Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, July 17, 1990 TAG: 9007170023
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: B4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ST. ANDREWS, SCOTLAND LENGTH: Medium
"A vast, flat plain," British golf historian Bernard Darwin wrote in 1910.
A plain shaped by the centuries, the sea and the wind.
Sheep had something to do with the formation of the Old Course at St. Andrews. Man had very little to do with it.
"I'd like to thank Mother Nature for the golf course," Ben Crenshaw said in the presentation ceremony after the 1978 British Open.
The oldest of the world's golf tournaments returns to the oldest course - the birthplace of the game - this week for the 119th British Open.
"The Old Course remains a monument to the origins of golf as a game played on links by the sea," the late British writer Pat Ward-Thomas said.
"In the beginning, it knew no architect but nature; it came into being by evolution rather than design; and on no other course is the hand of man less evident."
No one really knows how old it is. On a piece of parchment, dated Jan. 25, 1552, the Archbishop of St. Andrews gave the public the right to play golf on the linksland, as well as the right to breed rabbits on it.
The game had been played here for more than 200 years when the St. Andrews Society of Golfers, later the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, was formed in 1754.
The course, covering 93 1/2 acres of land between the town and the Bay of St. Andrews, has changed little since. There are no trees, and little definition where the fairways end and the gorse and heather begin.
There are nine holes out, with the sea on the right, and nine holes back. Fourteen of them share seven double greens. The tee shot on the par-3 11th crosses over the fairway of the par-4 seventh.
"Without the wind, it's a pretty easy course," said Arnold Palmer, who played his first British Open here 30 years ago and is making a farewell appearance this year.
But it is a rare day when the wind doesn't blow. And it is so fickle that it isn't unusual for a player to have the wind in his face all the way out, then find it change and be in his face all the way in.
Generally speaking, the 6,933-yard course is flat, but there are humps and swales - and bunkers, 140 of them, formed by sheep burrowing into dunes to escape the wintry gales off the sea, and by people digging for shells.
Many are deep pits, the pot bunkers that Darwin said were only large enough to accommodate "an angry man and his niblick."
Many of them are invisible from the tee. You have to know where they are. It was this lack of knowledge that caused a young Bobby Jones to tear up his card in disgust during the 1921 Open. He had taken 46 to the turn and played the 10th in six.
He later won the British Amateur and Open at the Old Course and said: "The more I studied the Old Course, the more I loved it and the more I loved it, the more I studied it. There is always a way at St. Andrews, although it is not always the obvious way."
The layout puts most of the trouble on the right - the sea going out, out-of-bounds coming home. But, in almost every case, the better approach to the green is from the right, a tee shot between the sheep-formed bunkers and the sea.
Many of those bunkers have names: Walkinshaw's Grave, Hell Bunker, the Coffins, the Beardies, the Lion's Mouth."
"It is the essence of golf," said Tom Watson, who won five British Opens, but none at St. Andrews. "This is the way golf is meant to be played."
by CNB