The Old Course

I’ve been watching the British Open golf championship this weekend. This is a special year, as it is the 150^th Open Championship, having been held 149 previous times since the first tournament in 1860 (it has been interrupted by two world wars and Covid). This year, the tournament is being held at The Royal and Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews, Scotland. Also known as the “Old Course,”  the course is wedged between the town of St. Andrews and the North Sea on Scotland’s east coast, and is acknowledged by many to be the official birthplace of this ancient game.

The game of golf dates back 800 years, to the 1200s. It started with shepherds (“sheep herders,” get it?) who were bored while watching their flocks graze along the flat, treeless, coastal lowlands of Scotland. Using their crooks as clubs, they entertained themselves by hitting rocks into rabbit holes. From there, the game evolved. They carved rounded balls out of wood, dug holes in the ground, and shoved sticks in the holes to mark them. The first recorded reference to the game came in 1457, when Scottish King James II officially banned the game. It seems he worried that his soldiers spent more time on the links than in practicing archery. In St. Andrews, golfers shared the links with grazing sheep, cows, and goats, fishermen drying their nets on the thorny plants called whin or gorse, women bleaching cloth, children playing in the low hills, and soldiers shooting longbows at targets. The Old Course was eventually shortened from 22 to 18 holes, and that number became the standard size of a golf course. In 1754, a group of local gentlemen formed the Society of St. Andrews golfers and established the first 13 rules for the game. From that point on, golf was regarded as a rich man’s game, as working people could not take time off to play, and it cost a week’s worth of hard labor (6 days) to afford a single golf ball stuffed with goose feathers.

Old Tom Morris, one of the early groundskeepers of the course, had a great deal to do with the present layout. Morris was one of the first golfers to make his living from the game. He won the Open Championship in 1861, ’62, ’64, and ’67, and his son, Tommy, or Young Tom, also won the title of “Champion Golfer of the year” four times. Purses were small in those days, however, with the winner taking home just a couple of pounds (usually about $25) for their efforts. The real money came from betting on yourself to win and playing head-to-head matches against other top players. To provide a more consistent form of income, Old Tom made clubs and golf balls, caddied, and did the work of maintaining the Old Course. That maintenance was in the form of physical labor that he performed by himself with little assistance.

He generally left the fairways as they were naturally. That’s why Scottish courses look so strange to Americans more accustomed to carefully manicured, table-top fairways of bright green grass. Each St. Andrews’ fairway is marked by hundreds of small hillocks and brownish-green grass that has to be hardy enough to grow on sand beaches and withstand the harsh Scottish weather. A ball hit in the middle of the fairway might roll straight, but it could just as easily kick left or right and wind up resting in the waist-high gorse bushes with no chance to reach the green in regulation. Sand traps were also established in places selected by nature, not a course designer. Most traps were places where sheep or other livestock burrowed into the soft turf next to higher ground to wait out the cold, driving rain during storms. They chewed on the thin grass until a sandy hole emerged. Old Tom used those holes as sand traps, although later groundskeepers added fresh sand and sod walls to make them even more formidable. He moved tee boxes and greens, created new holes, and reshaped the course to a significant degree. Finally, Tom put a great deal of labor into the greens, carrying dirt from one place and putting it in another in a wheelbarrow, leveling it, and experimenting with different seeds until he found the right mixture. All of this was done by hand and most of it by one man. While building a new green for the finishing eighteenth hole, Tom found a mass grave where cholera victims had been buried during an outbreak in 1832. He simply mounded dirt over the grave and went on with his work. The result of these Herculean efforts is a course that, while not as beautiful as the more modern links, has a unique quality laced with history and romance.

Mary Stuart, better known to history as Mary Queen of Scots, became Queen of Scotland in 1542, at the ripe old age of 9 months. Later, as an avid golfer, she made an important contribution to golf when she began calling the lads who carried her clubs around the course “cadets.” This term was eventually shortened to “caddy,” and their job was made easier in the 1800s when they began using archery quivers as cases to carry the clubs and extra balls. (I was actually a caddy when I was 11 and 12 years old. I weighed about 80 pounds, and I swear some of the bags I carried weighed nearly that much. But, on a good day, when I managed to get a round with a golfer in the morning and another in the afternoon, I could take home over 3 dollars, including tips, for being at the course for 12 hours. I was a shrewd businessman even then.) It was said that Mary was playing a round of golf while her husband was being murdered, giving her a solid alibi. And her cadets may have been handy for finding lost golf balls while on the course, but they could not help her when she lost her head while plotting to overthrow her cousin, Elizabeth, as Queen of England.

Some of my favorite caddy stories took place in Scotland, where caddies are often older adults. These guys have been reputed to take a drink on occasion, and have been known to put down a bet or two based on the information they gathered while following golfers around the links. In the 1860s, club members at a Scottish club hosted a tournament for caddies, putting up a turkey for 1st place, and a bottle of whiskey for 2^nd. It was a strange finish as one golfer after another purposely mishit their ball in an attempt to lose the lead and take home the 2^nd-place prize. Caddies are an invaluable resource to golfers who are new to a particular course and need information that might help them improve their score. At Carnoustie, a wee bit north of St. Andrews on the eastern coast, a player once asked his caddy what to expect from the weather. The caddy gestured toward the sea and said. “There’s a rocky island a half-mile off shore. If you canno’ see the rock, it’s raining. If you ken see the rock, it’s aboot to rain.” Gary Player tells the story of his introduction to St. Andrews as a 21-year-old in his first Open Championship. He was assigned a grizzled old caddy who knew the course like the back of his hand. The inexperienced Player was understandably nervous as he teed off on the legendary course. His first shot was a terrible hook that landed well out of bounds. Embarrassed, he teed up again and sliced a ball out of bounds the other way. The unimpressed caddy watched closely, a cigarette dangling from his lower lip. Player finally landed one safely in the fairway and began walking toward it. The caddy walked up next to him and asked, “Where are you from?” Gary said, “South Africa.” The caddy said, “What‘re you doing here, then?” Gary replied. “I’m here to play in the Open Championship. I’m a professional golfer.” The caddy shook his head and said, “Well, you moost be a helluva putter.” Over time, caddies have developed their own folklore and stories. My favorite is about two golfers who teed off together back in the 1800s. One of them had a heart attack and died halfway through the round. The other man threw the dead body over his shoulder and made his way back to the clubhouse, where a gentleman member said, “That’s a fine Christian thing you’ve done.” The golfer said, “Aye, the worst part was lyin’ ‘im down and pickin’ ‘im up again between shots.”

A few years ago, Kathleen and I took a tour of Scotland, and our bus stopped in the medieval town of St. Andrews. The Old Course is right in the center of the town surrounded by homes and businesses, the golfing equivalent of Wrigley Field or Fenway Park. Each member of our tour was given a bucket of balls to hit on the driving range so that they could return home and brag that they had “played” at the birthplace of the game of golf. Most of our group was elderly, so they thought I was some sort of wizard because I could hit the ball 50 yards in the air.

Still, standing there and looking at the course, I could feel the history of the place and my imagination conjured up images of Old Tom Morris, pipe in his mouth, leaning into the wind and hitting an approach shot to the green he built on top of a mass grave. I nodded to the apparition, and Old Tom tipped his Tam O’ Shanter in response.