PRESTWICK, SCOTLAND | With all of the hype and attention directed toward St. Andrews leading up to this week’s 150th Open Championship, one could be excused for thinking that the world’s oldest championship originated at the Old Course.
It did not. In fact, St. Andrews didn’t play host to any of the first 12 Opens. That distinction belongs to Prestwick Golf Club on the west Ayrshire coast of Scotland. St. Andrews might be the “Home of Golf,” but Prestwick proudly touts its claim as the “Birthplace of the Open Championship.”
This beautifully quirky course – bound by the railway hard (and haunting the opening tee shot) on one side, the Firth of Clyde on the other and pinched between its namesake town to the south and Royal Troon to its north – seems a little lost in all the pomp and circumstance going on 100 miles away in the Kingdom of Fife.
But golf purists know, and Prestwick has enjoyed “a huge wave of excitement about it and lots of interest,” said David Fleming, Prestwick’s head professional since 2004. “The great thing is it all points back to Prestwick.”
After Allan Robertson’s death in 1859, Prestwick’s members paid for an ornate belt and decided to hold a championship to determine a successor to the long-time St. Andrews pro as the “champion golfer.” It was originally called the Challenge Belt, played Oct. 17, 1860.
In the 1861 club minutes, “it was unanimously resolved that the Challenge Belt held tomorrow and on all future occasions until it be otherwise resolved shall be open to all the world.” Thus, the Open Championship was born.
Prestwick played host to 24 Open Championships from 1860 to 1925, today second only to the Old Course’s 29. It took 70 years before St. Andrews finally took the lead in 1995. The last at Prestwick, won by American Jim Barnes, was plagued by such large crowds on the criss-crossing links that the club decided it could no longer safely host another. (Bobby Jones’ first win the next year in 1926 at Royal Lytham and St. Annes was the first year that had ropes to marshal spectators thanks to the lessons learned at Prestwick.)
Willie Park Sr. won the inaugural in 1860 and all of his subsequent Open wins (1863, 1866 and 1875) at Prestwick. Old and Young Tom Morris each won all four of their Opens here. Harry Vardon won half of his record six Claret Jugs at Prestwick, in 1898, 1903 and 1914, that last marking his final turn as Champion Golfer of the Year.
When Young Tom won his third consecutive in 1870, the championship belt was retired to him. With no trophy, there was no championship in 1871. A silver Claret Jug was commissioned as the new trophy, and 1872 marked the start of the original rota, with St. Andrews’ Old Course and Musselburgh Links joining as alternating host venues.
Prestwick still has so many of the delightful and devilish quirks that make playing links golf such an inviting challenge to this day. The original Alps hole, now the 17th, was the second hole of the original Old Tom Morris 1851 links and remains unchanged – a distinction that makes it the oldest existing championship golf hole in the world. A tall dune completely hides the green, which is protected by a yawning Sahara cross bunker hidden between the dune and punchbowl green that ensnares any half-hearted blind approach.
Six of the original greens are still used from the first Open layout. The third – a par-5 with the massive sleeper-tied “Cardinal” cross bunker that marks where the hole turns sharply along with the Pow Burn that runs the length of the right side – was the fourth on the original. No. 13 (Sea Headrig) was the original fifth, with a green so devilishly sloped high/back right to low/front left that any architect who built it today would starve for lack of work (which is the modern game’s loss).
The original Himalayas (the current No. 5) – from 1882 when the course was expanded to 18 holes – is a long, blind par-3 over a massive dune. Play any of these holes once and you’ll never forget them.
The club staff has painstakingly studied aerial photos, club archives and Bernard Darwin books to accurately re-create the original 12 holes for a 10-day celebration of the inaugural Open, which will culminate in a tri-match between members of the original rota – the Honorable Company of Edinburgh Golfers (originally at Musselburgh), the R&A and Prestwick – on Oct. 17, 162 years ago in 1860.
A cairn marks the original first tee where the eight players started all three rounds of the inaugural 36 holes in one day. It was a 578-yard par-6 opener to the current 16th green.
“It’s quite a hard thing to put on because you need marshals in hard hats because at one place there’s four holes that all go round and across at the same point,” Fleming said of the 12-hole course. “When we did the risk assessment, there was a bit of assessment working out the tee-off times and the gaps of nine fours on the course at a time. But it’ll be great fun.”
Since 2016, the R&A allowed Prestwick to market merchandise with the Open logo and its distinction as “1st.”
“The 150th, when the putts hit this year, is pretty much done, isn’t it?” Fleming said. “Whereas ‘1’ remains active all the time and never goes out of date.”
E-MAIL SCOTT
Scott Michaux