Jack Nicklaus is reputed to have said that the quality of golf courses used to stage the British Open championship diminishes the further away you get from Scotland.
You can’t get much further away and still be in the British Isles than Royal St George’s in Sandwich on the Kent coast, but if you think that means this year’s venue is a goat track, think again.
It was, in fact, a group of Scotsmen who first agreed to move the cham-pionship south of the border, and just seven years after it was formed, St George’s (as it was then) hosted the Open in 1894, the first time it had been played outside Scotland.
The champion in 1894 was the great English professional JH Taylor, then at the start of a glorious career that saw him win the Open in three separate decades. Only two other men have ever done that — Harry Vardon and our own Gary Player.
Taylor discovered that St George’s, with its long carries off the tee and massive sand hills, turned into a monster when the wind blew. He never broke 80 in any of his four rounds and yet won by five shots.
It is safe to assume that Taylor’s winning score of 326 would be about 50 blows shy of next week’s winner in the 132nd Open championship.
To put it in perspective, the last time the Open was played at Royal St George’s Ernie Els became the first (and so far the only) man in the tournament’s history to record four rounds in the sixties. That’s how the miraculous modern equipment has changed the game.
Els’s score wasn’t good enough to win, however, as Greg Norman blew the field away with a final-day 64, to record his second (and last) major championship victory. Els had to wait until Muirfield last year to get his hands on the claret jug, when gale-force winds destroyed Tiger Woods’s challenge on the third day.
Els’s emotional reaction to victory was a million miles from the laid- back celebration of his two United States Open wins. He double-bogeyed the final par three to slip into a four-way playoff and had to produce his second impossible bunker shot of the day to finally clinch victory.
It was quite possibly the first time in his career that Els was almost undone by the enormity of the occasion. Having done it once, it would be easy to suggest that he should be able to win major championships on a more regular basis from here on.
That, however, would be to ignore the lessons of 2003 when the first two majors of the year went to the ‘wrong menâ€. Canadian left-hander Mike Weir won the US Masters at Augusta with a nerveless finish that laughed in the face of those who believed that he would crumble down the stretch. Then Jim Furyk, swinging the club in a manner that would have made Taylor laugh, annexed the US Open.
Woods is expected to win this year but, for the first time since we entered the new millennium, he is not the current holder of a major title. His so-called ‘slump†includes four wins in 10 starts in 2003. What has happened, of course, is that he has raised the bar.
If the wind blows at Royal St George’s, we will find out a lot more about the Woods psyche. He coped extremely badly with filthy conditions at Muirfield and it was staggering to see the body language of the man who has set new standards of focus on the golf course. By contrast, Els resembled Clint Eastwood chewing on a cheroot, knowing that the job was dirty but that it had to be done.
What marks the Open as special, however, is that talk of the world numbers one and two automatically dominating is nonsense.
Weir and Furyk have proved that there are dozens of golfers out there good enough to win a major — and remember that it’s only four years since Paul Lawrie won at Carnoustie. Lawrie was the first Scot to win the Open since Sandy Lyle, and Lyle won his Open at Royal St George’s. It is, therefore, not ridiculous to suggest that Colin Montgomerie could feature next week.
Of the Southern African contingent — in addition to Els — Nick Price is playing better than at any time in the past six years.
He has a win and a recent second-place finish on this year’s US PGA Tour, and has publicly stated that he believes the one major that could still be won by an ‘old man†is the British Open. That’s because of the way the courses are set up, with a greater premium on accuracy than length.