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“It’s like every day’s a Sunday,” said Andrew Dingwall, an American who has just completed his second year of an honours degree in German and international relations at St Andrews University. The student was referring to the Old Course in what is hopefully its last few days of lockdown.
On Sundays, the public are always free to walk the links and will have it to themselves other than, say, in the week of an Open. Now, though, all the courses are open to the town’s exercising residents at all times as everyone awaits the day when the so-called Home of Golf is open for business. The business of golf. (There are those outside the town, incidentally, who have struggled to believe that that business could have stopped in a place given over to the game since the 1500s, with David Scott, the manager of the new Dumbarnie Links, having fielded any number of “Are you open; you must be open” calls.)
The greenkeeping staff at the seven courses which come under the wing of the St Andrews Links Trust have been adhering to the rules of the lockdown every bit as conscientiously as you would expect bearing in mind that the "lockdown rules" were laid out by the R&A in combination with the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association. And how Old Tom Morris and his predecessors would have approved the way in which the Old Course, as it is at the moment, is not too far removed from how it would have looked in the 1500s. The grass is growing wild around the bunker edges; only the first cut of rough is being kept in check; and the fairways in many areas are peppered with daisies.
“With no flagsticks in place,” said Dingwall, “you can sometimes forget you’re on a course at all. It’s a glorious expanse of open land.”
At the end of the last term, Dingwall was in the process of buying a flat in St Andrews with his parents when the lockdown instruction came. Dingwall and his mother, Elizabeth, were too late to return to the family home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and similarly too late to find a shop where they could buy curtains for the new property. They were stuck but, as Dingwall said, he could not have wished for anywhere better to experience such a predicament.
A 12-handicap golfer, he had not come to St Andrews with any aspirations to make the university golf side, “but there is no question that golf was an added bonus … I saw it as a fantastic opportunity. I have a students’ Links ticket and am able to get involved in all the local golf. I love it.”
Along with his mum, who plays to 18, the family pair have been walking the courses on a regular basis. Sometimes they reminisce on how they played this hole or that, while all the time storing the sights of the day for Dingwall’s grandparents, Jimmy and Phyllis Dingwall, both of whom are in their 80s and are long-time residents of St Andrews.
Jimmy and Phyllis are unable to go out and see for themselves because Jimmy has underlying health concerns related to COVID-19 which, combined with the pair’s ages, suggest that they do best to stay put at home. It is, of course, a tough ask for a couple who have been immersed in the game all their days. Jimmy, who has given up playing, still serves as an Old Course guide on Sundays; Phyllis, for her part, is as keen a golfer as she ever was. In normal circumstances, she sets out every Monday with four friends from her age group.
“They tend to get organised on a Sunday night,” explains Dingwall. “One of them arranges a tee time on the Strathtyrum and the group is usually up and about by 7 o’clock the next morning before teeing off at 7.30. The arrangement is that they play until they’re tired and that they don’t play out of bunkers.” (Henry Cotton, that three-time Open champion, adopted the same approach towards bunkers in his senior years.)
The golf over, the ladies enjoy a coffee, having given up on the bacon rolls which were the norm until last year.
Andrew Dingwall has enjoyed plenty of games with his granny and is more proud than sheepish when he owns to struggling to outhit her off the tee. After describing how Phyllis was a dab hand at hockey and tennis in her youth, he went on to talk in hushed and admiring tones of how she knows the secret to keeping her drives under every wind St Andrews has to offer. No wonder she cannot wait to be back in action...
Yet any day now, the full battalion of St Andrews’ mowers will be warming up to prepare the way for Granny Dingwall’s drives to be running as far as they ever were; the town’s golfers will be vying for starting times on all seven courses; and curtain shops and the rest will be opening up.
Though hundreds of locals have been walking the fairways, the streets of St Andrews have been empty throughout this period. There are queues for the grocery stores where everyone obeys the yellow-lined distancing instructions as avidly as they might follow the Rules of Golf, but that is the sum total of current happenings.
“It’s crazy how different it is,” Dingwall said. “You go for a stroll and there are days when you will see one or two people at most.”
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