ESPN.com - Golf Online - British Open 2000 - Birthplace of golf not loved by all

By Tim Dahlberg
Associated Press
Friday, July 14

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland -- About once a month or so, Valerie Melvin takes her bag and 1-handicap down the street and onto the Old Course.

The birthplace of golf might be a tough place to get on, but not if you live in St. Andrews, where $155 gives residents annual rights to perhaps the most hallowed course in the world.


	St. Andrews is unlike any other course golfers will see during their careers.

Except on Sundays.

The Old Course, perhaps the most famous in the world, is closed on Sunday to golfers and becomes a city park for all to enjoy. Just as it was in 1123 when King David gave the land to the town, it is a park one day a week.

"People go on walks and fly kites," said Melvin, who works for a golf research institute.

Some pros have thought over the years that the Sunday closure should be made permanent.

Despite being the birthplace of golf more than 500 years ago, the sometimes scruffy, bunker-filled course has not always measured up to the expectations of golfers from the other side of the Atlantic.

"Say! That looks like an old abandoned golf course. What did they call it?" Sam Snead said when he first saw the Old Course in 1946.

Some of Snead's modern-day counterparts weren't even that kind.

"The worst piece of mess I've ever played. I think they had some sheep and goats there that died, and they just covered them over," Scott Hoch said a few years ago.

From its hidden bunkers and greenside traps, with walls rising 6 feet, to the famous No. 17 Road Hole, St. Andrews has a character unlike no other. Don't confuse this with the manicured fairways of exclusive Augusta National or the seaside elegance of Pebble Beach.

What looks like an easy test on a flat piece of seaside land can confound even the best. When the wind howls through the willowherb and ragwort, it can become almost impossible.

"When it blows here, even the seagulls walk," Nick Faldo said.

Golfers first played at St. Andrews in the 1500s, hacking through the bushes and heather on a simple course. Later, they played 11 holes out to the nearby estuary, then played them again coming back in.

That changed in 1764, when the noblemen and gentlemen who made up the Royal & Ancient Golf Club had an outing in which a player named Earl St. Clair recorded a 121 on the 22-hole course. The next day they decided that the first four holes were too short and converted them into two, creating the modern 18-hole course.

Though St. Andrews was the center of the golf world, few played the game at the time, and the bankrupt town council sold the links in 1797 to merchants who turned the land into a rabbit farm. Twenty-four years later landowner James Cheape bought the course back for golf.

Not until Old Tom Morris was appointed by the R&A as custodian of the links in 1865 was the course really updated. With the help of assistant David Honeyman he widened the fairways and greens and added sand to help the grass grow. He also built the first and 18th greens as they are today.

There's now a five-month wait for outsiders to play. Hundreds come every Sunday to join the townspeople walking the course. They take pictures of the Road Hole and the mammoth and deep Hell Bunker on the par-5 14th that trapped Jack Nicklaus in the 1995 Open.

In spots, though, the Old Course doesn't appear to be much to look at. Cars drive across a road on the 18th hole, and some of the holes are virtually indistinguishable from each other.

It's a layout that has perplexed as well as astounded over the years.

"My first impression of St. Andrews was one of strange ambiguousness. I didn't like it, nor, for that matter, did I hate it," Tom Watson said in 1984. "I've never been so puzzled after a practice round in my life."

But the course has held up over time and remains a true test of championship golf, remarkable in itself because of the way the equipment and game have changed over the years. John Daly's winning score five years ago was just 6-under par.

At that same Open, Arnold Palmer stood on the Swilken Bridge and waved his hat to the crowd in his last British Open.

"I guess it's all over," Palmer said.

Not at St. Andrews it isn't.

Maybe the late Tony Lema, who won the Open on the Old Course in 1964, described it best.

"I feel like I'm back visiting an old grandmother," he said. "She's crotchety and eccentric, but also elegant, and anyone who doesn't fall in love with her has no imagination."