The top 10 overrated things in sport - No 3 - St Andrews

Alasdair Reid, The Sunday Times, 29 February 2004

The home of golf? No, just the site of a sandstone clubhouse where golf’s rules are made.

The best course in the world? Get away, it’s not even the best course in Fife.

A shrine to the sport as a whole? Yes, but only for the terminally misty-eyed. Lift that mist - tricky when the stuff surrounds the town for days on end - and you are left with a grim, Presbyterian settlement on a wind-lashed promontory in the North Sea.

The Old Course has a few good holes, but so many quirks that even the saintly Bobby Jones, the Mother Teresa of American golf, once tore up his card and walked off.

To make matters worse, St Andrews’ few charms are being eroded by a development sprawl around the town as it reinvents itself as a golfing Disneyland for American tourists.