Man On The (St. Andrews) Street: It Had To Be Done!

Alan Bastable talks to the man on the street in St. Andrews (by phone) and two themes emerge:

(A) few people knew changes to the most revered public course on the planet were about to be made and...

(B) too many people of St. Andrews live in a bubble free of actual information or apparent awareness of what they have.

First, the lack of transparency issue, talking to local golf shop manager Andrew Donaldson:

"A lot of people like me didn't really hear about it until the last minute," he said. "You see, the golf courses here are all public, so they're owned by the public, basically. They're counsel courses, so there should be a public consultation before anything major happens — that's how most people would feel. And there really hasn't been. It seems they just bypassed the public, who have the right to walk on the course, whether they play golf or not."

An innkeeper in town who has been playing the Old Course for 30 years, but who asked to remain anonymous for fear of upsetting his friends and associates, corroborated Donaldson's account. "There was no public consultation at all," he said. "They just did it. But that's life and you get on with it." (Peter Dawson, the R&A chief executive, told the BBC this week that the alterations were, in fact, roundly embraced by the townspeople.)

By the way, the R&A still has not released the Photoshopped images that were put out on the Old Course grounds showing the proposed changes.

This next part is where you start to worry about what the townspeople genuinely understand the sacred ground they've inherited.

Same anonymous shopkeeper:

"If you want to talk about tradition, there was not one single piece of gorse on the Old Course going back 30 years, yet there's gorse there now," he said. "And now they're complaining about the gorse going away."

Anyone see complaints about gorse going away? Actually most of those upset about the changes would hail that move! But it'll never happen for the same reason we are in the mess we're in: some people don't like low scores and will go to amazing lengths to prevent them.

And there was this from Emily Griffiths, captain of the ladies golf team at the University of St. Andrews:

"Typically the R&A are criticized for being stuck in their ways," says Griffiths, who is also president of the St. Andrews Athletic Union, "and now they're doing something which is moving with the times and they're getting complaints the other way."

Uh, that's because (A) the only people who see the times as having passed the Old Course are those charged with protecting the game and (B) not to be repetitive, but no one was crying out for this upgrade. No one! Nada! Zilch! Which brings us to Niall Scott, a St. Andrews University employee:

"A lot of the golfing press was full of articles about the fact that the Old Lady had become too easy," Scott said. "They were honestly asking the question, Was it appropriate to play the Open at the Old Course anymore? The Links Trust, I think, responded very thoughtfully to that."

If anyone has a link to the golfing press calling the Old Course outdated and inappropriate for The Open, I'd love to read the stories!

Anchoring Ban Continues To Highlight The Distance Issue

I'm beginning to think the anchoring ban was a clever ploy by the governing bodies to unlock previously muted opinions on the distance issue!

Royal and Ancient Golf Club member Michael Bamberger is the latest to note the Old Course changes with little enthusiasm but says "the real problem is that the R&A/USGA have consistently lacked a 'staff futurist' to anticipate how various issues would spiral."

The R&USGA should be focused on how to make courses far shorter and easier to maintain. As modern layouts approach 8,000 yards, maintenance becomes incredibly expensive (a cost that's passed on to golfers), and the courses become excessively punitive and excruciating slow.

So, where to start? Brown, for starters, should truly be the new green. Augusta National, ridiculously verdant, sets a terrible example in this regard.

But where the governing bodies absolutely blew it was by allowing big-headed titanium drivers almost 20 years ago. It's because Dustin Johnson can use modern weaponry to drive the ball 370 yards that the Old Course is getting these pointless renovations.

And add him to the bifurcation camp.

The modern ball, coming off the face of the modern driver, flies way too far for golfers on TV trying to break 60. But it doesn't for us, shooting our newspaper 89s. The solution is two sets of rules. Rory and Co. should have a ball they can call their own. Bifurcation. That's the word they don't want us to use.

An unbylined FayObserver.com story talks to club pros and everyday golfers. Guess what, they are saying the same thing.

"I think it's kind of dumb," said pro golfer Chip Lynn of Lillington. "There's a lot of other stuff that they could ban that affects the game more."

Lynn is a former Fayetteville State golfer who now plays on the Egolf Tour and got through the first round of PGA Tour qualifying this year. He said he tried a belly putter in "six or seven events" this year and found it didn't help him.

"I didn't putt any better," he said. "I don't think the belly putter gives you that much more advantage. I didn't notice anything different. My putts weren't better during the round."

Lynn said technology has affected the game more than anchored putters.

"I agree with Webb Simpson who said there are a lot more things that have affected the game than just the belly putter," he said. "I don't think it's that big of a deal.

"If you're going to change that rule, you probably need to do something about the balls, the driver heads and the technology that has really affected the game instead of the belly putters."

 And Adam Scott continued to press his case on this theme Wednesday, asking for some consistency from the governing bodies

Maybe, just maybe, all of this crying out for a distance solution was part of the plan to start with when the anchoring ban came about? I know, they aren't that clever. But the unintended consequences of screwing with the Old Course and moving first on anchoring could ultimately work out in the favor of the governing bodies.

Update on 2012-12-06 15:47 by Geoff

**Thanks to reader PMDF6 for this Frank Deford NPR commentary on the same theme. The link includes an audio version of DeFord reading it.

Now understand, modern golfers have kryptonite drivers with club heads as large as prize pumpkins, and steroid balls that would not pass the drug test, even if the hapless International Cycling Union were doing the random sampling.

Golfers are slugging the dimpled rockets so far that all sorts of classic courses have had to be lengthened — even the sacred Old Course at St. Andrews. This is like if baseball bats and balls had been supercharged so much that Bud Selig decreed that now it had to be 100 feet instead of 90 between bases.

But never mind the bazooka transcontinental drives. No. The golf honchos have issues with the little itty-bitty part of the game called putting. If the U.S. Golf Association and the Royal and Ancient were in charge of nuclear proliferation, they would handle things by legislating the size of bayonets.

Tom Watson Open To Bifurcating Rules Of Golf

From Steve Orme's report on Tom Watson, longtime traditionalist and passionate supporter of the Rules of Golf, sounds open to bifurcation after seeing how the belly putter kept his son interested in the game.

Asked if the USGA and R&A are on the right track, Watson said: "Yes, but I say that with mixed emotions.

"(A broomstick or belly putter stroke) is not a stroke of golf ... but it makes it easier to play.

"My son Michael, with a conventional putting stroke he couldn't make it from two feet half the time but he went to a belly putter and he makes everything.

"The game is fun to him now, so there lies the danger. Do we take the ability for people to have fun away?"

"Do we go to two sets of rules, where some people can use (long putters) in certain competitions but the PGA Tour maybe can't?

Update on 2012-12-04 16:55 by Geoff

**Ron Kroichick talks to Watson's pal and former USGA president Sandy Tatum, who does not agree.

“I think it’s a move in the right direction,” Tatum said. “What’s been going on is such a serious departure from the fundamental requirements of playing the game. … To watch these guys, with these paddles and other things, it kind of reminds me of the croquet stroke.

“The long putter, in my un-humble opinion, doesn’t qualify as a putter.”

Minimalism Coming To Dallas, And Other Changes To The Nelson?

With AT&T becoming the new title sponsor of the Byron Nelson Championship in 2015, and the tournament likely to move to a new golf course designed by a minimalist to be determined, there are several storylines here.

- The PGA Tour announces a new sponsor while the current sponsor has two years left on their deal. That has to be fairly unprecedented, no?

- The many-times-renovated TPC Four Seasons Resort is a lame duck venue, even after a recent renovation supervised by the PGA Tour. D.A. Weibring was the most recent designer to attempt resurrecting the course.

- This would seem to end any chances of AT&T's long term interest in the "National" event at Congressional in conjunction with the Tiger Woods Foundation.

- The Friday news came on the same day an AT&T representative and some other suits announced a plan to build a golf course in southern Dallas, which will benefit SMU and eventually, the tournament along with a First Tee facility.

There is no truth to the rumor that the phone call listeners erupted in laughter when the Commish said "the odds are quite high," that with support from the Salesmanship Club the Nelson could find a new home.

Candace Carlisle described the project this way:

The 400-acre golf course development will include an 18-hole championship golf course, a nine-hole short course, an administrative and teaching facility, a practice facility, and a practice academy for Southern Methodist University students. The golf course will anchor the university's golf program and there's plans to pony up a significant investment in the project, said President R. Gerald Turner.

Bill Nichols says "AT&T officials have already interviewed several renowned golf course architects, including Coore & Crenshaw, Tripp Davis and Associates and Tom Doak’s Renaissance Design."