The Old Course at St Andrews is largely just known as “St Andrews”, certainly in the context of golf, which is certainly the context one might expect to find within the glossy pages of this crackerjack journal. Like hearing “Edna” in the wind, the Old Course is just what many people think of when they hear those deeply seductive words “St Andrews”.
They don’t typically think of the greater, rolling, dune-side mélange of seven courses which come under the banner of “St Andrews Links” and include the Old, New, Jubilee, Castle, Eden, Strathtyrum and Balgove courses. No, they do not.
Nor do they think of the University of St Andrews, which was founded in 1413 – sweet Byzantine Empire! That is 610 years ago! The Scots hadn’t even invented whisky! – and which awards promising local students the Robert T. Jones Scholarship for study in Emory University in Atlanta.
And nor may they even think of the “Auld Grey Toon” itself, as St Andrews is known, where in 1958, Robert T. “Bobby” Jones was awarded the title “Freeman of the Town”, which is like being able to do whatever you want, as the only other American so honoured, Benjamin Franklin, was wont to do.
Rather, people, particularly golfers, equate St Andrews with the storied, fabled, fabulous old golf course which was established in 1552 – sweet King Henry on horseback that’s a long time ago – and still holds up today as a test of the world’s great players.
And it’s just a bit special.
The Old Course at St Andrews is the home of the great game. It is the home of our game and all its manifold parts. It is where they invented clubs and balls, tees and greens. It is where they first put flags in holes to show where they were. It is where they invented etiquette. It is where they first yelled “Fore!” so that the new breed of cashed-up gadabouts and dandies, enjoying the relatively new activity known as “leisure time”, could warn servants known as “Fore caddies” that the golf ball was coming their way, and they had best find it or they would be whipped.
Lorena Ochoa of Mexico whipped the field in 2007 when she won the first Women’s Open Championship held at the Old Course. So did Stacy Lewis of the United States when she won the most recent Women’s Open at the Old Course in 2013.
The men’s Open Championship last visited “home” in 2022 for its 150th staging. (PHOTO: Getty Images)
After making birdie on the 17th, known as “The Road Hole”, you may have heard of it, and birdieing the short par-4 18th, known as “Tom Morris”, Lewis told reporters she loved the Old Course “more than any other links course I’ve played”.
“I think it’s more the history of it than anything; just knowing all the great champions who have played here. Golf was started here,” Lewis said, in the process confusing many Americans who had been led to believe the home of golf is Florida.
St Andrews, which can be encompassed by both the old, grey town and the local links which is so very much a part of it, is a long way, physically, culturally, spiritually from Florida. St Andrews, the town, is all grey, sandstone buildings and narrow, winding streets and lanes, and little pubs, and knick-knack shops selling tartan crap.
There is a “European”, “old” feel that’s appealing for visitors from gleaming, sun-bleached Australia. It is foreign and charming for those of us from the modern New World, with our chrome hubcaps and smoky sauce on barbecued meats and icy, fruity, craft beers, and so on.
Rather, in St Andrews, you can roll into the Jigger Inn that sits next to the Old Course Hotel on the other side of a really old stone wall on the Road Hole. And there you can sup upon a fine black stout or a pump-poured ale, and dip warm bread into a haddock chowder called a skink because … that’s what they call it. And you’ll just luxuriate. And pinch yourself you’re at the home of golf, drinking beer and supping fish soup.
Of course, it’s the golf course, the 471-year-old golf course, that you’ll have gone there to play, just as 144 women will be going there to contest the Women’s Open Championship, first staged in 1976 between five professionals for a prize pool of 500 pounds.
Now, one of the beauties of golf is that the very best exponents of the game, the great professionals, the elites, still know the same emotions as we the consumer, the mug punter, the handicapper-on-holiday, even if they’re better at masking it. And, thus, it is possible to use a single round by an 11-marker in May of 2011, to extrapolate upon the challenges awaiting the world’s best women.
Consider the first hole. It is metres from “the town”. It is part of the town. To your left is the 18th green and then the old, grey town. Like, right there. And then you pitch up onto that first tee – and it doesn’t matter if its your first time, 10th time, 52nd time and as defending champion – you’ll know the same thoughts: Sweet Ian Baker-Finch! This is the widest fairway I have ever seen.
Not all of the St Andrews Old Course is pretty. Parts of it are stunning. (PHOTO: Getty Images)
And you’ll think: to hook this OB, it’s borderline trick-shot territory. You would have to almost aim out there, and then hook it.
But then you pop that tee in, and perch your ball upon it, and waggle that three-wood, or hybrid or whatever implement will knock your ball out the maybe 200 metres required to give you a short iron in, and you will know: it’s the easiest tee shot in golf, and the hardest. There is OB right as well. There is a stream called a “burn” (pronounced by locals “b’r’rrr’n”) which weaves along front of the green. There is 471 years of history.
And, on the tee, there’s just you and your thoughts, and what feels like lots of people, including the ghost of Old Tom Morris, watching, observing, judging.
I was able to make contact (after genuinely fearing I would not) and squirreled a hybrid 180-straighty down the middle. It left 9-iron into a large green, which I pinched off the tight fescue in pleasing fashion. There followed two putts before I walked off the first at the Old Course at St Andrews, the Home of Golf, with the greatest par of my life.
A better one would follow.
The Old Course at St Andrews is by Old Tom Morris out of Mother Nature. The fairways look flat enough on TV but are rolling, bulbous – like a roiling green sea of aqua bumps frozen mid-swell. The fescue and bent grass is short-cut to 10 millimetres. The layout is open, undulating. Hard green moguls feed up to greens you can approach from anywhere you dare.
The ground feels hard and trampoline-like, and your golf ball can shoot off at interesting angles. There are “wee” burns and riveted, fiendish pot bunkers. There are massive double-greens and double fairways. The first and 18th fairways are so wide combined, they’re like the Straits of Hormuz.
On the Old Course’s eastern perimeter is West Sands Beach, which is all wet, grey sand whipped hard by salt-flecked rain.
Old Tom Morris used to swim in these waters, they say, and somehow lived to 86. Gary Player slept in the dunes before the 1955 Open Championship because he was backpacking on the cheap.
As Eddie Izzard would say: “There’s lumps of history just lying about.” Playing the Old Course is like re-enacting history, like those Civil War guys getting in character.
Deep bunkers abound, but nae bother. (PHOTO: Getty Images)
After my par on one, I had the hooks off the tee because it’s golf and random things happen, nobody can explain why. And yet, after each snappy-long draw, and each exclamation of “Woah” and variations thereof, as my Titleist traversed fairways and bounded across mounds, my caddie would assure me: “Nae, s’alright oot there. Y’right. Nae bother.”
Or words to that effect; it could be hard to tell. But he was right, and right I was. And though the angle to the flags wasn’t ideal, I could still whack it back thereabouts. And in a breeze that was mild with occasional flurries, and in wispy rain which spat harder in patches, I was fairly, verging on absolutely bloody delighted to scoot out in four-over 40.
On the 11th, I tasted my first “disaster”. Well, it was a triple-bogey, not the Hindenburg Disaster. On the multi-tiered par-3 green, I landed short and low. My putt up was too hot – my caddie had to jump over it – and went off the green. My putt back went back to whence it came. And there followed three putts. And it was bad.
Not as bad as Bobby Jones’ effort in 1921, however, when he couldn’t extract himself from Hill Bunker, the one in front of the green, and which was later called, unofficially, Bobby Jones’ Bunker. After several chops at the ball, Jones picked the ball up and tore up his scorecard.
While he continued playing that round, and the remaining ones, his self-disqualification was summed up by one local who famously said: “Master Bobby is just a boy, an ordinary boy at that.”
Five years later, Jones won the Open Championship at Royal Lytham, before turning up at the Old Course and winning the Open there, too. Like Bryson DeChambeau on a baby-kissing tour of the world, Jones endeared himself to the Scots by declaring that so precious was the old Claret Jug, it should stay in St Andrews in the care of the R&A.
Jones a few years on won the Amateur Championship at St Andrews in 1930, which made the locals like him so much that by 1958 he could do whatever he wanted in the town. St Andreans love golf and they loved old Bobby Jones for his skill and humility.
Love is given and reciprocated at St Andrews. Another adopted son, Jack Nicklaus, won two of his three Open Championships at the Old Course. He said “I fell in love with it the first day I played it. There is just no other golf course that is even remotely close.”
The Old Course in all its glory. (PHOTO: Getty Images)
Nicklaus may have been less fond of it after carding a 10 on the 14th hole following four shots in Hell Bunker. That said, he was 56 years old and not expected to win the Open Championship of 1995. In rather different circumstances, of course – he was competing in a major championship; I was on the drink on holiday – but I only took one shot to get out of Hell Bunker … by hitting it sideways.
Managing one’s excitement at playing St Andrews will be a challenge for each of the world’s great women’s players.
From the moment my brother and I woke up at 4:39am and looked out the floor-to-ceiling windows of our Old Course Hotel room, with the sun rising slowly over the sea and highlighting the contours, delivering early morning purples and mauves, and the promise of the Old Course … I loved it before I’d even met it.
For the rest of the back nine we played holes made famous by giants – Palmer, Thomson, Norman, Watson, Player. And Robert Allenby, whose caddie Michael “Sponge” Waite picked up his man’s golf bag and threw it over his head, forcing Allenby to carry it himself. Waite awaited Allenby on the 16th green. “I’m a professional,” Waite said. “And you can go fuck yourself.”
And so to the Road Hole. And nerves cranked up again on the tee as our caddies advised lines over letters in the sign for the hotel. I hit what felt like a slice into someone’s pint in the Jigger Inn, but was advised it was “perfect”, the man pronouncing the word with upwards of five ‘R’s.
I squirreled hybrid again, just short of the greenside bunker from which Tommy Nakajima hit so many shots in 1978 that locals renamed the hole “The Sands of Nakajima”. Better to channel the spirit of Doug Sanders, who made the up-and-down of his life here to lead Nicklaus by one in the 1970 Open Championship before three-putting the last green and heading to an 18-hole play-off.
Like Cameron Smith in 2022, I putted the ball to about 15 feet from goal before, like Smith, draining the greatest par of my life. Are we peers now, Smith and I? Not really. But that day? You bet. Cool thing about golf number 672.
On the 18th, where Nicklaus drove through the green in that 1970 play-off before getting up and down for birdie and winning the Open Championship, my brother hit driver into Rusacks Hotel before I knocked an 8-iron stiff. And, as I walked up to mark the ball, I had to touch my tartan visor as a dozen tourists applauded. I tapped in and wrote down three for an 81 (and 38 points, baby). Rory McIlroy shot 80 in 2010. Are we contemporaries? We are not. The day before, Rory had shot 63.
The Old Course in all its glory. (PHOTO: Getty Images)
But, I had made a birdie on 18 at the Old Course at St Andrews, as Nicklaus did in 1970, as Smith did in 2022, and as the champion golfer of 1984, Severiano Ballesteros, did, too.
Let’s see Seve again through the magic of television and latterly YouTube, the great man, on 18 in ’84, pumping his fist after tipping in a 15-foot birdie putt to win the Claret Jug. It is a moment of ecstasy frozen in time: Seve, the Grand Senor of Spain, in a navy-blue woolly jumper with a little white Slazenger cat on the breast, pretending to vigorously hand-milk a cow and throwing a punch to the four corners of the Old Course and to the world.
Ballesteros felt that St Andrews, town and course, was indivisible. He loved it all.
“The Road Hole, Hell Bunker, the museum, the hotel, the shops in the town where everybody is selling golf – all of it. I want to spend time with the people there. They want to see me, and I want to see them. It is an appreciation,” Ballesteros said.
“I love St Andrews as much as my house. It is like going back home. It is a piece of art; a unique, singular place.
“I really believe the Open should be there every year.”
