The arc in professional sport bends towards a uniform blandness.Broadcast and commercial interest have begotten riches to which prospectors have rushed, armed with data analysis to find a lucrative edge. Their creed, communicated via spreadsheets, has led to a vast swathe of believers preaching the same, narrow message.Shot-efficiency statistics have turned modern basketball into a shoot-out from the three-point line, while a belief in expected-goals data has led football coaches to largely outlaw long-distance shooting. Better to blandly circulate the ball to win a set-piece from which you have a statistically better chance of scoring. Gaelic football became so convinced of the importance of derisked short-passing that the sport overhauled its rules. Hurling lags behind on the same road.Professional golf also suffers from uniformity, where the data shows that length off the tee trumps accuracy and all else, transforming most American events into driver-and-wedge contests. Players’ faith in technology and data is such that when Cameron Smith was asked for his favourite addition to Augusta National’s opulent new players’ building earlier this year, he picked the inclusion of a charging port for his Trackman device.The links courses of the Open Championship provide a blessed holiday from this statistical consensus. This is the event at which the shorter hitters have a chance. Of the 24 players to win at least one Major championship over the last decade, only five averaged a driving distance of less than 300 yards. Four of them – Brian Harman, Cameron Smith, Francesco Molinari, and Jordan Spieth – were winners of the Claret Jug. (Reigning US PGA champion Aaron Rai is the ultimate outlier.)This year’s edition of the Open at Royal Birkdale should be particularly hostile to rote learning. The sun has baked the fairways to something approximating concrete, so when players add the mighty kick from the surface to the changing wind directions, they will realise it is a week to rip up their learned terms of reference. Spieth has had five-irons roll out to 300 yards, while some players hitting into the wind and from the back tee on the 241-yard, par-three 15th have been unable to reach the green with a three-wood. Pádraig Harrington believes the 393-yard par-four 16th has become drivable, too.Jon Rahm plays from the rough on the 10th hole during practice for the Open championship at Royal Birkdale Golf Club near Southport, England. Photograph: Andy Buchanan/AFP via Getty Images Players cannot afford to reach automatically for a driver on all par-fours, however, with the fairways greatly narrowed by their firmness. The heat has withered some of the rough and made it perhaps less penal, but also more unpredictable. Harrington said he has never seen rough like this in all of his career. With so little grass to get between the ball and club head, fliers are more rare than normal and skewing players’ radars.“You are more likely to see people chip over the rough as it looks so heavy and they’ll hit it hard, and you will see a lot of people [from long distance] giving out they have come up short,” says Harrington. “It’s kind of crazy.”Multiple players have spoken this week of swapping out a wedge for another long iron, the clubs at risk of obsolescence on the PGA Tour. Trees have been removed to make the fifth hole a drivable, risk-reward par-four, but conditions will question players’ appetite to roll the dice on most of the other holes, too.“When you give professional golfers options and you can create a little bit of doubt in their minds in terms of ‘should I play this shot or that shot’, that’s when things start to get fun, especially for the viewer,” says Rory McIlroy. “Not so much for us.”Deprived of their usual bearings, the field will this week be playing escape-room golf. Forget about avoiding all trouble – focus on finding a way out of it.“We love to be prepared,” says Justin Rose. “I think, ultimately, at an Open Championship, you can’t perfect something. Play with creativity and play in the moment. Just play with a lot of flair in the moment. See a shot, bump and run. You might not have practised it, you might not have hit that shot for a long, long time, but if you see it, go with it.”The Open happily remains resistant to the gentrification of professional sport. Between the ropes at least.