{{ubiquityData.prevArticle.description}}
{{ubiquityData.nextArticle.description}}
This story begins on a spring day earlier this year. A middle-aged man is on his daily run around St Andrews heading out along Lade Braes from the West Port in the centre of the town to the south. If this summons up recollections of Eric Liddell and Co running on the West sands in the opening scenes of Chariots of Fire, then there the comparison ends.
It was April, when the Masters should have been taking place but had been postponed to the end of the year because of COVID-19. The previous month the Players Championship had ended after one round and the Open, scheduled for July, had just been cancelled. Subconsciously if not consciously, Malcolm Booth, 41, the sales and marketing director of R&A Ltd., the commercial arm of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, was troubled by this. The Open is hugely important to the R&A and it was the first time since the Second World War that the event would not be held.
As Booth jogged along, he had a “eureka!” moment. “Why not a virtual reality Open?” he thought to himself, wiping sweat from his face. The Grand National had done just that with the world famous horse race. Why couldn’t the R&A do something similar with golf’s oldest major championship? “The virtual Grand National attracted 4.8 million viewers,” Booth said. “That got me thinking: ‘What could golf do? What could we put out?’ ”
By taking more than 250 pieces of footage from the Opens to be held over the Old Course, the filmmakers have stitched together a virtual reality Open that will end with five pairings of men competing for the virtual title of Champion Golfer for the Year 2020.
Booth took his brainwave to colleagues at the R&A and then to IMG, the R&A’s broadcast partners. “Can you do this?” he asked, conceding that it was “incredibly ambitious.” The answer was yes. “It was a daunting but fascinating idea,” Ben Simister, the IMG producer and director, said. “We wanted to make it as seamless as possible. We wanted viewers to settle down and watch it as if it was a live transmission.”
The result is an imagined Open involving every one of the nine winners of the game’s oldest major championship played at St Andrews starting with Jack Nicklaus in the 1970 event, the first transmitted in colour. Open champions from other venues include Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, Gary Player, Arnold Palmer, Tom Watson, Greg Norman, Tony Jacklin and Lee Trevino. By taking more than 250 pieces of footage from the Opens to be held over the Old Course, the filmmakers have stitched together a virtual reality Open that will end with five pairings of men competing for the virtual title of Champion Golfer for the Year 2020. The winner already has been chosen – by 10,000 viewers of Open.com and other R&A social media sites.
It is called The Open for The Ages and it will be broadcast Sunday on Sky Sports, NBC, Golf Channel, TV Asahi in Japan and the Open.com, the Open’s YouTube and Facebook channels. Ten-minute highlight segments will act as teasers for the film being transmitted on the previous Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
Let’s be clear. This is not Tin Cup, which was total imagination. Nor is it Follow the Sun, the 1951 film about the life of Ben Hogan. The first three days of action are factual, taken from the archives, even if the fourth is imaginary. Simister calls it “faction,” the merging of fact and fiction into a film. Commentary is by Butch Harmon, Ewen Murray and Nick Dougherty and, from out on the course, Iona Stewart.
“This is definitely something different,” Simister, an enthusiastic amateur golfer, said. “We didn’t want to simply pull out archives of the 2000 Open, the 1978 Open, the 2015 Open, etc., though there is a lot of this sort of thing on television at the moment. We wanted to make something more exciting. We thought to ourselves: ‘What can we do with the archive material?’ It was a daunting but fascinating project. In lockdown everyone has been doing jigsaw puzzles. This is a 3,000-piece jigsaw.”
Golf lends itself to a project such as this in a way that tennis, say, does not. If you think about it, golfers are often filmed on their own or with their caddie in discussion about the next shot and whenever another golfer or another ball (or balls) popped up in the archive material Simister and his team photoshopped it or them out. Another advantage that golf has is that down the years St Andrews has not changed much in the way that a tennis stadium might have been significantly enlarged or even rebuilt, say, or had a part demolished. The clubhouse, Hamilton Hall, the town’s skyline all remain much the same in 2020 as it was in 1970.
Murray added the last two pieces of commentary late last week and describes this project as among the most satisfying of his long career in broadcasting. “It surpasses anything I have done before,” Murray said. “The commentary is as live. We had no idea of the script. Nick and I were in separate sound studios because of COVID-19 and Butch did his from Las Vegas. He is going on 77 but still as sharp as a tack.”
“The way I approached this film was much the same way as I approached producing or directing live golf,” Simister said. “I thought to myself: ‘What do I want to see on Sunday afternoon?’
“It will be very subjective. I didn’t tell the commentators how it was going to end. I wanted to hear freshness in their voices, to make it seem as though they were watching this live. What I hope is that the viewer will lose all sense that this is a work of fiction and think that instead it is a broadcast.”
E-Mail John