Saturday, July 22, 2000
This Old Course has a feeling
of history
By Rick Morrissey
Chicago Tribune
(KRT)
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland-I asked the man sitting
next to me on the train ride from Edinburgh toward St. Andrews
what he thought of the Old Course, where the history books say
golf began.
He was a 6-handicap and the club secretary
at a private course about 20 miles away.
"Are yeh goin' to quote me by name?'"
he said.
What is this, Watergate?
He looked around, then leaned forward.
"Overrated," he said in a whisper.
I would expect this sort of thing from an
American. I would expect a soft, spoiled country-clubber to say
that the golf might be royal and ancient at St. Andrews but that
it's about as rewarding as a day at a municipal course in South
Dakota. I wouldn't expect this from a Scottish golfer, not with
the first British Open of the 2000s about to be played.
I wanted to put my hands over my ears and
hum loudly. There is, too, a Santa Claus. But he continued: The
Old Course is for the poets and not the realists.
I am happy to report that all I saw was
poetry upon arrival at St. Andrews. If you can deprogram yourself
to believe that a golf course doesn't have to feature fairways
you can eat off of and greens that can be read as easily as a
bad liar, then you'd love this place.
If you believe that imagination and creativity
are just as important as the ability to hit a ball 300 yards,
then you'd love the Old Course.
If you believe that wind and rain are as
much a part of golf as trees, then you'd love the constant threat
of a gale off St. Andrews Bay. The old saying here is that "if
there's nae wind and nae rain, it's nae golf."
Noted sourpuss Scott Hoch has called this
place "a mess." He is an American who has been weaned
on perfect conditions and sour milk.
"It's awesome," said Dennis Paulson,
a pro from San Gabriel, Calif. "It frustrates me a bunch-and
I don't want you to take this as a knock on Scott Hoch-but I can't
imagine anybody who really appreciates the game of golf coming
here and not appreciating this golf tournament."
If the grade of a ski slope could somehow
be leveled to leave only the moguls, this is how it would look,
an unending spread of undulations. The greens are a churning,
roiling sea of nasty breaks. Some of the pot bunkers have 6-foot
vertical faces that are pure evil, not to mention impossible to
exit-ask Jack Nicklaus. Some are no wider than a Yugo. There is
angry heather, unforgiving hay and wicked gorse. Gorse is shrubbery.
St. Andrews has a gaggle of gorse.
The argument is that if you can separate
the history (read: romanticism) from the place, then you would
be left with a public course with mats for tees.
But that's just it. You can't separate them.
The course first played host to a British
Open in 1873. That's the recent history. The ancient history starts
in the 1400s, when shepherds began hitting rocks with sticks here.
The Old Course slowly evolved from the same tract of land. The
earliest surviving written reference to golf is from 1457, when
King James II of Scotland banned golf and football because they
were keeping his subjects from archery practice. It's hard to
defeat an invading army with niblicks and mashies, after all.
Of course, St. Andrews had the best defense
of all: No. 17, the infamous Road Hole. Golfers have to hit over
a wooden extension of the Old Course Hotel to get to a narrow
patch of fairway. It's a blind shot. Hit to the left on your second
shot and you're in the black hole of bunkers. You've heard of
being in jail on a course? This is being in a maximum-security
penitentiary. Hit to the right and you have the road and a stone
wall to confront.
"The reason I really like the hole
is if you're coming down the stretch and you've either got a one-
or two-shot lead or you're one or two shots behind, anything can
happen," Tiger Woods said. "It's not a hole where you
can systematically hit two normal shots. You've got to hit good
shots."
Imagine that: a course set up to demand
more than long drives and high-flying smart bombs. Approach shots
don't automatically stick to Velcro greens here, as they do for
the pros in the States. This course takes feel more than proper
technique.
That's the thing about St. Andrews. It's
all feel. You have to feel the roll of the course underneath your
feet to appreciate it. You have to feel the history.
"Yeh write what it's really like, you'll
be ostracized," the man said.
Only by the realists.
(c) 2000, Chicago Tribune.
Visit the Chicago Tribune on the Internet at http://www.chicago.tribune.com/
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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