ANDREWS, Scotland — It always seems to be about the old at Andrews, from the university, founded in 1413, to the ruins of the 12th-century cathedral to, above all, the Old Course, the ancestral home of golf and the site this week of another British Open.
But there is, believe it or not, a
, even if it is not in use this week.
It lies adjacent to the Old on the same precious stretch of Scottish seaside property known to local residents simply as the Links. The New has no
and no
, but it, too, has great views of the town and its steeples, and is even closer to the West Sands, site of that
that opens the Oscar-winning film “Chariots of Fire.”
Yet there is no New Course Hotel, no New Course signature golf cart, not even, it appears, a New Course cap, visor or T-shirt at double the reasonable price (or any price).
No, in St. Andrews it is definitively out with the New and in with the Old.
The Old, established in 1552, can make grown men tear up as they pose for group photos on the first hole after securing the tee time of their lives. The New does not even require a reservation.
Each hole on the Old has an aura and a name: Burn for 1, Ginger Beer for 4, Bobby Jones for 10, Road for 17 and more. No hole on the New gets a name, just a number.
“Look, if I’m being honest, I get one question about the New for every 50 I get about the Old,” said Gordon Moir, director of greenkeeping at St. Andrews Links Trust.
The New does have its proponents, though.
“I think the majority of the locals who play recognize the New is the better of the two courses,” said Tony MacDonald, a member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, as he played a solo round on the New Course on a sunny afternoon last month.
Moir, who has played both courses, said he would rate the New as “slightly more difficult,” in part because it has only one double green to the Old’s seven.
“You can have a pretty poor second shot on the Old and still be on the green, and if your long putt is good, you are going to make par,” he said. “You won’t be able to do that on the New. Most of the locals would probably say it’s a better test of the golf than the Old.”
The courses are neighbors with different attributes.
“How they play is the complete opposite,” Moir said. “Because the Old Course goes anticlockwise and all the trouble is on the right, while the New goes in the other direction, so all the trouble on the New is on the left. You can slice to your heart’s content around the New and all you do is find another fairway. It’s more like a normal links golf course with the normal-sized greens and undulations.”
The twist is that, by most sporting standards, the New Course is far from new. It was built in 1895.
“It’s probably the oldest new course,” said George Wilkinson, a starter on the New Course. “Maybe they could market it that way.”
Said Moir: “Up until the New Course was built, the Old Course was just known as the Links. It was only when they built the New Course that they said, ‘We’ll call it the Old.’ They had a lot of imagination in those days.”
The New was designed by
, who, despite the assignment, was known as Old Tom Morris to distinguish him from his son, who was known as Young Tom. (New Tom apparently was not an option.)
Old Tom, one of the most influential figures in the history of golf, was a four-time Open champion in the 1860s after finishing second in the inaugural Open Championship, at Prestwick Golf Club, in 1860. He later did pioneering work in greenskeeping and design, renovating some of the Old Course but starting from gorse and scratch with the New Course, which did not stay the newest course in town for long.
The
was built in 1897 even closer to the beach (and its holes eventually got names). But the New has continued to be called the New.
“We occasionally have debate: ‘Should we change the name?’ ” Moir said. “Do people really want to come and play a new course? Because that’s just what they think — that it’s new. So maybe it would it be better to call it the Tom Morris course? But for now, it’s still the New.”
New, when pronounced by a Scot, finishes with a sound that does not exist in the American strain of English, something roughly akin to “Neuhh” (think an abbreviated lamb’s bleat).
However it is pronounced, the New generally operates on a first-come, first-started basis. This is not because there is low demand. Like the Jubilee Course, where a tee time can be booked 24 hours in advance, the New gets more than 40,000 rounds of play a year, according to Moir. The Old Course, which, unlike the Jubilee and the New,
, gets more than 40,000 rounds annually in only six days a week.
The reason most golfers cannot generally reserve time on the New is that the Royal and Ancient Golf Club paid for its design and construction and, for many years, its maintenance. Its members are thus entitled to claim every alternate starting time for most of the year.
Generally, the members give advance notice, but they do exercise their right, which is guaranteed by the 1974 Act of Parliament governing how the Links are run.
“They don’t actually take up many slots,” Moir said. “They have a medal on the New every third Friday of the month, and will have a lot of people playing that day. A Monday and Tuesday morning are quite popular. They go in a ballot for the Old, and those who don’t get in the ballot will come play the New.”
So it goes in general, the New as the consolation prize in the great raffle of a St. Andrews golfing life. But the bonus is that sometimes those who start out playing the New get to play a little of the Old by mistake (or by hook).
With the courses so close together, the route can get confusing after the fifth green of the New. Hence the signs with arrows that read, “6th tee, New Course.”
“You can play three courses in one day here,” Moir said with a laugh. “If you slice it and play the Old, you can play a few holes on the New and a few holes on the Eden on the way round. It’s quite often people go the wrong direction. There are a couple of holes that are really bad.”
The Links encompasses five and a half courses in all: the Old, the New, the Jubilee, the Eden, the Strathtyrum and the nine-hole Balgove.
Only one continues to be a global bucket-list item, however, despite all the good, new-fashioned tests of golf available.
“Look, there’s no substitute for history,” said Shane Leon, 52, an American pilot based in Berlin who shot 92 on the Old and 89 on the New during a June visit. “Say you’re in Gettysburg, right? And say Lincoln gave his address right there. Three hundred yards away, it might have been just a crossroads for the stagecoach. Who cares? Where you want to be is the place where Lincoln gave his address.”
As for St. Andrews?
“I know of no one with any allegiance to the game,” Leon said, “who can end a conversation of golf one-upmanship by saying, ‘I played the New.’ ”
Source:NYTimes
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