ST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- The club secretary opens the heavy door and leads me inside. It's called the New Club and, this being St. Andrews, "new" means 108-years-old. The clubhouse occupies several row houses just off the 18th fairway. Old Tom Morris was one of the founders.

I go through the men's bar, where old wooden lockers line the walls and three tables sit right by the window, up the stairs. Suddenly, there it is, one of the greatest views in golf that few people ever see, out the floor-to-ceiling windows: St. Andrews. The stone skyline of the town. The Old Course and the North Sea, clear to Dundee. The secretary, Mark Richardson, points at the beaches of the West Sands.

"Which, of course," he says, "is Chariots of Fire."

A former captain of the club, Colin McAllister, looks through the glass and raps on it hard. The old windows were drafty. These? They're state-of-the-art. Just a few weeks old.

"Are these armor protected?" he says.

The current captain laughs and cracks a joke about Colin's wayward drives.

"For you," Scott Reith says.

"We have a golf ball downstairs that Bing Crosby sliced in here," Colin says.

A few people mill around down at the men's bar, and a few more upstairs at the family bar. A cell phone rings and the man gets stares from everyone. He apologizes. By Sunday, these bars will be standing room only, filled with members of the private club, most of them professional types. Downstairs, the early drinkers will get the window tables and everyone else will crowd against the lockers, watching the finish on the big flat-screen TV. There are three clubs on the 18th: the R&A, which is the most blue-blooded; the St. Andrews Golf Club, the most working-class of the three; and the New Club.

"They are different in character," Richardson says.

There are about 1,600 members, most of them local. There are four honorary members: Old Tom Morris, Sandy Herd, Bobby Jones and Arnold Palmer. Morris, who suggested the name New Club, loved the bar here. One day, he went toward the toilet door. Well, he thought it was the toilet. Turned out, it was the stairs to the beer cellar. He fell.

"Old Tom died in this club," Colin says, then he heads back to the window.

There are golfers out on the course.