Old Course Exudes Character British Open Site Not Much To Look At, But Beauty Is In The Punishment It Can Extract

Listen to these Scots go on about golf. You’d think they invented the game.

“The Americans come over here and pull out that sand wedge, and after five or six holes, it goes back in the bag,” Jimmy Bowman said. “The ground’s too hard. The lie’s too tight. You cannot get the same divot you get in the States. So you have to learn to run it up to the green with a 7-iron.”

Bowman shook his head.

“Americans are pampered,” he said.

They are pampered to the point they bring their own caddies to St. Andrews for the British Open that starts Thursday.

This affects Bowman and Steve Martin and Jim Reid quite a bit. They are St. Andrews caddies, and they were sitting by the caddie master’s stand, waiting for a bag.

To their resigned astonishment, they were still waiting early Sunday afternoon. For a serious contender to walk right past these decades of local knowledge - why, it’s like playing leapfrog with unicorns.

“Last year in the Dunhill Cup, the Canadians used us,” Bowman said. “They won it. The year before that, Taipei used Scottish caddies. They won, too. I remember the year the Korean lad used a Scottish caddie and beat Mark Calcavecchia, who was the reigning Open champ at the time. It only makes sense.”

But Bowman and the boys get more American business than they want at other times. They’re quite familiar with the CEO in the white pants who thinks his 10-handicap back home translates nicely over here.

“On the tee, we always ask a guy if he likes to draw the ball or hook the ball,” Bowman said. “Sometimes, the guy will say, ‘I can hit any shot.’

” Reid said.”That means it’s going to be a long day,” Bowman said.

“Then there’s the guy who has it rough for three or four holes and says, ‘I’m not on my game today,”’ Martin said. He laughed. “We don’t get torture pay.”

“A guy like that will go back to America and say the course is no good,” Bowman said. “I had a guy the other day who said it was a cow pasture. It takes two or three times to appreciate it.”

On TV, the Old Course does lack definition. Many visitors, in fact, have driven up, squinted and wondered, “That’s it?”

No trees, no shimmering lakes, no white sand in the bunkers. There is no clear, nine-hole parade on one side of the clubhouse, and then another on the other. There is nothing, in fact, except acreage. The Old Course was not actually designed by anybody, although consultants shaped its 18 holes (there once were 22).

Yet from a teebox - which, refreshingly, is often just beside the preceding green - there is wonder in what you see. And what you can’t. There are 184 bunkers out there, most of them tiny booby-trap craters, without rakes. “Room only,” the old saying goes, “for an angry man and his niblick.” Only Bowman and his friends know where they are.

St. Andrews, like most seaside courses, essentially goes out from the clubhouse and comes back. Therefore, the wind you curse going out on one nine is the wind you thank coming in, or vice versa. But that’s only a theory. “You can have the wind in your face the whole way around,” Bowman said. “That’s when it’s a test.”

The fairways are beautiful, primarily because wintertime visitors to the Old Course were made to hit every shot off Astro-turf mats. (They were allowed to keep the mats.) But the ball still rolls from hump to hump like popping corn, and a level lie is cause to party.

Still, the friends of St. Andrews fear for it this week.

In 1990, the sun was bright and the wind took the week off, and Nick Faldo won here with 18 under par. Curtis Strange shot 62 here in the 1987 Dunhill Cup. The Old Course is only 6,566 yards. It does not change. In fact, when they filled in a bunker on the 15th hole several years ago, several members returned that night to un-fill it. But the golfers, or least their utensils, keep improving.

“It’s too easy, really,” Bowman said. “It has a great name, but if the weather is like this, they’ll tear it apart.”

St. Andrews responded by firming up the 17th, the horrific “Road Hole,” creator of so many British Open runners-up. More rough, and a scoreboard to impede you.

Jimmy Bowman noticed another change. Yellow, white and red squares in the fairways, 200, 150 and 100 yards from the greens.

“The sprinkler heads are too small,” Bowman said glumly, “so they made these things to help Peter Alliss (BBC and ABC-TV) tell you what the yardage is.”

But in his heart, Bowman also knew the colored squares helped all those alien caddies.

His consolation was in knowing they will need them.