St Andrews will make Carnoustie a distant nightmare

For those who cherish golf, there is something gratifying in the fact that the organisation that has the biggest influence on the sport around the world is run by a tiny staff from a 19th-century building in a town in Scotland that does not have a railway station. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews lays down the rules of golf in every country outside the United States and Mexico.

Most of the time it conducts itself and the events it runs in a manner that is as sure-footed as any sporting administrative body in these islands. But sometimes it gets it wrong. The Open at Carnoustie last year was a case in point. The fearsome Angus links had always been among the most difficult in golf, even before the course was set up, seemingly, with fairways no wider than church aisles and rough made luxuriant by spring rain.

To these defences was added a capricious wind. Player after player spoke out against the severity of the course and they christened it Carnastie. When, after the Open, Hugh Campbell, the chairman of the championship committee, and Sir Michael Bonallack, then the secretary of the R & A, accused Tiger Woods of being too defensive, their criticisms had a very hollow ring. That the 1999 Open was won by Paul Lawrie, who had been nearly 159th in the world at the start of the week, merely added to its surreal nature.

So one essential facing Peter Dawson, who has succeeded Bonallack as secretary of the R & A, is to make sure that there is not another chorus of complaints from the players this week. "I want the Open to be a great festival of golf," Dawson said last Thursday morning as he sat in his office overlooking the 1st and 18th holes of the Old Course. "It is the Millennium Open, St Andrews is the home of golf. We are expecting very big crowds. We are marking it with the past champions' challenge.

"With regard to last year's championship, there was clearly a very large body of opinion that Carnoustie was unfair, the fairways were narrow and the rough was savage. I think that we all at the R & A accept some of that," Dawson said.

"The set-up of the golf course is our responsibility not his [John Philp, the greenkeeper's] and if it got out of hand I would never regard that as his fault. I would regard it as ours, frankly. I would not sit here and blame people we work with. Obviously, those sort of things are not problems at St Andrews. The Old Course will be set up in a traditional manner.

"It is a little longer than for the last Open. It will protect itself as it always does with the bunkering, the pin positions and the wind. All links courses need wind to provide a full test and I will be disappointed if we do not have some but we will not trick the course up to compensate."

But why couldn't the fairways have been widened at the eleventh hour or the rough cut back? Did the players need to be humiliated, as some of them clearly felt they were? "There is always this great terror on the part of greenkeepers that if they cut something very late and it turns white, it is going to look dreadful on television," Dawson said.

It may be that the main criticisms of the Old Course have already been made. They came a few years ago when a group of players, led by Severiano Ballesteros, Mark O'Meara and Curtis Strange, suggested that the addition of new tees to lengthen five holes was unnecessary. There was no need to desecrate a masterpiece, they said.

Dawson bridled slightly at this. "I am surprised by that because the sole purpose of those new tees is to bring the hazards that were always the key elements back into play," he said. "It had got to the point where people were carrying the bunkers at 16. The bunkers there were never meant to be carried. I think they have returned the holes to the challenge of former years.

"It is an absolute fallacy to say the Old Course has been 100 per cent the same for centuries, though probably in the last 50 years it has been less changed than at any time in its history. Bunkers have been put in, angles of holes changed. Look at the change by the 17th. The railway lines, the sheds, the road behind the 17th green have changed many times. People have memories of the past 20 years and think that it has always been so."

Dawson, who once played off scratch and now describes himself as masquerading off 3 when he should really be higher, is the second-best golfer after Bonallack to have held his position and the best educated of the postwar secretaries with a degree in engineering from Cambridge. He has an easy charm and a keen business mind, attributes that, in a former life, were used to direct a company employing several thousand and with a turnover of £300 million.

The television rights, at present held by the BBC in order to be available to the widest audience, may be sold elsewhere. A new golf development secretary has been appointed and soon there will be a new commercial secretary. It is a time of change for the R & A, and most of all for Dawson. He held up his hands and smiled. "Fingers crossed for this week," he said.

Email this page to a friend | Return to top of page