Dunhill tournament fails to capture the public’s imagination......

Extract, Alasdair Reid, The Times, 28 September 2003

........ The appearance of so many stellar names at the top of the leaderboard must have come as a blessed relief to the organisers of a tournament that has achieved only the most perverse forms of distinction in its short and ill-starred life. You don’t want to rubbish the thing completely, but at an event that has the wrong field, the wrong format, the wrong venue and the wrong place in the calendar, it is difficult to think where the scope lies to shower the thing with praise.

Certainly, the good people of St Andrews and Carnoustie could scarcely have expressed their disdain more emphatically than by their steadfast refusal to turn up and watch. The motif of the Dunhill Links Championship is an empty grandstand, a backdrop so familiar by now that you wonder why the organisers bother to erect the things at all.

Free admission has been on offer for the first three days of this year’s competition, but even that has done nothing to raise the dismal attendance figures that have underscored its dubious appeal.

Window-dressing the event with a handful of celebrities — a term that has lately acquired a rather elastic definition — cannot disguise the fact that the primary purpose of the tournament is to provide a platform for a private party for the sponsors and their friends.

Nothing wrong with a spot of corporate canoodling, but it sits ill-at-ease in a place where golf retains a purist dimension and where six-hour rounds provoke a furrowing of disapproving brows.

It has also been depressing to observe the event unfold just a few miles from Drumoig, where the Scottish Golf Union’s cutting-edge training centre was forced into liquidation last week for want of funds far less than are being spent on this event......