I watched the final round of the 2015 Open Championship – large chunks of it, anyway – on my mobile phone while queuing for various rides at the Legoland Windsor theme park. (Alas, family holidays don’t stop for Monday finishes.)
You might think I’d struggle to find a less apposite location from which to watch an Old Course Open. But consider this: Legoland has been around a long time and constantly struggles to keep its attractions fresh and modern. And while its rides are generally wonderful for younger children, few of them are capable of truly entertaining and/or scaring more experienced attendees.
I truly love the Old Course. I’ve played it at least 30 times, mostly during my year as a student in St. Andrews, and I’ve come to understand and respect its nuances and the strategic conundrums it poses to normal golfers. But the men playing the Old Course in an Open Championship aren’t normal golfers: for them, the Old Course is a series of wide fairways, big greens and few hurdles. Sam Snead won the 1946 Open at St. Andrews with a two-over-par total; since then, the average winning score at St. Andrews Opens has been 11.3 strokes under par, compared with 6.1 strokes under par for all of the non-St. Andrews Opens. This century, the four winning scores on the Old Course have been -19, -14, -16 and -15.
So, every few years the R&A re-buttresses Road Bunker and builds a newer and more preposterous set of tees, expanding further into the adjacent New and Eden courses in (vainly) attempting to protect the Old Course from modern firepower. And this year, the R&A used numerous hole locations bordering on the criminally gimmicky which many locals had never seen before: e.g., the far-back-right location for the third hole on Monday was just beyond a steep downslope which bounded excellent wedge shots well beyond the green if a player’s judgement was out by even one yard. Ironically, the course’s main defense – the wind – was negated by the modern desire to maintain artificially fast green speeds; on slower greens with slightly longer grass, the gusty conditions on Saturday would have generated a brilliant day of shotmaking challenges instead of a lengthy postponement.
The Old Course – and many other outstanding specimens of golfing architecture – could be toughened more easily simply by enforcing rigid regulations upon the game’s equipment manufacturers. But just as no political will exists to enact meaningful gun control laws in America, ball control remains a distant dream…so we soldier on, fattening the bank accounts of golf course renovation specialists at the expense of golf clubs and their members the world over. And still, as the birdies and eagles kept flying in at the Open, two-thirds of the Old Course strongly resembled a drive-pitch-and-putt competition. Personally, I’ve never thought any course is too easy; my own golfing faults see to that. But then, the Old Course is one of the few courses in the world on which I’ve broken par for 18 holes, a fact which itself may testify to what we saw at the 2015 Open.
There is one way in which the Old Course is less inviting for the world’s greatest golfers, people who obsessively practice and prepare for every obstacle they expect to face, than it is for hackers like you and me: it doesn’t have a large practice putting green. And for the want of this particular nail, Jordan Spieth’s Grand Slam may have been lost: Spieth, probably the world’s greatest putter at present, cited the lack of a facility on which to practice the long lag putts you inevitably get on the Old Course after he took 37 putts in his second-round 72, and his disastrous four-putt at the eighth on Monday left him one too many mountains to climb. Of all the 2015 Open’s many fascinating storylines – I haven’t even mentioned Zach Johnson, an underrated golfer and a worthy champion – this has to be the stupidest, and yet somehow it seems an appropriate summation of the tournament. I can’t wait to see how the R&A attempts to defy golfing immortality at the next Open at St. Andrews five or six years from now.