J
ust as predictably as Old Tom Morris’s favourite Scotch Broth would be simmering on the family stove in the 1860s, so excitement is brewing in the build-up to the 150th anniversary Open championship at St Andrews. Even before the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship got under way last October, posters of past Open champions were on show in the window of the old Woollen Mill adjacent to the original Tom Morris Shop. One was devoted to the late and legendary Bobby Jones and bore the accompanying quote, “You are not a true golfer until you have won at St Andrews.” Another pictured Jack Nicklaus, whose message was along much the same unequivocal lines as that of the man he has always worshipped. “If,” said Nicklaus, “a golfer is going to be remembered, he must win the title at the Home of Golf.” Jones, for the record, won the 1927 Open and the 1930 Amateur over the Old Course, while Nicklaus bagged two Opens, in 1970 and 1978. Tiger Woods is another with two St Andrews’ Opens under his belt – and he could be the first to make it three, though it now seems unlikely that he will return to the game in time for this 2010 installment. The moment the Dunhill was finished, work started on the new tee at the seventeenth, the site for which was previously out of bounds. The adjustment will add thirty-five yards to the famous Road Hole, stretching it to 490 yards and
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rendering it every inch the treacherous affair it was in the days before modern equipment allowed a man to catch the green with his a wedge. Extraordinarily enough, the current change was first mooted by the late Sir Henry Cotton prior to the 1964 Open. “I would make a new tee just beyond the railway line on the other course [he was referring to the Eden Course which is now the practice range]. It would restore this drive to its former value.” Whatever Woods and the rest might say about the alteration, the locals will always be the sterner critics. The St Andrews Links Trust knows as much from experience… When, back in 2002, they started major excavations on the Road Hole Bunker without consulting the townsfolk, it was seen as an act of vandalism, with a former captain of the New Club advising the world’s media, “The town is in uproar.” Almost every bed for the 150th anniversary Open was booked before last year’s championship at Turnberry, with much the same applying to seats at the better restaurants. Again, International Sports Management, who have such as Ernie Els, Lee Westwood and Rory McIlroy on their books, made arrangements as long ago as 2005 to take over the famous Jigger Inn for the week. The inn, like the Old Course Hotel, stands behind the boundary wall at the 17th. The reason any Open at the Home of Golf adds up to so much of a pressure cauldron is
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largely down to the sense of intimacy in the town. People are often seemingly magically in the know on every score. Joyce Wethered, winner of the 1929 British Women’s Open, captured the situation to perfection when she talked of how town and course were one… “You meet the same people on the streets as on the fairways.” Everyone in the place is an expert on such diverse topics as where the top players were eating the night before and which bunkers they visited the previous day. It is perhaps because the bunkers have names that events in their sandy depths turn into stories which never go away. For example, none of the moderns has ever descended into the Road Hole Bunker without first having to cast out thoughts of Tommy Nakajima and what happened in his third round in 1978. The Japanese competitor had opened with scores of 70 and 71 and needed two fours for another 71 when, following two splendid shots to the heart of the 17th green, he putted into the deadly trap. With the pin less than 20 feet from the rim of the bunker and the green deceptively fast, he tried to splash out gently, only to leave his ball in the sand. He did the same again, again – and again. In the Dunhill Year Book, they made mention of how there was “a subdued if encouraging cheer” as he finally surfaced en route to holing out in nine. It is quite a thought that had he not suffered such a fate, Nakajima might well have beaten Yang Yong-eun by 31 years as the first Asian to win a major. Hell Bunker is another infamous stopping point. Nicklaus once took three to escape. In HKGOLFER.COM
contrast, a local bishop, circa 1850, once exited so surprisingly well with his niblick that his somewhat mischievous caddie advised, “When you die, you’d better tak’ your niblick wi’ you.” Colin Montgomerie maintains that it is possible to delay the championship’s pressures by having an early starting time on the first day: “You can sneak round before the tension and the atmosphere are in full swing.” That, though, presupposes that the player in question is not drawing attention to himself with his scoring, for it only takes a couple of birdies to go up on the leader-board for a man to remember, forcibly, precisely where he is and what he is about. John Daly, who won in 1990, will tell you that he felt the proverbial shivers up and down his spine from the moment he came round that turn in the A 91 which affords a first glimpse of the old grey town and its spires. He said it affected him even more deeply than the drive up Augusta’s Magnolia Lane. No-one would ever have thought of Daly and St Andrews as obvious soul-mates but that is precisely what they turned out to be. The locals took this often tortured soul under their wing from the moment they saw that he had a short-game which was at times in the same jaw-dropping league as his drives. The same applied with the cook in the Old Course Hotel. He satisfied the A merica n’s relatively harmless addiction of t h e m o m e nt – D a l y classified himself as a chocoholic - by providing the constant supply of chocolate puddings and cakes which fuelled the player’s unlikely triumph. You have to think that if there is one place in the world where Woods would find his comeback less t ha n i mpossibly stressful, it is St Andrews. Though the people would almost certainly go through the litany of his much-publicized transgressions and utter their disapproval, they would look further. No less t ha n t hey embraced Da ly, t hey would see into the soul of a man whose love of St Andrews and the Old Course has never been less than constant.
Open Time (clockwise from bottom): Stewart Cink will be hoping to emulate Padraig Harrington and Tiger Woods by winning back-to-back championships; the Road Hole Bunker, arguably the most famous hazard in golf; the Jigger Inn will be the base of McIlroy, Westwood and Els during Open week.
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