St Andrews Witness The Brisbane Roar
St Andrews Witness The Brisbane Roar
No matter how hard golf repeatedly punches itself in the face while wearing a LIV knuckleduster nothing makes the game look even more beautiful than an Open Championship at St Andrews, and the one that concluded this weekend was no exception.
The Old Course isn’t just the physical home of golf, it’s the spiritual one too. Almost everything in the game can trace its roots back there, from club and ball design to details like the number of holes in a round and the size of the hole on the green.
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"In many ways, St Andrews is the worst venue to hold the Open Championship. Except all the other ones."
Robert Hardie
"In many ways, St Andrews is the worst venue to hold the Open Championship. Except all the other ones."
Robert Hardie
In many ways, St Andrews is the worst venue to hold the Open Championship. Except all the other ones.
There’s pretty much one road in and one road out; the terrain is so flat and the course so narrow that all the spectators are around the sides and the only ones who get a decent view are the ones in the stands; 14 shared greens means everyone’s waiting for everyone all the time; and its only defence is the wind, which means when it doesn’t blow hard too many par fours are driveable and six-hour rounds become the norm.
And yet everything about the Old Course is perfect: none of those shelves and tiers and swales on and around the greens are man-made; the bunkers are pristine now but they’re in the places rabbits used to dig and expose natural sand; the turf is perfect links turf; and placement, not power, is how you make your score.
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It also has the history that no-one else even gets close to. The first official mention of golf being played at St Andrews is in 1552: that’s 470 years! It has a mystical, almost religious, feel when you’re there, and an irresistible draw to go back when you’re not. St Andrews IS golf.
Cameron’s Smith’s win proved what everyone over the age of 25 who plays golf knows but what everyone over that age choose to forget: putting is the difference between winning and losing.
The difference on the last afternoon was that Smith made four putts from inside the 15-foot distance that Rory McIlroy didn’t.
But what The Open proved this year, as it tends to do every year, is that no matter all the nonsense that surrounds golf the game is the thing that really matters, and that game is truly wonderful.
