Tommy Fleetwood's Open Championship Dream at Royal Birkdale

Two o’clock on a sunny Sunday afternoon, five hours or so to go in the 154th Open Championship, and here comes Tommy Fleetwood up the 1st fairway, five shots off the lead. A delay in one of the groups up ahead meant that Fleetwood has had to stand and wait 15 minutes at the tee box, which is maybe why, when he finally got up to play his opening shot, he pulled it left into the rough stuff behind a fairway bunker. It was the first time he’d missed that shot all week.

From there, Fleetwood had caught his second shot a little thinner than he wanted. He shrugged as he followed its flight, twisted his lips into a grimace as he watched the ball drop and stop about 20 metres short of where it needed to be. “Head up, kid!” someone cried out. “Head up!”

On Saturday night, Fleetwood said he had been imagining this Sunday at the Open just about as long as he can remember. “I’ve done it most days since I was seven years old, and it still hasn’t stopped,” he said. “That’s what life’s about, right? You dream about the biggest things possible and then you try and make it a reality.”

Now here it was at last, real as it gets. Sunday at Royal Birkdale, a clear blue sky over his head, parched brown grass beneath his feet, a shot at the Open Championship in front.

And his home crowd all around, every step of the way. “Walking up to every green, it’s like the most amazing ovation that you can imagine,” Fleetwood said. These aren’t strangers on the other side of the ropes, they’re friends, and friends of friends. They’re people he was at school with, used to play football with, people who worked with his dad, or used to get their hair cut by his mum, people who worked with him sweeping leaves at Southport & Ainsdale, who shared a drink with him in the clubhouse at Formby Hall.

“I still try to stay in my bubble,” Fleetwood said. “It just happens that there’s like thousands of people in my bubble with me that are willing me on.” However many times he pictured the moment in his head, he can’t ever have been standing over this putt in front of him on the 1st, 73ft from the front of the green to a pin set tucked into the very back corner.

But here it is. And now the ball is rolling and all of a sudden people are starting to shout out and the ball’s closing in and now even the marshals who are supposed to be controlling the crowd have turned around to watch and as it drops into the cup everyone’s up and screaming and leaping and Fleetwood is pumping his fists and the roar they made in that moment must have carried clean over the beach and out across the Irish Sea.

Four shots back became three shots back when Fleetwood drove the green and chipped his second shot on for a tap-in birdie at the 5th. By the time he made an 8ft putt for birdie on the 8th he was only two shots behind. He was eight under now, and in that moment everyone there on the course, and watching on TV, listening on the radio, felt that maybe, just maybe, he really was going to do it. Like Fleetwood said himself: “Sometimes dreams do come true, we watch it all the time.”

And sometimes they don’t.

At the 9th Fleetwood overhit his approach and it skittered off the green over the back up into the lee of the grandstand. Everyone watching winced. It got worse. His next shot was his ugliest yet. It blew 30ft past the hole, and this time, as hard as everyone around hoped for him, he wasn’t able to hole it. It was his first bogey, and it seemed to break the spell. He dropped a second shot at the 10th, when he blew his tee shot wide right, and a third at the 11th, where he took three putts. That meant he had dropped three shots in as many holes.

He would say later that the par-five 14th was the one that finished him. He was greenside with a chip for birdie, but it burned the hole and passed 3ft by.

“My dream might come true, it might not,” Fleetwood had said last week, “but you’ll never find out if yours will unless you chase it.” By the time he got to the 18th, just before six o’clock, the gallery had made peace with the idea that it wasn’t going to happen for him this year. Maybe he had too. He scored a birdie on 17, was an inch off holing his approach on 18. That left him seven under, three shots off the winning score, tied for fourth.

“There’s disappointment that I didn’t win when I was in a good position, but the atmosphere walking down 18, that was beyond anything I ever dreamed,” Fleetwood said. “As a kid, when you’re dreaming of having putts to win the Open, that’s one thing, but I could never imagine something like that ovation on 18. That was incredibly special.”