{{ubiquityData.prevArticle.description}}
{{ubiquityData.nextArticle.description}}
The other day, a friend suggested that if any people new to golf were to tune into Sky Sports, they would be wondering if there was golf before Tiger Woods: “The commentators can all tell us how Tiger did this, that and the next thing, but not too many of them still talk about Arnold Palmer and the other old-timers.”
My friend is not the only person to have made an observation like that. Neil Coles, 50 times a professional winner and for 38 years the chairman of the European Tour, despairs when he tunes into the latest tournament. Doing the usual thing of avoiding any mention of himself, Coles said he doubted whether the modern tour players would know the first thing about golfers like Dai Rees, Max Faulkner and Ken Bousfield.
“They’re the players who led to the tour being where it is today,” he said. “When my generation started, there were only around 10 of us making a living from playing competitively. We vowed to make it up to 100 and we surpassed that by miles.”
The R&A might argue that there is plenty of history on their website and that much is true. The BBC, of course, used to introduce some lovely snippets of the old stuff by Peter Alliss and Co., only now it is Sky rather than the BBC who cover the Open and the bulk of the competitive golf in Europe. It makes for plenty of lucrative deals, and if what we are led to believe is correct, Sky’s style of coverage encourages a younger audience. Yet what, you wonder, is the median age of those who put their feet up in front of the TV to watch our sport?
Even at St Andrews, something happened which was more than passing strange. In 2018, when the Links Trust purchased the Tom Morris Golf Shop just down from the 18th green of the Old Course, they changed its name. Instead of continuing to honour the little eyrie where Old Tom Morris, the winner of four Opens in the 1860s, would sit outside the door watching the golf in his declining years, the trust changed the name to “The Open.”
“What the hell have you done to Old Tom’s shop,” came a tweet from one David Woodford in the immediate aftermath. His tweet was one of thousands.
In an article in The Courier in April 2018, the R&A defended their decision as follows: “The Open shop is an exciting new retail offering celebrating the championship’s close association with St Andrews and the town’s heritage as the home of golf.”
“It’s yet another instance of disappearing history,” said Coles, who had not been apprised of this sorry situation before. “That was such a famous shop. Everyone wanted to go to Old Tom’s shop. All the Americans would have known to visit it on their trips to Scotland and now, like so many other things belonging to golf’s past, it’s going to get forgotten.”
E-MAIL LEWINE
Lewine Mair