British Open 2013: Latest News and Updates Heading into Muirfield

Buckle your seat belts for what’s sure to be an exiting week at Muirfield.

Muirfield will play host to the Open Championship, the third major tournament of the PGA Tour season, for the 16th time in the course’s history. There have been five different champions in each of the last five years at the British Open, and it wouldn’t be surprising to see another new face raising the claret jug on Sunday afternoon.

There are some things you need to be aware of as the players continue to practice before Thursday’s opening round in Scotland. Here is everything you need to know leading up to the first day at Muirfield, including information on tee times, a star making his return to the links and a storm brewing at the course.

Tee Times Announced

The Open Championship released the tee times and groupings for the opening round of the third major tournament of the year, and they didn't disappoint. Two groups in particular really stand out, and that's because each of the golfers in both groups has a major championship on his resume.

Nick Faldo, Tom Watson and Fred Couples will tee off at 4 a.m. ET on Thursday. Faldo is a three-time Open Championship winner, and Watson has won the major five times. While Couples has never captured this specific tournament, he has the 1992 Masters to gloat about. None has won a major since 1996.

The other group of champions features the top golfer in the world, Tiger Woods. Woods will be playing alongside Graeme McDowell and Louis Oosthuizen, and they tee off at 9:45 a.m. ET. Tiger has 14 major titles. McDowell won the 2010 U.S. Open, and Oosthuizen won the Open Championship in 2010.

Tiger Healthy, Ready to Go

We haven’t seen Tiger on the links since a disastrous performance at the U.S. Open. At Merion Golf Club, Woods shot 13 over and finished in a tie for 32nd. He missed the last few weeks with a strained elbow, but Steve DiMeglio of USA Today reports that the elbow is healed and Tiger will be ready to go on Thursday.

Here’s what Woods had to say about his ailment:

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It’s fine. It feels good. I took a couple weeks off and that’s what I didn’t play and I started practicing last week. It felt fine.

That’s one of the reasons I let it heal, so I could go right back at it.

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Woods has been stuck on 14 career major victories for quite some time now. He hasn’t won a major tournament since the 2008 U.S. Open. Since, he’s finished in the top 10 on eight occasions but hasn’t been good enough to finish atop the leaderboard. He finished tied for fourth at the Masters earlier in the year.

Tiger has won the Open Championship three times in his career, but none of those wins have come at Muirfield—two at St. Andrews and one at Merseyside. DiMeglio writes that it’s been more than 10 years since Woods played at the course. At the 2002 Open Championship at Muirfield, he finished at even par and tied for 28th.

Storm Brewing at Muirfield

There’s trouble in paradise.

There aren’t many prominent golf courses in the world that only allow men to be members, but Muirfield is one of them. The course allows women to play and have access to the facilities, but they cannot become members, according to Steve Douglas of the Associated Press (h/t Yahoo! Sports).

Douglas reports that a pair of government members, Maria Miller and Hugh Robertson, declined invitations to this week’s major championship. This is what Peter Dawson, chief executive of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club—which runs the British Open—said back in April, per Douglas:

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I don’t deny my job would be made a lot easier if this issue didn’t exist; that’s self–evident. But one might choose to respect the wishes of members of these clubs, which are virtually unanimous in a place like St. Andrews, that the status quo works extremely well for them.

And to think the R&A might say to a club like Muirfield, ‘You’re not going to have the Open anymore unless you change your policy,’ is frankly a bullying position that we would never take.

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While Dawson does make some good points, it seems likely he’s going to get an earful on Wednesday when he holds a news conference.