JUSTIN ROSE is recalling his chip into the hole at Royal Birkdale. Not that chip, you understand, but the one from a practice bunker before his third round. After a ripple of applause from the crowd, he drops another ball in the sand, and does the same again. This time there is laughter, not least from the young Englishman as he fishes into his pocket for a third ball. “By now, I’m 2-0 up and smiling already,” he says. “I step forward, take a swing, and for the third time in a row, it goes in. It was just spooky. I don’t think I’ve ever done that since.”

Much of that glorious week in 1998 would not be repeated. Never again has he finished as high as fourth in The Open Championship, which he did as a 17-year-old amateur then. Nor has he produced a 66 better than that with which he announced himself to the world on a windswept Friday when the average was nearly 75. And don’t expect another wedge like that which he holed on Sunday from 45 yards to cap the best display by a 17-year-old at The Open since Young Tom Morris won it in 1868.

When he makes an emotional return to Royal Birkdale this week, Rose will lack the freedom that was his biggest asset last time round. “I’d love to have that carefree attitude back,” he says. “I sometimes feel like the closer I am to that attitude, the better I perform. It’s amazing when you think about how close I came to winning. I was 17, and only missed out by two shots.”

Rose’s miracle was “in the DNA”, and his long battle since has been to protect that genetic purity from corrupting influences. “That’s the key to professional golf,” he says. “It is a completely different animal. It shouldn’t be, but it is. I wish we could just go out there and say, ‘What the hell, let’s just play’, but we all get wrapped up in trying too hard and thinking too much. And the better you are, the more pulls there are on your time. There are a lot more distractions.”

He says his best round was not his 66 at Birkdale, but his 67 at Chart Hills the following year, when his future was on the line at a windy qualifying school. “The way I look at it, Birkdale was a snapshot of my potential, and the rest has been hard work, trying to wire the brain so that it harnesses that natural ability. In some ways, it was a bit of a cheat last time, an amateur with nothing to lose, and suddenly you have all these people behind you. Everyone roots for the underdog. It was a unique feeling, a one-off. Now, if I win The Championship, I will have been a lot more aware of what I’m doing. I won’t be the darling of the crowd, which was a large part of why I played well last time. I was inspired by everybody.”

Only once a year does Rose have the chance to play for fun. The JR Challenge is an annual golf holiday with his mates in which the winner receives a mini replica of the Claret Jug. “I love it because I can wear my shorts and T-shirt, and not really care about how I play. It’s a weird feeling. I’m often quite jealous when I hear of business-men going up to play the likes of Pebble Beach and Cypress Point, and having a few bottles of fine wine in the evening. Will I still want to do that when I’m 50? Or will I have had enough by then?”

Rose has been through a lot in his short career. Soon after his day in the sun, he found himself alone, hitherto an amateur with the world on his side, now a professional with the weight of it on his shoulders. How he struggled to meet expectations, famously missing his first 21 cuts, waiting four years for his first title, and then losing his father, Ken, to leukaemia. He had to grow up fast, enduring another four-year absence from the winner’s circle, before emerging only 20 months ago to begin fulfilling his potential.

Since then, he has gone from strength to strength, winning Europe’s Order of Merit and rising to ninth in the world, but it represents the culmination of a brutal character examination. He knows he is lucky, but it hasn’t always felt that way. “I have to remind myself. You have to be able to almost take a step back, watch yourself walking down the fairway and think, ‘You know what, as a kid, this is what I dreamed of’. Being in the thick of it, that’s what you can’t comprehend when you are young. You can have a fantasy of it, but the reality of performing under all that pressure is something you can never understand until you are in it. You don’t have time to enjoy it because you are being tested to your limits.”

Rose is a bright young lad, but there are times when he wearies of the world at large. This is the only sit-down interview he has agreed to ahead of The Open. Influenced by his coach, Nick Bradley, who is a Buddhist, moments of solitude are a vital part of the daily routine, and his mobile phone is never touched until the evening. “It stresses me out trying to keep pace,” he admits.

Rose is shaped by the intensity of his experiences, during and after Birkdale. It was, he admits, too much too soon, but in the long run, he is stronger for it. “I learnt after Birkdale who my real friends were,” he says. “That period was very humbling. It taught me you have to give this game a lot of respect and never grow too big-headed. In fact, that’s probably a fault of mine to some extent. I don’t quite have the cockiness of others.”

The hard times have taught him to value success, which came easily at first, and then not at all for long stretches. When he was young, his father read him Rudyard Kipling’s If, little knowing his son would have such cause to reflect on its meaning. Rose tried to treat both impostors just the same, and suspects he has dealt rather better with the bad than the good. Even now, with seven professional wins, and last year’s Order of Merit, he is performing below his best. Not for the first time, he let slip a strong position in The Masters, and last month’s missed cut in the US Open again raised questions about his resolve in the big events. He has yet to win in America, and persistent back trouble has become a way of life.

But, as he tires of hearing, he is still young, with experience many would kill for. “The 10 years I have been through have given me everything, but there has been just about enough good to keep me on the sane side. If I take what I’ve learnt from those 10 years and apply it to the next 10 years, it could be incredibly exciting.”

He has prepared for this week by delving through cuttings and mementos that have been in storage since his father died and and his mother sold the family home. As well as the summer of 1998, there was the “song and dance” of 1995, when he made it through to final qualifying at the age of 14. “I’d just like to relive the journey a little because there is no doubt I have done some amazing things in golf.”

And if more are to come, maybe they’re meant for Royal Birkdale. “I’ve never been superstitious,” he says. “I’ve always believed in hard work, and making it happen, but maybe I should start believing in fate. If it was ever to be fate, it would be this year, wouldn’t it? You couldn’t script it any better.”