Scottish golf public shun congested showbiz fairways

Martin Johnson, The Telegraph, 11 October 2004

It would be a rum business anywhere in the world for a golfing audience to largely stay away from a tournament when there is no charge for admission, and then turn up - in semi-respectable numbers anyway - when asked to pay £15 to get in on the final day. But in Scotland? It's as savage a blow to the national stereotype as Italy suddenly being described as a nation of careful road users, or finding an American who can tell you where Wales is.

However, when a Scot goes to a golf tournament he actually wants to watch the golf, and not some ageing film star re-enacting the Hamlet cigar advert down in the bowels of the Road Hole bunker at St Andrews. The likes of Kevin Costner and Michael Douglas certainly attracted some female attention, but it was only when the professionals got down to serious business yesterday - on the bleakest day of the four moreover - that the spectators outnumbered the marshals.

The Dunhill Links is fun to play in, for both pros and amateurs, but in its four-year existence has yet to attract the kind of galleries you would expect from an event that carries more prize money than any tournament in Britain bar the Open. It certainly does not compare with the crowds that used to turn up for the old Dunhill Cup, when even Tiger Woods was tempted by the £100,000 first prize.

However, it was Woods himself who raised the television money bar to such heights that it turned the Dunhill swag into so much petty cash in the biscuit tin, and when the sponsors declined to offer him, or anyone else, the usual ludicrous amount just for turning up, that was the end of the international team format. Woods spent Dunhill week on honeymoon in Barbados, although we still do not know whether his new bride managed to lure him up the aisle without paying him appearance money.

International team events like the old Dunhill Cup really only work if you can get the best players, but there is so much money sloshing around elsewhere now, that even an event like the World Cup in Spain in November will have spectators quivering with the same kind of breathless anticipation that football fans reserve for the LV Vans Trophy.

A spin off from the old Canada Cup - the trophy is engraved with names such as de Vicenzo, Thompson, Nagle and Palmer - the World Cup was won by Woods and Duval representing America in 2000. This year the Americans are sending the relatively obscure Scott Verplank and Bob Tway.

The Dunhill Links have tried hard to get the format right, but by grouping all the so-called A-list celebrities and the Ryder Cup players together on the same one of the three courses every day, instead of splitting them up, spectators get to see the same people over and over again. And it's a moot point as to how many viewers can take a daily dose of commentaries like: "…and now let's go to the ninth, where Samuel L Jackson is playing his seventh."

Yesterday Jackson was one of those celebrities who had made the cut, thereby confusing the issue for spectators trying to follow the climax of the tournament proper. The two tee start was essential, given that the pace of play had been so slow here that they would never have finished in daylight, but with some groups in threeballs of all pros, and some in fourballs with two amateurs, it just did not feel like a big event was taking place. The two pros you felt most sorry for were the Dane Anders Hansen, and the Swede Robert Karlsson, both of whom missed the cut, but by dint of their amateur partners having played better than they had, were obliged to stay on for the team event. It produced the rare sight in a pro-am of Karlsson, the professional, picking up his ball having played too many while his amateur partner, R & A secretary Peter Dawson, carried on. This was at the 13th where Karlsson took two to get out of a bunker, and his caddie, after realising that his man could not improve on the amateur's par four, scooped up his ball from the green and threw it to a small boy in the gallery.

One can only hope that the young man will experience more exciting moments than this over the course of his lifetime, but given the choice between a used golf ball from Robert Karlsson, and an autograph from Kevin Costner, it is a toss-up as to which one a Scottish golf crowd covets less.