Dan Brown shot a 1-over 72 in the second round of The 152nd Open championship at Royal Troon. (Harry How/Getty Images)
Written by Cameron Morfit @CMorfitPGATOUR
TROON, Scotland – Kay Brown is taking none of it for granted.
Heck, she didn’t even book a place to stay beyond Thursday night.
“I’m superstitious,” she said.
Kay and her husband, Michael, of North Yorkshire, England, hoofed it around Royal Troon as their oldest son, Dan, carded a 1-over 72 on a windy Friday at The 152nd Open Championship. At 5-under 137, Brown, in his first major start, was tied with Justin Rose (68) and two behind Shane Lowry (69) going into the weekend.
And, yes, it’s Dan, not Daniel.
“Daniel is usually when I’m getting told off by my mom and dad,” he said.
Lowry and Rose, of course, are Ryder Cup stars and major winners.
Brown, conspicuously, has no sponsor logos on his sweater vest.
“Dan played the Challenge Tour in 2018 and ran out of money and didn’t finish the season,” Kay said. “I remember my mum funding a flight to Switzerland one time. He’s just found a way to make it work.”
Kay Brown is a mortgage broker. Her husband, Michael, farms cows and pigs. Their oldest son? Well, he gets by. Dan Brown had a cyst removed from his knee and missed seven weeks this year. His first-round tee time was so late (4:16 p.m. local time) that he relied on his caddie/brother, Ben, to read the greens with his feet in the dark.
And yet here is Dan Brown making a name for himself in the last major of the year even amid all the references to the Dan Brown who wrote the “Da Vinci Code.” Brown hasn’t read the book, nor has he seen the movie.
“I’m not a big book reader,” he said.
That’s OK, because he’s still a Cinderella story to rival even that of Troon Open winner Todd Hamilton in 2004.
Brown is No. 272 in the world, loves country music, and has been to America, which he loves, exactly once. He was planning to go again for this week’s Barracuda Championship in Lake Tahoe, but, well, fate had other plans. Brown made a 20-foot putt on the last hole to nab the last spot at the West Lancashire Final Qualifying.
He loves The Open, but until the last 48 hours, he’s loved it as a fan. When Lowry, his projected playing partner Saturday, won it in 2019, Brown was watching on TV. He always watches The Open on TV.
It seems not to have dawned on him to be overwhelmed by playing in it.
“He said he was nervous on the first hole yesterday,” said caddie/little brother, Ben, the 2023 English Men’s Amateur champion. “After that, though, he played pretty much flawlessly.”
Daniel Brown shoots Thursday 65 to take lead by one at The Open
Although Brown, the winner of one DP World Tour event, had missed the cut in six of his previous seven starts going into the Genesis Scottish Open (61st), he has been transformed at Troon. Despite being unknown even in the U.K., he’s beating Rory McIlroy and scads of others who not only flew here privately but brought their own chefs.
Here’s how Brown is rocking it:
After his first-round 65 on a tranquil evening staked him to the solo lead, he went back to his rental house in nearby Symington with his brother and three friends from North Yorkshire. They scarfed Domino’s pizza, soaked in the hot tub, and played cricket, for they are in the middle of a hotly contested, five-day test match. (Friday night would be Day 3.)
“I’m winning,” said Max Gardner, one of Brown’s friends from Romanby Golf Club, four hours southeast of Troon.
Two additional friends were persuaded to fly up from Birmingham after Round 1, including Tom Warbrick, a PGA teaching pro, who canceled his lesson sheet for Sunday.
“I was following it online,” Warbrick said, “and finished work, and our friend who’s here and real good friends with Dan said, ‘Get your ass up here. There’s room in the house.’”
It’s good that he did, for while it’s a safe bet many expected Brown to vanish off the board, he did no such thing. In the much tougher conditions Friday, he rebounded from a front-nine 38 with a 1-under 34 on the back.
“I was trying to kind of rein myself in a little bit after yesterday's score,” Brown said. “Going out there with it being a lot windier, knowing that 72, 73, 74 actually wasn't too bad.”
As for the prospect of contending or even winning, he wouldn’t go there.
“I'm not going to start getting ahead of myself and thinking that, oh, my God, I'm leading The Open or I'm second in The Open or whatever,” he said, no matter how improbable that would be.
Not long ago, Brown was relegated to 18-hole tournaments. He didn’t have anywhere to play during COVID-19 until a former DP World Tour player started something called the 2020 Pro Tour, a series of one-day outings in Yorkshire. Brown made enough money at those to keep going and won the DP World Tour’s ISPS HANDA World Invitational last year.
Almost no one ever recognizes him, and at his home club he loses about half the time to his little brother and caddie Ben, 19, who also tried to get through the West Lancashire Final Qualifying. Until this week, Dan Brown was in fact so little known that he was often mixed up with a completely different professional golfer named Daniel Brown. Yes, there are two of them; sometimes their Official World Golf Ranking points get mixed up, Kay said.
At the very least, the Troon tamer Dan Brown can look forward to perhaps leaving that confusion behind. Does he hope to land a few sponsors other than the Ping on his cap?
Brown smiled. “Potentially. We’ll see.”
All of which begged the question: How long does it take to iron on a logo?
