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 the 18th green every July, engraved with the new champion’s name minutes after the final putt drops.
Its origin story is stranger than most fans know: the jug only exists because a 19-year-old was so dominant he won the original prize outright and kept it, forcing the championship to skip a year, whip-round for funds, and commission a replacement. And the jug the champion lifts today isn’t the original at all, that one was retired to a glass case nearly a century ago after organizers decided its travels were getting too risky.
With the 2026 Open at Royal Birkdale next week (July 16-19), here’s the full story. The chart below covers the essentials, the origin saga, the rules of custody, the engraving ritual, and the jug’s best legends. Take a look, then we’ll break it all down.
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A wine pitcher, officially “The Golf Champion Trophy”
Golf’s most storied prize is, functionally, tableware. The Claret Jug takes its everyday name from its shape, a Victorian silver pitcher of the kind used to serve claret (Bordeaux wine) in 19th-century clubhouses, and almost nobody uses its real one: “The Golf Champion Trophy,” commissioned in 1872 from Mackay Cunningham & Co. of Edinburgh for roughly £30. It confers golf’s oldest honorific, “The Champion Golfer of the Year,” announced in the same phrasing on the 18th green for a century and a half, and it predates every other major trophy in the sport by decades. The Open itself is older still, dating to 1860 at Prestwick, and the thirteen-year gap between the championship’s birth and its trophy’s is the whole story.
The teenager who broke the first trophy system
The Open’s original prize was the Challenge Belt, red Moroccan leather with a silver buckle, awarded under a fateful rule: win it three consecutive times and it’s yours forever. For eight years this was theoretical; then Young Tom Morris, the sport’s first prodigy, won 1868, 1869, and 1870, the last of those as a 19-year-old by a margin still legendary, and walked home with the belt permanently. With no trophy, the 1871 Open simply wasn’t played, the only gap in its early history that wasn’t a war. Three clubs (Prestwick, the R&A, and the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers) split the cost of a replacement, the jug was ordered for 1872, and history added its punchline: the jug wasn’t finished in time, the 1872 champion was Young Tom Morris again, four straight, and so the first name engraved on the Claret Jug belongs to a man who was never handed it. The first champion to actually receive the jug was Tom Kidd, in 1873.
One year of custody, and the world’s fastest engraving
The modern arrangement is a masterpiece of tradition management. The champion keeps the jug for one year, genuinely keeps it, unsupervised, which is why its legend file includes every beverage imaginable, airline overhead bins, and pub counters across several continents, then returns it before the next Open and retains a replica plus the gold medal. The jug handed over each July is itself the 1928 replica: decades of champion custody convinced the R&A to retire the 1872 original to the clubhouse at St Andrews, where it has stayed for nearly a century. And the presentation carries the sport’s fastest permanence: a lone engraver works by hand on-site, adding the champion’s name within minutes of the winning putt, so that by the time the trophy is lifted for photographs, its newest line of history is already cut. The next name goes on at Royal Birkdale on July 19, and our Open coverage will be live all week for it.
Final Word
The Claret Jug, explained: officially The Golf Champion Trophy, a £30 Edinburgh wine pitcher commissioned in 1872 because a teenager won the original Challenge Belt outright and forced the championship to skip a year; first engraved for the man who caused it all (Young Tom Morris) and first presented to someone else entirely (Tom Kidd, 1873); held by each Champion Golfer of the Year for exactly one year of famously unsupervised custody; engraved live within minutes of victory; and, since 1928, itself a replica while the original rests at the R&A. Golf’s oldest prize is a jug you could pour dinner from, which is precisely why it’s the best trophy in the sport.
For how other sports handle their silverware, see the Wimbledon trophies explained (with its own replica system and a mysterious pineapple) and the World Cup trophy (which winners don’t get to keep at all). Full Open Championship coverage, including the Birkdale guide and winners history, lands here this week.