On Thursday the British Open returned to Carnoustie for the first time in 24 years. Here we reprint an article written before the 1975 championship by the esteemed former golf correspondent, the late Peter Dobereiner
Not to put too fine a point on it, Carnoustie is a pretty good place to emigrate from. The little township on the east coast of Scotland, which is to be host to this year’s British Open championship, has few pretensions to charm. It is just a few streets, with the houses huddled together for warmth, straggling along the railway line from Edinburgh to Aberdeen. By some freak of geography this stretch of coast has its own peculiar climate.
Most people who know Carnoustie only from reading about its past Opens have the idea that the place is continuously lashed by gales and stinging rain. That is not quite fair. It can be calm here but then, even in mid-summer, it is liable to be visited by a phenomenon known locally as “haaaaar”.
Purists of the Scottish dialect may complain that there are one or two surplus A’s in that rendering, but that is the phonetic form of the word, a teeth- chattering exclamation to describe the sea mist which strikes icy daggers into your very bones, regardless of how many precautionary layers of cashmere you may have adopted.
Twenty miles inland the sun may beat down warmly on some of the most magnificent country to be found within the British Isles, but in Carnoustie, when the haar rolls in from the North Sea, you know exactly how a bottle of champagne feels as it is plunged into an ice bucket. Haaaaar! How, you may ask, can life be supported in such a place?
For many of us, that is a fairly moot proposition, but the inhabitants have evolved a unique survival technique. It is based on the finest flowering of the Scottish culinary arts, an object resembling nothing so much in texture and taste and appearance (except for being yellow) as an ice-hockey puck. This is the infamous mutton pie. Human digestive juices can make no impression on it and, left to itself, it would simply remain in the system like an outsize gallstone.
However, generous measures of whisky will break down the mutton pie provided the mixture is well agitated. Hence the inhabitants of Carnoustie make a daily pilgrimage to the foreshore and play golf, regardless of the weather. Now a wonderful chemical process takes place.
On reaction with the whisky, the mutton pie dissolves and spreads to the epidermis, forming an insulating layer akin to thermoplastic. The people of Carnoustie are thus double glazed, as it were; or vulcanised, if you prefer. They go about their business with the minimum of clothing, remarking cheerfully to each other on what a bonny day it is.
The men of Carnoustie are fortified against all natural hardships and it was this quality which gave Carnoustie its special place in the history of golf, notably American golf. For towards the end of the last century, when golf in the United States was gathering momentum as a social craze of epidemic proportions, there was a chronic shortage of teachers and club- makers to service the game.
Scotland, home of golf and economically depressed at the time, was the obvious source of golfing missionaries. The village of Carnoustie sent some 150 of its sons to spread the gospel of golf in the New World.
How could a village produce so many pros? Well, in truth, they were probably not all professional golfers as we have come to understand the term. But for a Carnoustie boy, playing golf was as natural as breathing.
The most famous of the Carnoustie immigrants were the Smith brothers, Alex and Willie, who both won US Open championships in due course, and Macdonald, reputedly a better but unluckier player than the lot of them. One Carnoustie man did not make it.
Legend has it that he decided to emigrate to South America, although in all probability that meant the southern states of America rather than the subcontinent. His friends gave him a lavish send-off party and at a late hour, having downed a generous measure of mutton pie dissolving fluid and with many a slurred promise to send the lads a card when he arrived, he staggered off into the night in the general direction of Dundee.
The next thing he knew he was awaking, in an alcoholic haze, looking about him and remarking: “So this is South America, I’d better build myself somewhere to live.” We do not know how far he progressed with his house building before he realised his mistake but one thing is certain. Far from being in South America he was, in fact, only a mile away from Carnoustie, on the site of what is now the 10th hole, known as “South America” to this day.
At a later date, another Carnoustie man successfully made the trip to America and caused a bigger stir than even the Smith brothers. That was the great Tommy Armour, blinded in one eye during World War I and who once climbed out of his tank to strangle a German with his bare hands.
He brought some of that same directness of approach to his teaching of golf after his playing triumphs were over. Actually, it is cheating to call Armour a Carnoustie man, for he was born in Edinburgh, but when he re-turned to Scotland to win the Open at Carnoustie in 1931 it was too tempting a local-boy-makes-good story to quibble about a few miles.
At least, Armour brings us to the Open and to the links of Carnoustie. It is impossible to trace the origins of these old Scottish courses because in the 15th and 16th centuries, there was no formality about the layout of courses. You simply tucked your clubs (all wooden, of course) under your arm, put some balls in your pocket (featheries for the rich, boxwood for the poor) and went off to play over any promising golfing ground.
The land at Carnoustie was wild and bleak and it still retains enough of unkempt quality to justify Gary Player’s horrified description of the course as “a good swamp, spoiled”.
He should have seen it in 1527 when we have the first written record of golf at Carnoustie. A certain Sir Robert Maule was described as a devotee of hunting and hawking and “he exersisit the gowf, and oft times to Barry Lynks quhan the wadsie was for drink”. For anyone not too well up in medieval Scottish, that means that he frequently played golf for a whisky-sour nassau [a bet].
Even so, the finish was thought to be weak. In preparation for its inaugural Open, Carnoustie remodelled the closing holes to make a run-in of unrivalled severity.
Many clubs boast tough finishes. Merion, Pebble Beach and St Andrews are often cited as rugged examples. They are tame compared to Carnous-tie, especially in a teasing wind. Let us play them together. The 16th is a par-three, satirically speaking, at 221m, often needing a button-popping smash with a driver to a hogsback green.
The Barry burn, which winds as insidiously as a tapeworm across the links, waits to swallow a hook or pull. On the right, a tangle of heather threatens a fate scarcely less painful. The sensible way to play this hole is to lay up with a three-iron or so and hope to get down in a chip and a putt. But what golfer was ever that sensible?
Seventeen is worse. They call it the Island hole, a typical case of pawky Scottish wit because that Barry burn snakes across the fairway four times, producing five possible islands on which you may choose to land your drive. On the tee, you work out a complicated equation, involving your bicep size, courage rating and wind strength, and come up with a suggested target area. It was here that Jack Nicklaus came tragically to grief.
In the 1968 Open he had been playing his usual calculating, cautious game and he went into the fourth round trailing Gary Player. On the long sixth, Nicklaus hooked out of bounds, turned and kicked the bag out of his caddie’s hands.
Old Nicklaus watchers thrilled to the sight of this outburst. Now Jack would forget all about safety and turn it on. He had to. And so he did, producing an exhibition of matchless shotmaking.
By the 17th he had Player in his sights and groggy. On the tee Nicklaus wound himself up and slugged the ball as hard as he could. The ball carried enough of the hole’s 417m to leave him no more than a wedge to the flag, flying all the convolutions of the burn. Player, laying up, had a four-iron second shot.
It would be possible to draw up a list of 50 golfers almost guaranteed to birdie the hole after such a drive but Nicklaus, with that toy wedge of his, would not get many votes even from his own family. He duly made a hash of the shot, barely bobbling the ball to the front edge. That gave Player the safety margin he needed.
Memory plays one false – and, anyway, you can look it up in the reference books if you are really interested – but the impression is that Player played the 18th in a series of nervous hops with his seven- iron. It was a par-five then, with out of bounds all the way down the left, the infamous burn intersecting the fairway three times with the final twist just in front of the green to make you sweat, and rough up to your knees just for good measure.
This year the sadists of the cham-pionship committee have decreed a forward tee, making it a par-four and thereby posing the agonising decision of whether to go for the green with your second shot.
That, then, is just one glimpse of Carnoustie. There are really 365 Carnousties, different golf courses with the varying weather each day of the year. Yesterday’s clubbing is meaningless as a guide for today. Physically, it is the longest championship course in Britain at more than 6,3km but it can play as the shortest. This will be the fifth Open to be played here.
After Armour in 1931, Henry Cotton took the 1937 championship – with a last-day 71 in a downpour. He played the finest golf of his life for that round of one under par. Then in 1953 Ben Hogan entered for his one and only British Open. He won with descending rounds of 73, 71, 70, 68 in what many people hold to be the finest four rounds of competitive golf ever played in Britain. Lastly, as we have seen, Player took the title in 1968.
Perhaps that roll of honour tells more about Carnoustie than any hole-by-hole description. No one can anticipate what the 1975 Open will bring. Only one prediction is safe – that the winner will be a great player. Carnoustie is no place for mugs.