Only the champion at the Aberdeen Asset Management Scottish Open will claim an 11th-hour entry into the Open Championship at Muirfield after the R&A admitted they nearly played with five extra players last year.
The field at Royal Lytham and St Annes in 2012 was set to be 161 until scratchings and injuries reduced the number to the customary 156, but the R&A’s Peter Dawson admitted they had given themselves “something of a fright”.
The result is that late exemptions from qualifiying available at the penultimate tournaments on the European and PGA Tours the French Open and the Greenbrier have been removed.
Now only the winners of the Scottish Open and the John Deere Classic, the final events before the championship at Muirfield from July 11 to 13, will gain entry, if they are not already qualified by other means.
Previously any player finishing within the top five of the final events not already exempt like Scotland’s Scott Jamieson at Castle Stuart in 2011 gained a place in the Open.
“It’s always impossible to estimate with accuracy how many exempt players you will end up with as it depends on how many joint exemptions a player receives, but we feel a little safer with this number,” said Dawson.
“We were looking at 161 prior to the last Open and that gave us something of a fright. What we didn’t want to do was cut back the number of spots available at local final qualifying. If we’d done that, I think we would
have let down the thousands of people who enter the championship.
“Playing with a bigger field would have been difficult but, fortunately, we got away with it. It would have been a strain on getting finished but we’d have done it somehow.”
However, the organisers have cut the available exemptions form the last events on the two major tours, also from the Japanese Tour and cut the number from the European Tour’s Intrernational Qualifying event at Sunningdale from 10 to nine.
“If there are vacant spots, our criteria allows us to go into the world rankings then to fill the field and that’s what will happen if we are short of exempt players,” added Dawson.
The R&A chief executive didn’t think this would have any effect on the Scottish Open field.
“I don’t think players enter the Scottish Open with qualifying for the Open Championship directly in mind. It is a nice side benefit for sure but the Scottish Open is a very strong event in its own right.
“Some players use it to prepare for the Open Championship but I think players who go to the Scottish Open are concentrating on that, not the Open.”