arms,” on the grounds that Birkdale doesn’t do table service and I am no longer at an age where standing behind a rope for six hours strikes me as leisure; plus Mike and Julie are fantastic hosts.
The trouble is that this particular Saturday isn’t just golf. It’s Saturday the 18th, which means the Nations Championship’s Round 3 has picked this exact weekend to throw Fiji against Scotland at Murrayfield mid-afternoon, right in the middle of Open Saturday, before Argentina take on England in Santiago del Estero at an hour that translates, once you’ve done the maths from Argentine time, to roughly one o’clock on Sunday morning UK time; which by now feels less like a fixture and more like a recurring diagnosis. Add in the World Cup’s third-place play-off the same evening, and Sunday’s actual final at MetLife Stadium kicking off at 8pm, going head to head with the final round at Birkdale, and what I’m describing is not a weekend of sport so much as a weekend that has scheduled itself entirely without reference to human beings needing to sleep.
My WHOOP, as ever, has no idea any of this is coming, and I have started to feel a genuine, if slightly deranged, sympathy for it. It is about to be asked to process eighteen holes of tension-based golf-watching, ninety minutes of rugby at Murrayfield, a second rugby match arriving in the dead of night from Argentina, a third-place football match nobody asked for but everyone will watch anyway, and then, less than twenty-four hours later, an actual World Cup final. If Saturday the 4th was the day three sports launched at once, this is the weekend they all decide to finish at once, and I am, structurally, the venue for all of it.
I have, at least, done the geography. Legh Arms means I get the Open on the big screen with a pint of something local, close enough to nip home for the Murrayfield kick-off, back in time to have the football third-place match on low volume as a starter before the main event arrives. It is, I’ll admit, an itinerary that would concern a doctor. It would very much concern my WHOOP, if my WHOOP were capable of concern rather than simply producing a number and waiting.
Which brings me, while we’re on the subject of what people are wearing on their wrists, to WHOOP’s current colour chart, which I had a proper look at for the first time this week and found unexpectedly on-theme for the summer I’m having. There’s a Tide and a Petal that between them do a fair job of describing both the Mediterranean off Alcossebre and whatever’s left of my complexion by the third Alhambra. There’s a Dune, roughly the colour of a pint of White Witch held up to the light, and a Graphite that’s basically every cricket sky I watched from a deckchair this July. There is, extraordinarily, an official CR7 pack; Home in Portugal red with a green underside, Away in white with the same green trim , which means somewhere out there a man is watching the World Cup wearing the actual branded wristband of a player who, strictly speaking, isn’t even in this World Cup, which feels like the most WHOOP thing WHOOP has ever done.
And then there’s the athlete wall itself, which I went and had a proper look at, half expecting the usual suspects; Ronaldo, McIlroy, Sabalenka, Mahomes and found, tucked in among them, Virgil van Dijk, Liverpool’s own captain, listed as a “Global Football Star,” which is the first time all summer WHOOP has said something I agreed with unreservedly. Somewhere between Anfield and Alcossebre, apparently, we’re all wearing the same wristband for entirely different reasons.
What there isn’t, as far as I can find, is a straightforward Red and White for England; not for the rugby, not for the football, not for either of the two teams I’ll be shouting at this weekend. There’s a Fire, which is red-adjacent, and there’s an Ice, which is white-adjacent, and if I bought both and alternated I could probably talk myself into it being “England colours” in the same spirit that a can of Coke is “briefly refreshing.” The only genuinely official red-and-white pairing in the entire range belongs to Ronaldo, which means the closest I can get to dressing my wrist for England this weekend is wearing the sponsored band of a man playing for a different country entirely. WHOOP, it seems, is quietly daring me to buy a separate band for every fixture; rugby red, football white, golf evergreen, Alcossebre teal and at this rate I’m going to end up with more WHOOP bands than actual reasons to still be awake at midnight.
Which brings me to the one genuine question I have going into Saturday: will I see anyone at Birkdale wearing a WHOOP? Because unlike rugby, where the RPA relationship is official and visible, golf’s version of this has a proper poster boy in McIlroy, who turned up at Augusta this April wearing a green band to match the jacket he was chasing, having become a WHOOP investor only days before the tournament started. His numbers that week were the kind that make my own look like a cry for help; four straight green recoveries, a resting heart rate sitting in the high forties, and a heart rate that dropped rather than spiked as he stood over the winning putt, before finally soaring on the celebration itself. WHOOP, with what I can only assume was a straight face, publicly confirmed that his streak snapped the following morning with a recovery in single figures, which is the one part of his week I can say, with total confidence, I would have matched him on. Somewhere out on that links this weekend, a player walking eighteen holes in service of a Claret Jug will have exactly the same green, amber or red number on their wrist that I’ll be looking at from a pub garden twenty-three minutes away, for entirely different reasons and with entirely different consequences attached to it.
Sir Kevin Sinfield would, I suspect, call this a squad rotation issue. My WHOOP will simply call it Saturday, and then Sunday, and then, in the small hours between the two, the specific kind of night it has already had strong opinions about all summer. I intend to enjoy every minute of it regardless, and I intend to tell it so, out loud, to a wristband that will not answer, the way I always do.
Seniormash Reflections on Substack
