Less-than-swinging times as home of golf bunkers visitors

Gerard Degroot, Scotland on Sunday, 21 September 2003

Every once in a while, it’s a good idea to turn away from world events and take a look at the issues on one’s doorstep. Where I live, in St Andrews, it takes a really big story to push golf off the front pages of our weekly newspaper, the Citizen. I’m talking about something on the order of ‘Chicken Farm Planned for Strathkinness’, a shocker which merited two inch headlines a few years ago.

After a massive public outcry the chickens went elsewhere, proof of the power of journalism. But no amount of public protest could prevent an even more scandalous development, the decision by the St Andrews Links Trust to remodel the famous Road Hole bunker next to the 17th green of the Old Course. The bunker, where many a pro’s dreams of Open glory have been buried, was to be made slightly shallower, thus enabling a six-footer like myself to see out the top.

The locals, for whom golf is religion, reacted rather like you can imagine the Sikhs responding to an announcement that the Golden Temple would be covered in aluminium siding. The Citizen announced the decision with the biggest headlines I’ve seen in a long time - much bigger than the chickens got. Letters of protest flooded in, which seems rather strange since the correspondents, all of them keen golfers, must have spent the very worst moments of their golfing life in that bunker.

Golf isn’t just part of the town; it is the town. In my naughtier moments I’ve wondered how many townspeople were conceived in the Road Hole bunker, though that’s not an issue one could actually raise in this genteel place. St Andrews is the only place I know where one doesn’t feel like an absolute idiot walking down the main street carrying a bag of clubs and wearing those silly shoes. According to the local police, the No 1 crime in the town is theft of golf clubs. Restaurants come and go, but no golf shop has ever gone out of business.

The courses (there are now six) have an organic relationship with their surroundings. They aren’t outside the town, they’re part of it. The Old Course wasn’t built, it simply evolved, a combination of scrubby seaside turf, wispy grasses, prickly gorse and rolling dunes. The famous pot bunkers, it is said, evolved when huge rabbit warrens collapsed. Most of the locals want that story to be true because they can’t imagine that an obstacle so cruel could possibly have human origin.

Another story holds that the caddies are the descendants of fisher folk who were put out of work when boats moved further south to Anstruther and Pittenweem. Whether that is true or not doesn’t really matter, since most locals prefer legend to fact. The caddies and the greenkeepers actually look as if they sprouted from the land; their gnarled faces resemble a relief map of the course itself.

A few years ago, my playing partner hit a drive which had the trajectory of an Exocet missile. Just after it left his club, a greenkeeper popped up from a fairway bunker, rather like one of those fairground ducks. The ball hit him square in the forehead and he fell like a skittle. We raced to his aid, and found him struggling to his feet as we approached. There was a small dent in his forehead and one could just make out ‘Titleist’ written backwards across the centre of it. The poor man, blood dripping into his eye, apologised for getting in the way of a good shot and said: "Play on, boys".

The intimate relationship between the town and the courses causes problems for those entrusted with the management of the links. For those who aren’t aware, it bears emphasising that the links are all public, even the hallowed Old Course. They are owned by no one, though they belong to the town. One privilege reserved to townspeople is that they can hang their washing on the fairways of the Old Course on Sundays, which explains why it’s closed on that day. No one actually exercises that right, but the quaint law does deflect the criticism of American visitors who might otherwise be disgruntled at their inability to get a round on Sunday.

Anyone living in the town can purchase a links ticket for £105, entitling the golfer to unlimited play. (That’s about the same as the cost of a single round at a good course in England). Children do not have to pay a penny. But unlimited play is not the same as unlimited access, and there lies the problem. Locals grumble endlessly about the difficulty in getting a round, particularly on the Old Course. They’re incensed by the fact that tee times are set aside for wealthy foreigners prepared to pay a lot of money. Being civilised people, they do not take to the streets in protest, but instead vent their anger in the Citizen, which usually prints two or three letters a week from irate golfers.

Granted, all golf courses are busy, but locals here don’t expect St Andrews to be like other courses. They expect it to be like paradise - that’s why they live here. What they don’t understand is the basic economics of running a massive golfing complex. The Links Trust pulls in around £500,000 a year from the sale of yearly passes, hardly enough to pay for grass seed. In contrast, just under £4m was earned last year from visitors’ green fees - all those Americans and Japanese prepared to pay the going rate for good golf.

Statistics suggests that there’s little ground for complaint. Currently, 60% of the rounds on the courses are played by locals, the other 40% by visitors. The Links Trust, which is perhaps one of the few examples in Britain of a well-run quango, has used the income from visitors to carry out massive improvements in the facilities. In the past 15 years a new course has been opened, two new clubhouses and a practice centre have been built, and course maintenance has improved dramatically. Meanwhile, the cost of a local’s ticket has risen slower than inflation, making it quite possibly the best bargain on earth.

But the good people at the Links Trust are sensitive to the feelings of the townspeople. In order to deflect criticism and to open up more tee times for locals, they’ve recently unveiled plans for a seventh course, to be built (if planning permission is granted) at the cost of £8m. If recent projects carried out by the Trust are a fair indication, the new course will be a gem.

But guess what? Some locals are now complaining about these plans. "We don’t need a seventh course", they write to the Citizen, "we need more tee times on the existing courses". A lot of local golfers here behave as if they lost their logic in a greenside bunker. They’re the types who, when they go to heaven, will complain about the endless harp music and the occasional squeak from the Pearly Gates. The rest of us just play on, enjoying our own piece of paradise.