Thursday, July 20, 2000
St. Andrews perfect setting
for Woods' bid at history
By Blaine Newnham
Seattle Times
ST. ANDREWS, Scotland - The sun was setting
over St. Andrews Bay as my little rental car made it over the
last rise into town.
Before me, bathed in red, were jagged stone
church spires and fences. Beyond them was the long, flat beach
where they filmed “Chariots of Fire,” and next to it
the land on which golf was played 200 years before Shakespeare
wrote Hamlet.
I wanted to throw my Titanium driver down
in some kind of misplaced sacrifice.
It was almost 10 o'clock at night, but St.
Andrews is nine-tenths of the way to the Arctic Circle. I was
part of a pagan pilgrimage of almost 50,000 people to see if this
week Tiger Woods could become the first player in 34 years to
win all four major golf championships in a career.
“There is no better place to do it
than here, at St. Andrews, on the most historic course there is,”
Woods said yesterday.
Much has been made of the two open championships
of golf being played this summer on the two greatest public courses
in the world, Pebble Beach and St. Andrews.
To call Pebble Beach public is a $325 lie.
Certainly, the price to play the Old Course
has inched past $100 a round and is left in some cases to the
luck of a lottery. But to understand just how much St. Andrews
is part of a culture and a town, you have to realize that the
course is closed on Sundays so that the community can use it for
strolls and picnics.
There is no pro, and there are no members.
The five courses that roll across the land between the city and
the sea are operated by a city trust.
The first tee of the Old Course looks like
an extension of the putting green and is so close to town, passers-by
can watch and comment.
As the story goes - and this course has
more stories than any other - General Eisenhower went directly
to the second hole rather than face the embarrassment of missing
his drive at the first.
Normally, golf is played in an isolated
place separated from real life by geography and economics. Here
it is at the center of a community and a culture. Kids in town
carry old golf clubs around with them and go after autographs
the way the kids in Boston go after the Red Sox.
It is hard to imagine that they banned golf
at St. Andrews - it was largely ignored, of course - before Columbus
gave a thought about going to America. The Old Course wasn't designed
as much as it evolved. The result is astonishing and enduring.
Sam Snead recalled his first sighting of
St. Andrews.
“I saw it from the train,” he
said. “I didn't see anybody, so I asked, `What abandoned
course is that?' It didn't look as if it had ever had a machine
on it.”
The first time Bobby Jones, the great American
amateur, played it, he tore up his score card and walked off the
course on the 11th hole.
Jones would later win the Open by six strokes
and say, “the more I studied the Old Course, the more I loved
it; and the more I loved it, the more I studied it.”
After all these years and all the changes
in the game, what is it about St. Andrews that still tests and
excites players from Woods to Jack Nicklaus?
From afar, it looks dead flat. Up close,
its fairways ripple like the nearby sea. The British call it random
golf. Shots are left to the whims of the wind and the land.
“People say St. Andrews is easy,”
Woods said. “Aim left and just hit it. Well, it isn't easy.”
The course looks like none other. Many of
the holes are two holes, sharing a common fairway and a green.
The fairways are hard and fast, the grass cut short and sparse.
Woods said the fairways were faster than
the greens. He knew that because he putted from 40 yards off the
green and watched his ball slow as it went.
St. Andrews doesn't share the sea the way
Pebble Beach does. Nor does it have the spectacular dunes of Ireland's
Ballybunion or the backdrop of Northern Ireland's Royal County
Down.
Everything is understated. Players this
week were nearly driving the finishing hole, which is a 347-yard
par-4 with a 200-yard-wide fairway and no bunkers.
What makes the hole difficult is the undulating
fairway leading up to it. Chipping the ball close to the pin proved
difficult, and the wind wasn't blowing.
St. Andrews had survived because the winds
blow the way they did 200 years ago, because the tumbling turf
keeps shots from going where they ought to, and because the bunkers
are hidden and painfully penal.
“It is 50-50 whether you will even
get out of them the first try,” Nicklaus said after his practice
round. “The course is playing faster than I've ever seen
it.”
Nicklaus won twice at St. Andrews. He said
he would rather win a major championship here than anywhere else.
The setting is perfect to anoint Woods as
the greatest player of this time.
“But don't give it to him prematurely,”
Nicklaus said. “A lot can happen out there.”
A lot has.
(c) 2000, The Seattle Times.
Visit The Seattle Times Extra on the World Wide Web at http://www.seattletimes.com/ Distributed by
Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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