"As we stood on the first tee, the wind was blowing so hard from the left that the starter advised a petite woman in the group ahead of ours to aim her tee shot well into the 18th fairway..."

From David Owen's engaging look at all of the courses that have hosted the Open, capturing the allure of St. Andrews...

The R&A is less ancient than the Honourable Company, but it now rules the game everywhere in the world except the United States and Mexico. It's the outfit that puts on the Open, and its clubhouse is the bank-shaped hunk of stone and glass that looms above the first tee of the Old Course -- which I played the next day. My group included an American university student from St. Louis, whose name was Walker. He had transferred to St. Andrews from Duke -- with the enthusiastic approval of his father, a member at Bellerive -- and had been pursuing an unofficial year-long elective in the Old Course, as a supplement to his thesis research on David Hume. At the beginning of the school year, he said, he had paid £170 for a student golf ticket, which allowed him to play any Links Trust course whenever he felt like it, ho-hum. As we stood on the first tee, the wind was blowing so hard from the left that the starter advised a petite woman in the group ahead of ours to aim her tee shot well into the 18th fairway, so that the gale and her presumed slice would bring her ball safely back into play; she aimed where he pointed, then power-hooked her drive very nearly onto Old Station Road.