Between Tiger Woods' withering put-down of Colin Montgomerie and Rory McIlroy’s press conference at which the subject rarely strayed from his crushing US Open disappointment, there’s been less spoken about what might unfold on the golf course over the next four days at Royal Troon than your average major championship week - if there is such a thing.
And that is not entirely unexpected on this somewhat underestimated test on the Open rota.
"There aren’t too many chances out there," said Shane Lowry, the last Irish winner of the Open in 2019 at Royal Portrush.
"If we get the wind that’s forecast, I think it will play very difficult. It’s a hard course to see your way around and I’ve been struggling a little bit (in practice) this week," he confessed.
"I feel that it’s the best bunkered course we play and it’s a great sign when there are two or three of you on the tee and no one knows what club to hit," he laughed.
Lowry was in relaxed form when he chatted with media this week and with good reason. He’s confident in the state of his game right now and yet also aware of not quite knowing what to expect each week.
"It’s been good this year – my best season on the PGA Tour so far (up to this point of the season). But golf’s a funny game. In the last two months I’ve had two 62’s and an 85 so you can never take anything for granted."
"The good times don’t last forever but neither do the bad times and you’ve just got to ride the wave when you’re playing well and I feel like I’m playing OK right now. I’m really happy where my game is at."
McIlroy braced himself for a press conference here with a high level of scrutiny about the state of his mind after he let slip a great chance to win the US Open just over a month ago. He had his answers well thought out and in some cases probably prepared.
"I’d say many people would be surprised to see how quickly I got over it," he said with clear sincerity at his Tuesday press conference.
"Yes, I was in a great winning position and should have won but it’s not the first time I’ve let one slip away and it’s probably not going to be the last. It was tough but it was just one tournament."
Part of his analysis of what went wrong in the closing stretch of three bogeys in the last four holes at Pinehurst was a realisation that his pre-shot routine had been getting too long.
"I was starting to take extra looks," he said.
That required some tidying up and after a lengthy chat with renowned sport psychologist Bob Rotella, he seems to have emerged with strength of character intact or at least restored.
"I know I am playing well. I know what shape my game is in. If I go and do my thing, then hopefully I’ll have an opportunity this week."
Troon only garnered its 'Royal’ appendage in 1978, more than a century after the first holes were laid out on this part of the Ayrshire coast.
It has staged nine Opens, with one-time champions outnumbering the truly great names on the Claret Jug here – the likes of Bobby Locke, Arnold Palmer and Tom Watson.
There’s a quiet respect for this out-and-back layout, which is heavily influenced by the ‘Duel in the Gloom’ at Troon in 2016.
Even Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson are on record in stating that their famed ‘Duel in the Sun’ at Turnberry in 1977 didn’t quite match the extraordinary golf played in the 2016 Championship which saw Henrik Stenson, at 40 years of age, defeat the then 46 year-old Phil Mickelson in a contest so epic that the rest of the field were playing for the minor places from halfway through the third round on Saturday.
Stenson’s final round 63 and Mickelson’s 65 in the final two-ball on the course on Sunday were not only the best two rounds of the final day, the winning total of 20 under par for the tall Swede equalled the major championship record and set a new bar for the Open.
Stenson ended up three clear of Mickelson after he birdied the 18th and was a whopping 14 shots clear of third placed J B Holmes.
153 players could not better six under par in 2016 so the Stenson-Mickelson duel was mesmerising in its quality and intensity as they separated from the field on Saturday and Sunday.
Wind is so often a major factor in seaside golf and the configuration of Royal Troon makes the direction of the breeze a critical element in chiselling out a score.
From holes 3-7, there is an abundance of birdie chances in the prevailing wind while the stretch from 10-13 can be something of a torture chamber facing into the elements, with the course boundary (a railway line) in close proximity all the way down the right-hand side of the course.
With firm and mostly elevated greens, hitting and holding the putting surfaces makes this no paradise for the ‘hit, stop and spin it back’ type player who revels in that kind of target golf.
Scrambling pars from awkward places is a premium skill requirement, most admirably demonstrated by Todd Hamilton’s inventive use of hybrid clubs around the greens in his 2004 triumph here over Ernie Els.
Justin Leonard was another short game wizard who cracked the ‘patience code’ required for scrambling his way to victory in 1997 over Jesper Parnevik and Darren Clarke.
Tom Watson was arguably the best pressure putter in the world when he won at Royal Troon in 1982 and as for the 1950 champion Bobby Locke, a four-time Claret Jug winner with a golden touch on the greens, he coined the phrase "drive for show, putt for dough" with good reason.
Unusually in this modern era of statistics, only the last two Opens have been monitored for DataGolf’s most critical eye and those numbers suggest that unlike most other forms of the game, links golf places less emphasis on accuracy or length off the tee.
Stenson was very choosy about his club choice in 2016, rarely using driver. While the previous two winners at Troon, Hamilton and Leonard, were, at best, medium-range hitters.
That, of course, does not rule out so-called bombers of the ball but with the heavily strategic bunkering and even lusher rough than 2016, finding the short grass and evading sand will be the premium strategy.
On statistics alone in the majors this year, the main men to watch are the three winners of the big pots in 2024.
World number one, Scottie Scheffler has the Masters and five other trophies to his name since January; Bryson De Chambeau has a runner-up in the PGA and a sixth place at the Masters to go with his US Open triumph while Xander Schauffele is on a very consistent run of 10 top-10s in 2024 on top of his record-breaking 21 under par success at Valhalla in the PGA Championship.
But Royal Troon, as a venue, has thrown up so many quirks of fate and offbeat storylines in its history of staging Opens that the prospect of another Brian Harmon-like performance from a leftfield contender is almost as likely as a winner from golf’s current brand of elite player.
So a player like Tom Kim, tied second in the Open last year and with two top-four finishes on the PGA Tour in the last couple of months, has the look of a contender who might be at the heart of the pointy-ended action on Sunday.
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