Why playing the Old Course at St Andrews should be top of every amateur’s bucket list

This week is the third time that the AIG Women’s Open has been held at St Andrews and it will provide the perfect setting to the ninth and final Major of the golfing year.

My first visit to the Home of Golf came back in 1986 and remains, 38 years on, one of my most cherished memories. I can’t remember the logistics – I think a friend’s dad made all the arrangements – but we would play a round on the Jubilee, two on the Eden and two on the New. On the Wednesday we were booked in for a round on the Old Course, the priciest of the quartet at £16, and the plan would be to fill in the blank Saturday, via the ballot, with a second round around the setting of Seve’s recent Open victory.

I still view the Old Course through the prism of those 15-year-old eyes. I’ve been back a handful of times but the more recent rounds have become slightly blurred; what took place the first time was genuinely mind-blowing.

We would walk the course in the evenings to try and get some sense of its layout given this was decades before the internet. We had chipped in to get a course planner between the four of us but none of us had any real idea and, more worryingly though none of us had even considered this, we had never played a single round of links golf.

The first three days were spent in sunshine and respectable enough scores. We didn’t have the imagination to do anything other than strokeplay and the scores would start in the low to mid 80s and go up from there.

On the day of our debut on the Old Course it was different. We were certainly more nervous and had kept back our favourite diamond-cut sweaters for the occasion but it was also gustier which, from what we could work out, would help us on the front nine.

The opening hole

The beauty of St Andrews’ opening tee shot is that the fairway is more than 100 yards wide. The crudeness of St Andrews’ opening tee shot is that the fairway is more than 100 yards wide. Throw in the R&A clubhouse, history that dates back to 1764 and a guaranteed crowd of casual observers looking over your shoulder and there’s more than enough to offset what looks like a large piece of featureless ground in front of you.

Mention Ian Baker-Finch and The Open and it’s not his win at Birkdale in 1991 that they talk about, rather missing this fairway four years later and having to re-load. Something the first of us managed on this Wednesday; months of planning, hitting balls and dreaming of this very shot had only resulted in being forced to revisit his bag for another ball. I managed to find the fairway and then the green – a 5-wood and 6-iron – and continued to not three-putt and keep the ball in play.

Come the turn I had taken 40 strokes, a couple under my handicap, and I quietly wondered why so much was made of it. Bobby Jones and Sam Snead were famously underwhelmed by the place on their initial visits and, while my teenage brain didn’t go beyond thinking it was more straightforward than I had imagined, it was actually quite playable.

Which it is. The fear with St Andrews, probably more than anywhere else, is that technology and modern firepower will render it too playable. What it needs is wind and it would quickly dawn on us that medium-length par 4s that had been a drive and a short iron were now unreachable coming back the other way.

We didn’t have the skill or the nous to keep the ball low, we would miss greens in all the wrong places and we would be unable to make the carries over the various bunkers. Other less obvious bunkers would also appear from nowhere and we would spend the final two hours of the most anticipated round of our young lives playing out backwards from sand and having absolute no clue of how to stop the ball on any of these double greens.

Three putts were now de rigueur and none of us, despite the silly boasts of the past few days, would walk off the iconic Road Hole with fewer than six strokes. With my adolescent mind now in tatters I half-shanked an approach to the last which left me 90 feet of putt, probably three times the length of anything I had ever experienced before, and very nearly four-putted. Forty-eight strokes, eight worse than the front nine, and one of most humbling golfing educations I’d ever had.

Somewhere in the back of my mind the prospect of getting down to a handicap of 5 and becoming an Assistant Pro wouldn’t have been far away; the walk back to the halls of residence was spent pondering a career change.

Its uniqueness

There are other courses that start and end in the middle of the town but few could equal how much it plays a part over the closing holes. From the 13th onwards the skyline of the Auld Grey Toon becomes very clear and the run for home is taken up a notch.

If you want an underrated hole then look no further than the 3rd and then move to the 12th. You could make a case for every hole on the property.

No hole really follows the other. For a course that has 14 par 4s and half a dozen of them close to drivable with the right wind, every shot is different. Veterans of the course, who have done endless laps of the place, will tell you how every round is different.

Parts of it don’t really make much sense with railway sheds and unfathomable lines despite its overall flatness. And it all finishes with a public walkway crossing a closing hole that might well be the same 100-plus yards wide but where your only thoughts will be with the parked cars that flank the hole down the right.

The constants, though, are spectacular and, even if you weren’t playing the Old Course, these are the bits that will keep you coming back.

“Walking round the town is so special, you can still be in your golf gear and you don’t feel weird. You could easily walk into a restaurant with your spikes on, your glove in your back pocket, dump your clubs at the front door and nobody would bat an eyelid,” explains Robert Rock, who played two Opens at St Andrews.

We did get in the ballot on that Saturday and pretty much the same thing happened as the first round. Had I known it would take me 27 years to get back here then I might have tried to take it all in more. Then again I can still recount every last shot, which was only one fewer than the first time.

Since then I’ve worked at four Opens, caddied in two Dunhill Links and been on stag dos at St Andrews. I will make a detour from any journey just to set eyes on it and, even in among all my cynicism and distrust over many aspects of the modern game, I’ll feel precisely the same as I did on that first morning when we arrived in town at 5am from the London sleeper train.

Legendary designer Pat Ruddy says this of the old place: “Every time I see St Andrews, it makes me want to cry.”

If you’ve spent any time in St Andrews, you’ll likely feel the same. If you haven’t then put it on top your bucket list.

READ MORE: ‘Pure golfing romance’ – I got a sleeper train to play a round at the home of golf