Big names are forced to read from bad script

Mel Webb, The Times, 22 October 2001

They mounted a charm offensive at St Andrews yesterday that was not charming but was certainly offensive. A succession of high-profile golfers and celebrities were wheeled in by the sponsor to tell everybody how terrific the Dunhill Links Championship was, how much they were all enjoying it and how amazed they were that the event had been so roundly criticised. Yet again, the attempt failed pitifully.

In an effort to claw back some of the ground they had lost, Dunhill put Darren Clarke, Lee Westwood and Colin Montgomerie in front of a microphone, together with Michael Douglas and Ian Botham, and all of them expressed amazement that the non-event had had rotten eggs thrown at it for days. They chose to make their pronouncements in the media centre, which was not altogether a bad idea: there were probably more journalists at St Andrews than spectators.

It goes without saying that nobody was fooled. Indeed, Johan Rupert, the chief executive officer of Richemont, which owns the sponsoring company, and his aides were even more insulting than they had been before. Persuading golfers and other famous people to spout platitudes was as transparent as a jellyfish, only without the sting.

As the tournament shuffled grimly towards a fifth day, the ministry of disinformation surrounding Rupert found it curiously testing to release attendance figures. It is difficult to understand why - the fingers of five or six pairs of hands would have been quite enough to have done the job, such has been the public’s feverish enthusiasm for staying away.

A visit later in the day by Rupert and Iain Banner, one of his leading aides and, like his boss a member of the championship committee, failed to shed any more light. Neither Rupert nor Banner had come close to answering a searching question all week; their belated exercise in damage limitation failed almost before it had started.

However, if the organisers got one thing right on another day visited by meteorological nasties, it was in their decision to finish the third round then pull up the stumps and come back today for a final attempt to complete 72 holes. If they had started yesterday afternoon and had then been faced with another day of rain and fog, they would have been in an even stickier pickle.

The fourth day of the tournament gave an accurate indication of who were potential winners of the £551,000 first prize. By the end, all 156 professionals had played on the three courses that had been used for the first three rounds and a better than half-decent leaderboard had emerged.

Paul Lawrie has not won anything since he became Open champion at Carnoustie in 1999, but having left the scene of his triumph virtually unscathed with a 71 in the first round, he continued to make progress at Kingsbarns. His 63 yesterday would have been a record for the Old Course but for the fact that the 15th tee had been moved up by 40 yards.

Lawrie was not a bit worried about that. Sharing the lead with Paul McGinley on 202, 14 under par, was enough for now. “All year I’ve been playing fantastic tee to green and shooting under par after taking 33 or 34 putts,” he said. “It was nice to see them going in for a change.”

McGinley was again steadiness personified. A 71 with no bogeys at Carnoustie was as much as could have been asked of any man, although David Howell, who lies in fourth place a shot behind Ernie Els, had a 69 at the same course. He is not out of it by any means, and neither are Brian Davis and Paul Casey, both on 11 under.

Having said all that, today will still be something of a mish-mash, with the leading amateurs getting in the way of men who are playing for a king’s ransom. Even now, the potential for chaos has not gone away.