When Sam Snead first glimpsed the Old Course at St. Andrew’s,
Scotland, he wondered what an abandoned golf course was doing
tucked between the town and the sea. “The ugliest lookin’ thing I
ever saw,” he said. Later, he professed to love it, as almost all
golfers do.
Last weekend the Old Course showed itself at its absolute best
as the host site of the 134th Open Championships — “British Open,”
as we call it in the States. Tiger Woods won with a score of 14
under par, besting his nearest opponent by five strokes.Truly, it
was closer than that, and the famed claret jug trophy hung in the
balance till late in the final round. Truly, the field played well
and scored well, with the halfway cut coming at one over par. This
year’s Open proved the best major to watch in a long, long time.
The players could actually score.
By contrast, the U.S. Open often humiliates players with the
difficulty of the course setup: narrow fairways, cabbage patch
rough, hummocky old-fashioned greens on some classic course like
Oakmont or Medinah or Shinnecock Hills, greens designed in an era
of simpler grasses and cruder lawn mowers, greens now groomed to a
glassy speed they were never supposed to have. Putting — if you
get a chance to do it — is torture on a green like that. One
par-three at Shinnecock last year got so hard with its inverted
cereal-bowl green, dry weather, and a wind blowing, that the first
several groups on Sunday made triple bogies or worse. A ball simply
dropped from waist-height would roll off the green. There was no
chance to put a shot on it.
UNFORTUNATELY, THE USGA SETS UP U.S. Open courses like that nearly
every year. The organization’s own description of the process may
be found here here. It contains this most interesting statement:
“There is no USGA target score for a U.S. Open. While the final
score at some U.S. Open sites will be at or near par, the USGA does
not try to formulate a course set up that will only produce a
winning score of at or near even par.”
Given that USGA officials also talk about “protecting the
integrity of par,” and that most winning U.S. Open scores are just
about even par, that statement would make most pros gag. Most pros
would say the USGA aims to make birdies impossible. Most pros also
mutter that USGA executives aren’t really top-notch golfers (they
aren’t), so they don’t know what they’re doing. The controversy
roils up every year, some worse than others.
For the fan, all too many U.S. Opens present about as
entertaining a spectacle as watching flies try to escape from a hot
station wagon on a sweltering summer day.
NOT SO AT THE OLD COURSE this year. Without compromising on
anything, the Royal and Ancient simply let the Old Course be
itself. A few holes have been lengthened by moving the tees back,
that merely to bring some bunkers back into play that today’s long
bombers had been able to ignore. But the Course is essentially what
it’s been for several hundred years, rock-hard, same turf
wall-to-wall (tees, fairways, and greens), quirky (you have to
drive over a building at the seventeenth tee), spotted with
devilish bunkers that often have to be played out of sideways or
backwards.
There are no trees. The rough is negligible, except for
scattered patches of heather, which can sometimes be played from,
and gorse, which never can. The course looks like a moonscape, all
hillocks and bumps and hollows. Golfers who have never played the
Old Course before talk about “aiming at clouds” when they hit shots
to greens they can’t really see or differentiate from the
surrounding turf.
At St. Andrews, as at other seaside links course, a golfer plays
shots along the ground. Hard-hit shots roll and roll and roll. The
usual PGA tour player’s high iron into a green, spinning a bit and
then stopping, won’t work here. You can get crazy bounces,
sometimes straight sideways if you happen to hit a mound or a
hollow just in the wrong spot. The most commonly used club is the
putter, sometimes from 40 or 50 yards away.
“If there’s nae wind, there’s nae golf,” say the Scots. One
commentator said the Old Course really isn’t very hard on a calm
day. Indeed, it does look as though a reasonably competent old lady
could shoot 90 on a windless afternoon. Such days almost never
occur on the coast of Scotland. The game becomes one of endless
calculation and hunch, of anticipating the combined effects of
ground and breeze. But bonuses come with the calculation. Four or
five of the par-four holes can be driven in a single shot, and not
just by the prodigious hitters — drives roll 40 to 60 yards,
remember. Add the two par-fives, and you have a chance for six or
seven eagle putts per round. And that, in turn, means you can post
a very good score without ever having to one-putt. A good thing,
that, as getting closer than 40 feet to the pin on most holes is a
fabulous shot.
SO THE TOURNAMENT CAME DOWN to who could roll very long putts up
alongside the hole the best, leaving a low-stress tap-in for par or
birdie. Add a stroke or so per hole, and it’s the kind of game all
of us duffers know very well, no less entertaining for watching the
pros do it so much better than we can.
It is not the slow broiling torment of the finest golfers in the
world being made to look like idiots on some tricked-up course in
the United States. Yes, the British Open can get ridiculous, too.
Carnoustie, a few years back, was so hard it made players want to
quit. And the R & A has occasionally grown rough to hay
length.
But this year they did it right. They left the course alone, and
they let the players play. I wish the USGA would follow their
example.
