Just Golf

[BullNBear52]

Sundays on the Old Course at St. Andrews: No Golfers Allowed
By SAM BORDENJUNE 12, 2015

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — For those who arrive at the birthplace of golf on a sunny Sunday morning, the rules of play are simple. You can pretty much do anything you want on the historic grounds of the Old Course, as long as it does not involve actually hitting a drive or rapping a putt.

Frisbees are fine. Picnics, too. Locals might tell you that pushing a baby stroller (or pram, in the vernacular) can get a little challenging on some of the more uneven parts of the course, but if your little one will be soothed by the strong winds whipping in off the North Sea then, well, so be it.

Wedding photos on the famed Swilcan Bridge are no problem, either, though guests in formal attire should be advised that they may not fit in with the more casual university students who like to loll about on the 18th fairway.

Put another way: All are welcome at the home of golf on Sundays. Except golfers.

“Why is it this way?” Alastair Matheson, 86, said as he led a small group of visitors on the daily guided tour of the Old Course in the spring. “Because that’s the way it has always been.”

As with many regulations from a different era, the Sunday slumber for the Old Course is a rule that is simultaneously charming and maddening. For most purists — a group that seems to include a majority of the residents of this town on Scotland’s east coast — the centuries-old edict to refrain from golf on Sundays is a sacred part of the Old Course’s venerable traditions. For many golfing tourists — a group that has only been more feverish this year ahead of next month’s British Open on the Old Course — it is downright cruel.

In a city where good weather means it rained for only half the day, and at a course that most every golfer in the world would dearly love to play, why would anyone ever think it’s a good idea to close on a weekend?

Jonathan Kwiatkoski, who traveled here from Chicago on a golf vacation, paused near the renowned Road Hole bunker alongside the 17th green on a recent Sunday morning. He was on his way to play one of the other courses at St. Andrews, and he grinned when asked about the Old Course’s weekly hiatus.

“This is all a little strange, for sure,” Kwiatkoski said, motioning around at the area’s general stillness while watching another man, presumably also a visitor, squat down and appear to closely examine the famous bunker’s grains of sand.

“It’s hard to imagine a public course in America closing on a Sunday,” Kwiatkoski added. “Usually, that’s when everyone plays, not when nobody plays.”

Historians trace the Old Course’s Sunday closure to religious laws dating at least to the 16th century, when some residents of St. Andrews were cited in town criminal logs for playing on the Sabbath. According to Gordon Moir, the director of greens keeping at St. Andrews, it was not until 1941 that the other courses at the complex were opened for play on Sundays.

The Old Course, though, has always stayed shuttered, essentially morphing into a bumpy, sand-dotted parkland that attracts an inordinate number of joggers, dogs and, sometimes, joggers with dogs. (Several signs warn visitors against “dog fouling” and threaten to assess a fine of roughly $60 against any offender who might, say, think about leaving a companion’s bowel movement in a bunker.)

Sunday activities on the Old Course over the years have run the gamut. A local woman named Marie-Noel, who declined to give her surname, said she recalled members of her family laying out their laundry on the course some weeks and added, with a mixture of sheepishness and pride, that she and her friends used to participate in an on-course drinking game known as Port Golf when she was attending a university nearby.

Matheson, one of four guides handling the daily tours, recalled seeing fishermen spread their nets on the fairways so they could mend them. He shook his head when relating a story about a woman in high heels trying to walk across one of the greens.

“That happens more than you would think,” he said. “Then you sometimes see some of the boys out with a football trying to have a proper game before they get chased away.”

Matheson said he had never heard of any serious discussion about changing the Sunday rule. He noted that Old Tom Morris, the legendary player and greenskeeper who revitalized the Old Course in the mid-1800s, was said to have preached, “Even if the golfers don’t need a rest, the course does.”

Moir, who is charged with keeping the course in top shape, heartily endorsed that line of thinking, particularly in a year when the British Open will be played on the Old Course. Each Sunday is a full workday for Moir and his crew, with about 20 workers dispatched over the course to handle tasks from spreading sand to filling divots.

Sundays are the chance to tackle more labor-intensive repairs and get a full reading on what the course needs. (The course will be closed to the public — golfers and picnickers alike — beginning June 19 to prepare for the British Open.)

If members of Moir’s staff see any particularly unruly behavior on Sundays — he chuckled as he detailed the time he witnessed several students engaged in a snowball fight on one of the fairways — they will not hesitate to admonish the offenders, though most visitors are respectful.

For a long time, Moir said, the biggest problem was the number of people who wanted to take pictures next to the flagstick on the 18th green. With the well-known clubhouse standing majestically in the background, the tiny ropes that staff members put up to deter people did little to slow traffic across the putting surface.

These days, however, Sunday visitors will find an authentic St. Andrews flagstick stuck in the ground to the side of the green about halfway toward the adjacent first tee. This way, Moir said, both the ground and everyone’s selfies are preserved.

There are, of course, some exceptions to the Sunday rest. Practice rounds for the British Open, for example, are scheduled to begin on July 12 — a Sunday — and play will, naturally, be allowed on the next weekend, when the final round is played on July 19. There are also a few other tournaments throughout the year when Sunday play is permitted.

On a vast majority of weekends, however, this gem of a course separates itself from most of its brethren. Indeed, while the rest of the golf world is on the first tee at dawn or traipsing through a six-hour round at a packed municipal course or trying to squeeze in a quick nine before sunset, the birthplace of it all stays quiet.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/14/sports/sundays-on-the-old-course-at-st-andrews-no-golfers-allowed.html?ref=sports