The British Open at St Andrews brings with it a reminder of the greatness of golf through the ages.
“Would you like to see a city given over,
Soul and body to a tyrannising game?
If you would there’s little need to be a rover,
For St Andrews is the abject city’s name.
“It is surely quite superfluous to mention,
To a person who has been here half-an-hour,
That golf is what engrosses the attention,
Of the people, with an all-absorbing power.
RF Murray, 1885
In St Andrews, the march of time and golfers goes hand in hand.
Throughout the year, the starter will call a fresh party of players to the tee every ten minutes – and send them on their way round a links course where the game has been played since the early 1400s.
It was in 1457 that what had started out as a “popular pastime” took hold to the point where King James II had to call a halt. His people were being drawn away from their archery practice and he was understandably worried about the defence of the realm. In golfing vernacular, play over the Old Course was suspended before starting up again in the 1500s when Archbishop Hamilton granted the citizens the right to play all games – including golf – over the links.
The Open Championship came to St Andrews for the first time in 1873 – too late, alas, for Old Tom Morris and Young Tom, the town’s most celebrated golfing sons. Between them, they had seized as many as eight of the first 12 Opens, all of them at Prestwick on Scotland’s West coast. Young Tom, when he won three times in a row, starting in 1868, captured the Championship Belt outright and prompted a one-year hiatus before winning the newly-minted Claret Jug.
There will be those who have triumphed at St Andrews without having any great depth of feeling for the venue, but many more will have found an almost divine inspiration in the old grey town and its heroes.
Bobby Jones playing St Andrews
That legendary amateur, Bobby Jones, who won a total of 13 amateur and professional Majors, was one of those for whom Sir Walter Raleigh’s quote, “Hatreds are the cinders of affection,” could not have rung more true.
When Jones came to the Home of Golf for the 1921 instalment of the Championship, he gave up at the 11th hole of his third round after failing to escape Hill Bunker. Before he left, he made his dislike of the Old Course abundantly clear.
Such was his remorse that, when he returned for the 1927 Open, he was armed with an attitude so positive that he holed putts from everywhere, including six of over 100 feet in the opening 68 which contributed to his runaway win. Three years later and this great American was back to win The Amateur Championship, at that stage the title he wanted above any other.
No Rolex timepiece can have attracted closer scrutiny than did Jones at the end of a final in which his rhythm had been well-nigh perfect as he defeated Roger Wethered by seven and six. O.B. Keeler, who devoted himself to recording Jones’ feats, said of the spectators who hoisted him aloft on the 12th green, “They apparently wanted to take the new champion apart to see what made him tick.”
For another example of what St Andrews can do for a man, Densmore Shute went from the nadir of his career to its zenith after attending a moving ceremony on the eve of the 1933 Open in which the visiting Americans laid wreaths on the graves of Old Tom and Young Tom. Having lost the Ryder Cup for his country the week before when he took three putts on Southport’s 18th green, Shute was seemingly in a state of grace as he won his Open title.
So as the starter calls for the first man to tee up in this 2010 Open, the 150th anniversary edition, the player concerned will feel nerves peculiar to the first tee on the Old Course. The player will likely check himself “You feel honoured to be there and, at the same time, you are acutely aware of the pressures to come,” said Colin Montgomerie, the 2010 Ryder Cup captain and a Rolex testimonee, the long-time patron of the Open. “You can’t help thinking of how all the greats in the game, from Tom Morris onwards, have hit down that famous fairway.”
Great scoring bursts will go up on the on-course leader-boards but, just as surely, they will spread through the town.
Nothing has changed from that day in 1929 when everyone was out on the course watching the final of the British Women’s Amateur Championship between America’s Glenna Collett and Britain’s Joyce Wethered.
The streets were deserted apart from a postman who had picked up on the fact that Wethered was five down while servicing the road leading to the links.
When finally he bumped into someone – a visitor heading for the cathedral – he felt compelled to pass on the gloomy news.
“She’s five doon,” he advised in his Scottish brogue.
The visitor looked at him blankly.
For just about the only time in his life, the postman had accosted someone in St Andrews to whom such tidings were utterly meaningless.
