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IMAGINE a fine summer�s day.
The turf is lush beneath your feet. A breeze emphasises the purity of the air.
The fairways are ablaze with the colour of purple heather and yellow gorse, and
mountains provide an impressive backdrop. All about you there is an overwhelming
atmosphere of history, knowing you are walking in the footsteps of the greats
who made golf the game it is today.
Arnold Palmer - Farewell to St Andrews
Behind are successes and
disasters in equal measure, ahead a battle between your skills as a golfer and
the subtle intricacies of a course laid down many years before and made more
difficult by the wind and water of the Scottish climate. It is an experience
many have tried to replicate around the world. Over the years millions upon
millions of pounds have been spent in this quest, most actively in America and
Japan. Yet they cannot achieve that goal.
Scotland is the undoubted home of
golf. No matter what standard golfers are, they have to make the pilgrimage to
Scotland, where there are almost 500 spectacular and beautiful courses,
otherwise they feel they haven�t played the game at all. The most popular and
famous, of course, are the links courses that have evolved on sandy coastal
strips which, centuries ago, were beneath the sea. Here nature is the architect,
the course being fashioned out of the natural terrain rather than having design
imposed upon it. Then there are the magnificent inland courses, which provide
just as challenging a test.
Be it St.Andrews,
where you can almost see the ghosts of the past marching down the wide,
undulating fairways; or Prestwick,
the birthplace of golf�s most prestigious prize, the Open Championship; or the
great Open courses of Muirfield,
Turnberry, Carnoustie
and Royal
Troon; or the splendour of Royal
Dornoch and Loch
Lomond, or some humbler course, there is no finer country in which to
play golf.
The stamp of greatness is
everywhere. Almost every club has some link with the traditions of the sport.
Everyone has a tale to tell of the great men who were the founding fathers of a
great game. Scotland�s rich history is peopled with giants like Allan
Robertson, probably the first professional and certainly the first man to reduce
St Andrews to fewer than 80 strokes, Old Tom Morris, the most famous name in
Scottish golf, and his son, Tom, the only man to win the Open
Championship four times in succession � the first time at the age of
17. Other greats include Willie Park, the first winner of the Open, and James
Braid, who won the Open five times and laid down hundreds of courses. Braid�s
trademark was the most devilish of bunkers and his great rival, J.H. Taylor,
said on seeing one of his bunkers at Prestwick: �The man who made it should be
buried here with a niblick through his heart.�
The origins of golf remain a
mystery. There have been claims that the game was invented elsewhere. Play golf
in Scotland and you realise that cannot be true. All civilisations have
stick-and-ball games. As early as 200BC the Chinese were supposed to have had
some such game, as were the Romans. The Dutch played a game called Kolven or
Kolf, but it was more akin to ice hockey, and the Belgians and French had Chole.
Tom Watson - St Andrews 11th
The first mention of golf in
Scotland was in 1457 when King James II declared that it be banned lest men be
tempted not to practise their archery, which was more useful in the defence of
the kingdom against the English; and in 1491 James IV�s parliament ordered:
�In na place of the Realme there be used Fute-ball, Golfe, or uther sik
unproffitable sportis.� But some historians claim that golf was played at St
Andrews some two centuries earlier when shepherds, who grazed their flocks on
the commonland along the coast, took to hitting pebbles with sticks at targets
to alleviate their boredom, the name �golf� coming from �to gowff�, a
verb in their Scottish dialect meaning �to hit�. James was eventually won
over by the game and by 1513 was reportedly ordering some golf clubs to be made
for him.
In 1553, the people of the Auld
Grey Toon were given the rights by Archbishop John Hamilton to play golf on the
links. Fourteen years later Mary, Queen of Scots perhaps set the trend for
fanatical golfers by playing there only hours after the murder of her husband,
Lord Darnley.
Legend has it that in 1641
Charles I escaped an injudicious defeat at Leith Links. He was trailing by six
holes with eight to play when news came of the Irish rebellion. Of course, he
had to take leave of his opponent immediately to attend to matters of State.
Such was the growing popularity of the game that those who put a round ahead of
a sermon on a Sunday morning could be fined 40 shillings for incurring the
minister�s displeasure
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Brtitish Golf Museum - St Andrews
As with all games, there came a
time when the participants wanted more than just the challenge matches with
hundreds of pounds at stake. They needed champions, and in 1744 The Honourable
Company of Edinburgh Golfers, who then played on Leith Links and now reside at
Muirfield, petitioned the Edinburgh Council to provide a Silver Club for
competition. John Rattray, a surgeon and a partner of Bonnie Prince Charlie in
more serious issues such as the Jacobite rebellion, was the first winner. He
escaped a beheading, some say, because of his prowess as a golfer. And, not far
from Leith, the first ladies competition was staged in Musselburgh in 1810.
The early days of golf were an
expensive affair. They played with the feathery ball, which was made of a
top-hatful of feathers stuffed into a hand-stitched leather casing. At half a
crown [12� pence], it was more expensive than a club and deterred many from
getting involved. Allan Robertson made a good living manufacturing the balls in
the kitchen of his home at St Andrews, aided by his assistant Old Tom Morris,
but when the rubber-moulded gutta-percha ball came on the market in 1848,
Robertson declared: �It�s nae gowff.�
It was the gutty which started
the golf boom in Scotland. More began to play and its popularity really took off
with the launching of the Open Championship by the Prestwick Club in 1860, which
turned the top golfers of the day into national heroes. By that time Old Tom
Morris had moved to Prestwick as greenkeeper on the salary of �50 a year, and
he was favourite to win. His mentor Allan Robertson had been regarded as the
champion player, and he and Morris featured as partners in many foursomes
matches played for stakes as high as �400. Yet they never played each other in
competition.
Old Tom, an impressive figure
with a full beard, was beaten in the inaugural championship by a �foreigner
from the East Coast�, Willie Park, but he made his mark over the next seven
years, winning it four times. Then he handed over to his son, Young Tom, who in
winning his first Open recorded the first hole-in-one and unbelievably reduced
the then 578-yard first at Prestwick to three strokes with a gutty ball and
hickory shafts.
St Andrews - The Old Course 18th
Young Tom made the Championship
belt his own by winning three years in succession. In 1870 there was no
championship, and then a year later today�s Claret Jug was put up as the
trophy and he won that too. What Young Tom might have achieved is anyone�s
guess. His father once said, �I could cope with Allan [Robertson] masel�,
but never wi� Tommy.� Tragically, Young Tom died � some say of a broken
heart � on Christmas morning 1875 at the age of 24, three months after his
wife had died giving birth.
Scotland�s grip on the Open
lasted 30 years before an English amateur, John Ball, broke the sequence. If any
Scotsman took over the mantle of the Morrises, it would have been the Fife-born
James Braid, who formed the great triumvirate with Harry Vardon and J.H. Taylor.
He won five times between 1901 and 1910. But since those days only five Scots
have won the Championship: Jock Hutchison and Tommy Armour, who were by then
American citizens, George Duncan,Sandy Lyle and most recently Aberdeen�s Paul Lawrie at Carnoustie in 1999. Lawrie came from 10 shots back in the final round to force a three-way play-off with France�s Jean Van de Velde and American Justin Leonard. His triumph was the first by a Scot on home soil since Willie Auchterlonie in 1893.
Although the ultimate prize has eluded generations of Scottish golfers down the years, there have been many fine exponents of the game in John Panton, Eric Brown, Brian Barnes, Bernard Gallacher, who went on to captain the Ryder Cup team three times, and today�s superstars Sam Torrance, captain of the 2001 European Ryder Cup team, and Colin Montgomerie, who was Europe�s No.1 for a record seven years. They are the direct descendants of a great golfing tradition in which you can participate by playing the finest courses in the world.
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