Sandwich not right for Open
Bill Elliott
Sunday July 27, 2003
The Observer
The old boys with the keen eyes and a bagful of majors between them do not often agree on anything, but on one subject this week there was unanimity between Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Gary Player... Royal St George's is by a distance the luckiest, flukiest golf course ever to host The Open Championship. And either by inference or, in one instance, by declaration, they appear to agree with my contention that it is time to remove this carbuncle from the Open rota.
As the game's followers continue to struggle to come to terms with Ben (Who?) Curtis's outrageous debut victory last weekend, the original 'Big Three' were just as flummoxed as anybody else.
Nicklaus, in Moscow discussing new courses when his fellow Columbian took the title, said his wife, Barbara, looked up the results on teletext, then looked at him with an impish grin.
'She said, "Guess who won the British Open then?" I just shrugged and she said, "Ben Curtis" and I said, "I'm sorry?" I'd heard of him before, in fact we gave him an exemption for the Memorial Tournament in Ohio this year. I don't think he made the cut and I'm also not sure I've ever met him. I've yet to see a decent picture of him to know that.
'What I do know is I've never played particularly well at St George's. I won a tournament there as an amateur when I was 19 and never played a good round after that. It's always been a hard course for me. How could I shoot an 83 there one day and 66 the next, which I've done, and not feel I've swung any differently? It's just that type of golf course.'
Watson, too has his doubts about the validity of the Kent course as a testing ground capable of producing the year's champion golfer. After five Open victories, four in Scotland, one at Birkdale, Watson knows what it takes to win and understands the perversity of links golf - the need for a man to withstand the slings and arrows of particularly outrageous fortune. RSG, however, is at least one bad break too many as far he is concerned.
'I intend to be at Royal Troon next year. It's a different course to St George's, as is Turnberry, where we are playing at the moment [the Senior British Open, a reprise of 1977's famed 'duel in the sun', when Watson beat Nicklaus by a shot, the rest of the field spread over Ayrshire and irrelevant for the last 36 holes]. Here and at Troon you pretty much get what you deserve, there's not a lot of bad bounces here. St George's is a course you never really understand.
'When you play there you're always looking where you're stepping because you could go for a double-bogey very quickly and not hit a bad shot. There are at least a dozen places there where you hit the ball and you won't know until you're 50 yards from it whether it's gone into a bunker, it's in the rough, or, glory be, it's on the green.'
Watson points out that no matter who you are there are three fairways where, under Open conditions, it is all but impossible to drive the ball and keep it on the fairway at Sandwich. For him and everyone else, there seems no acceptable logic to the 1st, 17th and 18th holes.
'You need to be really, really lucky to keep a ball on the fairway there,' he says. 'OK, at 17 you can lay an iron off the tee, but you still have to hit the ball into a 12-yard area on the right-hand side and just hope it stays there.'
It is this eyes-wide-shut, hit-and-hope aspect that is most depressing. Golf by its nature should be perverse. Sometimes it is reassuring that the good ends up bad and vice versa, but introduce too much fickle fate into the equation and what should be a stern examination designed to identify rare quality ends up as randomly fair as a lottery ticket fluttering in the breeze.
There is no point grafting until you have control of the ball through the air at St George's because once it lands no one can predict the outcome on fairways that carry all the redeeming qualities of a seeded pipeline.
Gary Player, a great golfer who has never stopped thinking hard about the game, has no doubts that St George's should now be consigned to history. 'It's really not a great Open course. I think 80 per cent of people would agree that it is not a real true test of golf.
'Should it stay on the Open rota? No, I don't think so. Where should replace it? Turnberry should. It would be a tragedy if the Open never went back there. This is a great course with great hotel accommodations. The practice range is excellent and the enthusiasm of the people in this area is fantastic. It's also a lot easier to get to than Sandwich.'
So will St George's go? Will Turnberry be reinstated? Probably not. For a start the Open organisers, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, have a vested interest in a site in the south of England. There are commercial reasons for this. These are not, however, overwhelming. It is all very well making a few pounds extra because London is nearby, but when the core point of the Championship is compromised by a course so quirky that Nicklaus, Watson and Player admit they have never felt able to play it properly then something is deeply wrong. And this is before we even start discussing the bloody scorecards down there....