Justin Rose, the highest-ranked English golfer, finished fourth at Royal Birkdale in 1998 as a 17-year-old amateur, and has not improved upon that in 14 subsequent starts here as a pro. Rose, the 2013 United States Open champion, mentioned the great expectations as a boulder-size impediment to victory, and he is hardly the first to venture down that booby-trapped path. As the tennis star Andy Murray experienced for years at Wimbledon, Britain comes together this time every summer to suffocate its own in the name of support.

Fleetwood, 26, has failed to make the cut in his three previous British Open appearances. He summarily dismissed the suggestion that he would be burdened by extra pressure this week playing in front of a hometown crowd.

“Obviously it’s going to be a different experience, for sure, something that I’ve never experienced before,” Fleetwood said. “But it will be great to have so many people out there rooting for you. It doesn’t happen all the time when you have that many people, and they all want you to do well. So I think it will be nice, and I’m sure it will make me smile.”

As he played a nine-hole practice round with the Scottish amateur Connor Syme on Monday, three days before the tournament’s start, Fleetwood’s parents walked outside the gallery ropes. They were approached by a steady stream of people offering warm wishes and free cups of cold ale. Sue Fleetwood could not place some of the faces who engaged her in conversation, but it did not matter. Anyone rooting for her son is a friend of hers.

Tommy Fleetwood has a smile that can cut through a gray English winter day, and long curly hair that beckons the eye, though his locks apparently are not for everybody. “He needs a haircut,” groused one man who saw Fleetwood shortly after he arrived at the first tee.

Sue Fleetwood, a wig maker and hairdresser who trimmed her son’s hair when he was a child, was not surprised.

“His hair used to be an obsession with people,” she said. “If he’d let me loose, I’d chop it off.”

But it’s not going to happen, she added. Fleetwood will not cut his hair, his mother said, because his apparel sponsor, Nike, “likes his hair to be long because it looks a little different.”