Dan Hicks, Kevin Kisner, Jim “Bones” Mackay
July 10, 2026
THE MODERATOR: Beginning next Thursday, July 16, NBC Sports will present 20+ hours of live championship coverage from Royal Birkdale across NBC, Peacock, and NBCSN, as well as feature groups, player focus, and all-access coverage streaming all day on Peacock. In addition, 2026 marks the 10th anniversary of NBC Sports’ first ever presentation of the Open Championship, which came in July 2016 at Royal Troon.
Open Championship Schedule (All Times ET)
| Date | Peacock/NBCSN | USA Network | NBC/Peacock |
| Thursday, July 16 | *1:30-4 a.m. | 4 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. | |
| Friday, July 17 | *1:30-4 a.m. | 4 a.m. – 3:30 p.m. | |
| Saturday, July 18 | 5 - 7 a.m. | 7 a.m. – 3 p.m. | |
| Sunday, July 19 | 4 - 7 a.m. | 7 a.m. – 2 p.m. |
Joining us on today’s call, play-by-play announcer Dan Hicks, who has been NBC Sports’ golf lead voice since 2000 and is in the 18th tower for the 10th time at The Open Championship and the second time at Royal Birkdale after calling Jordan Spieth’s win in 2017.
Continuing with our participants, we have analyst Kevin Kisner, who played in seven Open Championships, including 2017 at Birkdale. At the 2018 Open Championship in Carnoustie, he finished tied for second, his best result in a major.
Finally, we have course reporter Jim “Bones” Mackay, who caddied at The Open Championship 25 times, working for the winner in 2013.
With that, I’ll turn it over to Dan Hicks to begin opening comments.
DAN HICKS: I can’t believe it’s been 10 years already since we started doing these. It just kind of got me thinking, as you said it, our first one 10 years ago, 2016, was -- I mean, talk about getting one out of the gates.
I had never done an Open Championship before that one. Always heard about how great they were and was just -- we were ushered in with an all timer, as Bones knows, with Phil Mickelson and Henrik Stenson, which was two guys leaving everyone else in their dust. Some of the best golf I’ve ever seen, especially at that high level in a major championship.
So, we do that one, and then the next year is Birkdale, where we’re heading next week. That one was totally different but maybe just as memorable with the whole Spieth thing, which to this day, I just can’t believe what happened at the 13th. Everybody knows what happened.
Suffice it to say, 5-under in the last five holes, you don’t throw things out like this normally, but it was the best five-hole finish by a major champion in history. We’re talking back to 1860, and we’re talking all the other majors. That’s how crazy that was after what happened at 13, where he was able to take an unplayable over by the trucks in a surreal scene over there that I’ll never forget. Maybe John Wood still has PTSD over the whole thing, I don’t know, but it was just sensational stuff.
So, The Open proved to me right out of the gates that it’s special, and I’m hoping for another one at Birkdale.
Before I toss it over to Kis, the champions at Birkdale speak for themselves. If you look all the way back to Peter Thompson, who won there twice, and you go through the names, it’s a Hall of Fame who’s who from Arnold Palmer, Lee Trevino, my old partner Johnny Miller, Tom Watson, and on down the list to the recent Jordan Spieth. They’re eventually going to all be Hall of Famers, maybe Spieth, I don’t know. The golf course produces those kinds of champions. So, I think we’re going to be in line for another one. With that, I will send it over to my booth mate, Kis.
KEVIN KISNER: I appreciate it, Dan. You stole my thunder there. That was going to be my opening remark about the golf course and the winners that it produces. I think that’s a huge characteristic of the golf course and a testament to how good of a test it is for an Open Championship.
When you produce champions on the list that they’ve produced up to this point, it just shows you the golf course is a great test and proves that a worthy winner wins every time they go back to Royal Birkdale. I love it because it smacks you in the mouth on the 1st tee, one of the hardest shots in Open Championship history I’ve played, depending on wind conditions and the weather, can have you thinking about that 1st tee shot all night before you go to tee it up in the Open Championship.
I love the way it sits down beneath the dunes. I love that it’s less bounce, luck bounces as I call it, in the fairways. The balls, if you hit good drives, they stay in the fairway. If you get off the path, it can be difficult. I think it rewards really good golf shots, and I think the finish is really cool with two par-5s in the last four holes and 18 being one of the most demanding tee shots. I did notice they added some new bunkers on 18 to make it even more demanding.
With any Open Championship, I figure it all comes down to the weather. If we get great weather, you’ll see lots of great birdies. If we have typical Open Championship weather, guys will be struggling to shoot around par. With that, I’ll send it over to Bones.
JIM “BONES” MACKAY: Thank you, Kevin. It’s great to be on this call with everyone today. I’ll keep my comments brief.
I’m really looking forward to getting over there, very interested in seeing the changes in the course. I think it’s the most underrated golf course on The Open course rotation, just a wonderful test of golf.
I’m also interested to see how Scottie Scheffler rebounds next week given he’s going to miss the cut at the Scottish Open.
So many amazing storylines with what’s going on in the game today. Can’t wait to get over there. It should be a heck of a week.
Q. No one has won The Open in back-to-back years since 2008-2009. What chances do you give Scottie Scheffler to pull it off this year?
KEVIN KISNER: I was just going to say other than the week that we’re currently seeing, pretty much Scottie Scheffler is someone we see in the final few groups every week that we cover golf and even when we’re not covering golf. So, it would be hard to say he won’t have a really good shot at it with his track record and with his game.
I know he probably didn’t play his best this week and is going to miss the cut, but I’ll be shocked if we’re not talking about Scottie Scheffler on the weekend at Royal Birkdale.
JIM “BONES” MACKAY: I was just going to jump in and say relative to what Kevin said, I just think Scottie is definitively the best player in the world. I expect the fact that he did miss the cut this week to light something of a fuse that much more underneath him.
I think that he’ll obviously get one or two additional days of practice there at Royal Birkdale given the fact that he’ll head down there early, given what he said in talking to the press after his Friday round at the Genesis. So, I expect him to be that much more of a force.
Certainly he hasn’t been quite at the level of play that we saw him last year in terms of what he’s done this year, but he’s still Scottie Scheffler, and my gosh, the intestinal fortitude that guy has is second to none on the PGA TOUR, and I expect him to rebound in a big day next week.
DAN HICKS: I couldn’t agree more with Kis and Bones. I’ll just simply say we are still very much every week in the era of it starts and stops with Scottie Scheffler as far as the pre-championship favorite goes. I think missing a cut, like Bones says, fires a guy like that up.
Kis and I were talking about this earlier in the year. I don’t know if I’ve seen another player so involved in the process of it all, who loves the process of getting ready for a golf tournament every single time he tees it up.
Tiger is a lot like that obviously, but there’s something about Scheffler’s preparation that he just absolutely can’t get enough of. I think, speaking to Bones’ comments, he’s going to be fired up and ready to go, and he’ll be prepped up even more so if he doesn’t make the cut. Anyway, Scheffler’s the man still.
Q. The weather is always part of the story at The Open. I’m curious how much can changing conditions completely alter a player’s strategy.
KEVIN KISNER: I would say every day you’re forecasting or watching the forecast in preparation for how you’re going to handle your round, how you’re going to expect to play this course in relation to par and how you’re going to best get around it and where you can be aggressive, where you have to be more conservative based on wind direction and other conditions that change.
It can be very volatile over there. Like we saw with Phil Mickelson and Henrik Stenson. Those guys got beautiful weather in the afternoon. It was horrible in the morning. You never know what’s going to happen, but you’re obviously always planning, working around the conditions to best prepare yourself for what you think is going to be out there and how you’re going to attack the golf course.
JIM “BONES” MACKAY: The only thing I’d add to that is to Kevin’s point about Stenson and Mickelson in that amazing year, half the field that week was basically eliminated given the disparity of the weather and the tee times there Thursday and Friday.
Obviously, they played some amazing, amazing golf, I want to make sure I point that out, but I just remember half the field was absolutely crushed in terms of what they dealt with, and that’s a big part of what can potentially happen in an Open Championship.
There will be a lot of very nervous guys checking out the wind forecast early in the week there hoping they don’t have a similar situation in terms of having a lot to deal with when they ultimately tee it up.
Q. A question for Dan. In a week like next week where you guys do have many cameras, but not the full complement like you normally have, so you’re working off some world feed stuff as well, is the dialogue with you and Tommy normal? Is it different? Is it harder for you in your world to kind of get settled in? Or is that more a Tommy and truck issue and you guys in the booth are kind of similar to every other week?
DAN HICKS: That’s a good question because it changes seemingly pretty much every Open we do -- the mechanics of it, the technical stuff that goes on, the individual setups that I really can’t speak to totally confident because I haven’t been over there yet.
A lot of times I’ll show up at The Open, and I’ll go into Tommy’s office, and he’ll say here’s what’s happening this week. Here’s what we’re doing, and this is the little wrinkle we’re going to have to deal with. It’s usually nothing too much more than that.
Sometimes he has to wait for world feed shots to come when maybe he’s abandoned the world feed for a little bit. So, it’s kind of an interesting, probably more intricate dance at times for us because normally we’re controlling our own feeds, our own cameras and everything, but when you bring the world feed into play, it’s a different animal, and you’re kind of subjected to what they’re doing. At the same time, as the championship gets deeper into the weekend, we can pull more cameras that have been covering action from earlier holes and kind of bring them into a final ensemble of more of our coverage.
I’m assuming that’s kind of what it’s going to be like, but until we get there and kind of go down the rundown with Tommy Roy and our production people, I won’t know totally for sure. But it is a little different dance every Open for sure.
Q. For Kis, I’m just wondering, as a player -- rain, wind, cold -- what’s the worst Open condition to play in?
KEVIN KISNER: I would say, first of all, we all look to wind as our first biggest deterrent on the golf ball in flight. Everybody wants to know how hard the wind is, how hard it’s blowing. Everybody has their own system or percentages they use on that.
As far as playing, from a player’s standpoint, I think the cold is the most significant. The more clothes you put on, the harder it is to swing, the less power or swing speed you have. Once you get into an Open Championship where you combine those two, it’s ‘hold on for dear life’ most of the time.
You throw in a little rain, that always confuses. But if it’s going to rain and not blow, I’ll take that all day over sunshine and blowing 30.
Q. You were talking about golf courses that seem to deliver fabulous winners, like for instance Royal Birkdale with Peter Thompson and Lee Trevino and Arnold Palmer and Johnny Miller and on down the list. Then there are other golf courses where Jack Fleck beats Ben Hogan and Billy Casper beats Arnold Palmer. I’m talking about Olympic. What do you think it is about the golf course design where that seems to happen? Do you have any thoughts on that?
KEVIN KISNER: I think the golf course design is one of the most fair Open Championship tests. From what I talked about in my opening statement off the tee, where you don’t have any awkward bounces or little moguls that you play through in the fairways that can kick your ball, carom your ball off into a pot bunker or into the gorse. I think it’s very fair off the tee. There’s not a ton of blind shots that we see a lot of times in Open Championships.
It’s all kind of right there in front of you. Now, they’ve added some length this year that will make a couple more holes challenging, but from my viewpoint, when I think about Royal Birkdale, it’s ‘here’s our golf course. Come and get it.’ And we let the conditions and what we think is the proper test do all the talking.
JIM “BONES” MACKAY: I would just echo what Kevin said in that the great thing about Birkdale as opposed to some of the golf courses that we may see around the world is that you just can’t fake it there. There’s less luck involved, which is exactly what I think Kevin’s point was. I think that you hit it where you’re looking and you’re going to be rewarded for it ultimately.
I just think that, as I said in my opening statement, I think it’s the most underrated golf course on The Open rotation. You’re going to get a fair sense of what’s ultimately going to happen out there for you with the way the ball bounces on the fairways and into the greens.
Again, I just think it’s a spectacular golf course and produces winners, as we’ve talked about, as a result.
Q. What characteristics of Royal Birkdale do you think will have the biggest impact on who contends on Sunday? Also, do you think that this course plays well for anyone in particular?
KEVIN KISNER: When I think of Royal Birkdale, I don’t think of overall lengthy golf course, which is somewhat rare for a major, not really an Open Championship. There’s a lot of par-4s in the mid-400 range that we don’t see often in championships.
I don’t think it’s automatically get up there and bomb it, I think it’s more strategic. They have some very cool par-3s that you even have to play away from one side of the hole. That design makes me think about iron play position golf. I know they added some length to the first par-3, I think it’s (hole No.) 4, and some length on the back nine.
I think, if the fairways and conditions line up with what a normal Open Championship is, that length won’t be the top of it, but strategic game planning and iron control will be huge, especially if the wind picks up.
JIM “BONES” MACKAY: I would echo what Kevin said. I don’t think it lends itself to any one player in particular. Again, I think it’s an incredibly fair golf course, and we should expect to see a very worthy champion come the end of the week.
Again, as Kevin mentioned, it’s not overly long. I think that you get off into some kind of rhythm off the tee, and you’re going to be rewarded ultimately with playing iron shots from the short grass. I just think, again, it’s a spectacular golf course.
DAN HICKS: I do think it does lend itself to the ball strikers that Bones and Kis are talking about. The golf course does lend itself to -- you look at all the guys that won there, they were playing well. It wasn’t like, okay, Ian Baker Finch appeared out of nowhere. He was one of the top players in the world at that time. All the champions were in that mode.
Having said that, you can’t forget about other Opens where the Todd Hamiltons and some other guys have broken through. Maybe in a weird way Birkdale is due for one of these guys.
But that’s sports, and they’re playing for a Claret Jug, and that also has an enormous impact on some guys that I’m always fascinated by when I’m grilling Kis on who’s going to win and who can handle the nerves.
That, I think, is one of the best things our analysts can impart. They’ve been in the heat, and they know what it’s like. Some guys are built for that, and some guys aren’t. That’s what I think makes golf one of the greatest sports, if not the best sport in the world, to watch these guys coming down the back nine with a Claret Jug on the line or a U.S. Open trophy. It’s just great stuff.
