Andrew Kerth 
Tennis is the only major sport where the score goes 15, 30, 40, where zero is called “love,” where a tie at 40 is called “deuce,” and where nobody alive can tell you with certainty why. The scoring system is a 600-year-old inheritance from medieval France, so old that its original logic is genuinely lost, … Read more
If the Open Championship ends in a tie on Sunday, there’s no Monday round, no sudden-death coin flip, and no shootout at a single hole. The Open settles its ties with a format unique among golf’s majors: a four-hole aggregate playoff, played immediately, over a set stretch of the host course, lowest total score over … Read more
The winner of the 2025 Open Championship earned $3.1 million from a total purse of $17 million, numbers worth holding against the championship’s origin: the first Open, in 1860, paid its winner nothing at all. Not a reduced sum, nothing, the champion received a red leather belt to hold for a year, and when modest … Read more
Golf’s oldest championship has a naming problem that flares up every July: is it “The Open,” “The Open Championship,” or “the British Open”? The organizers are emphatic, it is The Open Championship, “The Open” for short, and the definite article is doing real work: this was the first, the original, the one all other “opens” … Read more
Every July, golf broadcasts fill with a word that most casual fans nod along to without ever quite defining: links. The Open Championship is played exclusively on links courses, it’s a requirement, not a preference, and the word describes something far more specific than “a course near the ocean.” True linksland is a particular kind … Read more
Wimbledon employs a hawk. His name is Rufus, he’s a Harris’s hawk, he reports for work before dawn during the Championships, he carries his own security accreditation, and his job title, printed on the pass, is “Bird Scarer.” Every morning before the gates open, Rufus flies patrol over Centre Court and the grounds to convince … Read more
Wimbledon employs a hawk. His name is Rufus, he’s a Harris’s hawk, he reports for work before dawn during the Championships, he carries his own security accreditation, and his job title, printed on the pass, is “Bird Scarer.” Every morning before the gates open, Rufus flies patrol over Centre Court and the grounds to convince … Read more
The trophy handed to the winner of The Open Championship isn’t a cup, a bowl, or a shield, it’s a wine pitcher. The Claret Jug, officially “The Golf Champion Trophy,” is the oldest prize in major championship golf and one of the oldest in all of sports, first awarded in 1873 and still presented on … Read more
The most Wimbledon singles titles ever won belongs, on the women’s side, to Martina Navratilova, whose nine championships include a run of six straight (1982-87) that remains the most sustained ownership of one major in the Open Era. The men’s record is Roger Federer’s eight, a summit that suddenly matters again this fortnight, because Novak … Read more
For 141 years, a Wimbledon match could theoretically last forever, and in 2010, one nearly did. Final sets at the Championships were played to a two-game advantage with no tiebreak of any kind, which is how John Isner and Nicolas Mahut produced the most famous scoreline in tennis: 70-68 in the fifth, eleven hours and … Read more