For those fortunate enough to have traveled to golf’s ancestral home with our clubs, the Open Championship is more than an opportunity to watch great players compete on classic links courses. It is also a chance to relive past trips there. What follows is an olio from Global Golf Post staffers of favorite moments in that part of the world. And that includes one from a colleague who does not even play the game but who nonetheless finds herself in its thrall.
For Jim Nugent, it was a game at Prestwick Golf Club, site of the first Open Championship in 1860. “We were on the par-3 11th, named Carrick,” he said. “The hole was playing right in the sun, so I did not see my shot land. Someone asked if it had hit the pin, but I had no idea. As we approached the green, I saw three balls within 15 feet of the hole. I thought mine must have gone over. But then someone hollered, ‘You’d better come take a look.’ And sure enough, there was my ball in the hole.”
Scott Michaux still smiles when he recalls a round at Kilspindie Golf Club in East Lothian. “Chasing the sunsets, when the shadows are long across the links and the light ethereal, are the closest to heaven as I’ve ever gotten,” he said. “Those days are all special, but one that stands out was a pristine evening at Kilspindie with a college mate and I shooting matching 76s.”
Ron Green Jr. will never forget his first round on the Old at St. Andrews. “Having been around that course many times covering the Open Championship, the first tee and all that surrounds it was comfortably familiar,” he said. “But standing on the famous tee preparing to play it for the first time felt very different. As we waited to hit our tee shots toward the Swilcan Burn, a friend in our group asked if I was nervous. Yeah, I said. A little bit. Good, he said, at least he was not the only one. My tee shot got airborne, found the massive fairway, and we were off, carrying a memory and a feeling that has endured.”
I have made a few dozen golf trips to Scotland. But only one of those was to compete in a tournament. And that made it an experience like no other.
The event was the Carnegie Shield, and the venue was Royal Dornoch. And if the gravitas of competing for a prize donated by industrialist Andrew Carnegie on that hallowed links in the hometown of Donald Ross were not enough, there was the specter of two medal-play qualifying rounds. Suddenly, the wind, gorse and pot bunkers that pocked the fairways and guarded the greens seemed much more terrifying than they ever had during a casual game.
I felt terrible pits in my stomach at the start of each round. But I also relished the sensation of actually competing on an Old World course and having to get the ball in the hole on every hole.
As for Barbara Ivins-Georgoudiou, the non-golfer in this fivesome, her moment is sitting with Herb Kohler on the rooftop terrace of Hamilton Grand in St. Andrews during the 2015 Open. “At one point, he and I marveled at the hundreds of chimneys that jutted from the tops of every building,” she said. “And I tried to imagine what life in that town had been like for the people who had lived there through the centuries.”
John Steinbreder
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