"All are welcome at the home of golf on Sundays. Except golfers."

I haven't a clue why, on the eve of the U.S. Open with St. Andrews hosting The Open in a month, the New York Times felt compelled to run Sam Borden's piece on Sundays at The Old Course. Even ill-timed, it's an enjoyable read.

Borden writes:

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.”