The Old Course, New Tricks

Tony Dear

A visit to the site of this year’s Open Championship prompts a tour of the Highlands—and two of Scotland’s next great courses.

Standing next to an ornate writing desk in my room at the Old Course Hotel in St Andrews, I’m trying desperately, unsuccessfully, to stifle tears. The desk is undoubtedly a magnificent piece of furniture, one at which it is easy to imagine Louis XIV dipping his quill and staining his parchment. But it is not the reason for my unfortunate display. Rather, it’s the view.

As a guest of the 41-year-old hotel where Nicklaus, Trevino, Ballesteros, Woods, Faldo, Harrington and various international dignitaries have all stayed, I assumed I might be given something next to the kitchens or a busy elevator—with a view, if I were really lucky, of the parking lot. And I’d have been grateful for it, of course.
It turns out the Old Course Hotel doesn’t actually have any rooms like that. What more affordable accommodations there are look not toward the Old Course, but the Eden. But the east-facing Room 236, overlooking the Road Hole, was vacant. So I moved in for a couple of nights. 

In the distance, the imperious Royal and Ancient clubhouse is ablaze in early evening sunshine and the red Dumfries stone of Hamilton Hall positively glows. From half a mile away, it doesn’t matter one bit that the former St Andrews University hall of residence is actually in a state of disrepair, having been sold in 2006 to Rhode Island’s Wasserman Real Estate Capital LLC. The Yanks intended to divvy it into 23 fractionally-owned luxury apartments and renaming it the St Andrews Grand, but they have yet to follow through with the plan.

Below me, a procession of Americans, Swedes, Germans and, who knows, maybe even some Scots, is fouling up the 17th with a series of tops, shanks, chunks and half-stifled profanities. The Jigger Inn, bordering the fairway, looks cozy and inviting with the promise of two or three after-dinner Glenlivets.
For anyone with even the remotest interest in golf and its history, the scene is a bit special and, even though I’ve been to the Auld Grey Toon and played the auld brown links several times, the vista from this particular vantage point is overwhelming.  

Eventually I stop weeping like a child. I stand on the balcony for what seems like ten minutes but which was actually closer to 60. I remember Tommy Nakajima putting into the Road Hole Bunker at the 1984 Open Championship and taking four to get out; Seve chopping out of the rough on the left with a 6-iron in the final round and Tom Watson overshooting the green with a 2-iron a few minutes later. I recall Nick Faldo’s clinical dissection of the Old Course in 1990, Costantino Rocca’s miracle birdie on the 72nd hole in 1995 and John Daly’s subsequent win in the play-off. And I remember following Tiger all the way round in 2000, the year he beat Faldo’s scoring record. Most of all, I remember my first visit to the Old Course, with my dad in 1985, the year I discovered inland golf and seaside links golf were only very loosely related. 

The Old Course Hotel opened in 1968 on the site of the town’s original railway station. To counter-balance the moving sand on which it was sited, the 144-room building was constructed on underground floats. A series of owners ensued, and in 2004, plumbing magnate Herb Kohler bought the property with the intention of following up the great success of The American Club in Wisconsin at The Old Course Hotel. French designer Jacques Garcia, who worked on the Spice Market restaurant in New York, Hôtel Costes in Paris and Hôtel Metropole in Monte Carlo, was commissioned to remodel 23 suites whose walls now have a distinctly French look with a dark red, silk-lining. A nice tartan would perhaps be more appropriate. But the longer you stay, the more it grows on you.

In the bathroom you find top of the range Kohler products, including the Chromatherapy (color therapy) Bath, showers that spray you from three different directions, and colorful hand-painted wash basins, like the Mottahedeh design in 236, manufactured by Kallista (a Kohler brand).

A major redesign of the Duke’s Course which the hotel had built in 1995 was also undertaken. Five-time Open champion Peter Thomson designed the original course, a heathland beauty five miles inland from the hotel with great views of the town and St Andrews Bay. But it drained badly and was considered too difficult for resort golfers. Tim Liddy, an Indiana-based architect who has worked a great deal with Pete Dye over the last 20 years, reshaped and added bunkers, built five tees for each hole and added sand to the top-soil to improve drainage. A handful of greens and the last four holes were virtually rebuilt, the result a major improvement on what was already a good course. It cracked the top 100 in Britain’s Golf World magazine for the first time last year and certainly provides an enjoyable diversion from all that links golf.

The Castle Course

But heck, this is Fife. You’re here for all that links golf, so let’s head back towards the North Sea. The Old Course you already know about. It’s hosted the Open Championship 27 times and will do so again this summer, when a rehabbed Tiger Woods could be going for his third straight win there and fourth Claret Jug altogether (he also won at Hoylake in 2006). You may be less familiar with the year-old Castle Course which the St Andrews Links Trust developed a couple of miles east of town on a drab bit of clay-based farmland that sloped from the A917 down to the cliffs at Kinkell Ness.

The architect, David McLay Kidd, who built the excellent Bandon Dunes in Oregon, started by covering the 220-acre site with thousands of tons of sand to establish firm, close-cropped turf as similar as possible to that of the town’s links courses. Some say he overdid it, creating a sort of links theme park with excessive mounding, too many pot bunkers, over-the-top contouring on the greens and too many instances where golfers might get to their ball and think to themselves “Er, where now?”

It’s a valid question. At the Par-five fourth hole, I hit what I thought was a decent approach. When I arrived at the putting surface, however, I saw no sign of the ball. I looked behind the green and in the greenside bunker. Nothing. It wasn’t in the cup either. After a few minutes, I gave it up and headed for the next hole.
Having hit off the tee at the fifth and after walking 30-40 yards down the fairway, I glanced back at the fourth green and saw a ball. No one was playing the hole, so I quickly nipped back and was astonished to discover the ball was indeed mine. It was on the front edge of the putting surface, at the bottom of an absurdly severe slope, not 25 feet from the hole. 

And this was after several of the greens had been softened following the course’s first summer season in which reviews had ranged from gushing to downright rude.

Links fans should satisfy their curiosity with a visit. It is, after all, a magnificent achievement considering what it replaced, and the views looking west are fantastic. It’s perfectly possible you may fall for its 6,759 quirky yards, but don’t be surprised if you walk off the 18th green cursing the very ground David Kidd walks on.
Back at the Old Course Hotel, it’s time for some whisky in the awesome new fourth-floor bar, with leather sofas and floor-to-ceiling windows that look out on the 17th hole. Behind a set of double-doors across the corridor from the main bar is the whisky-tasting room where the bar manager, a German lad named Christian Zeiss, can’t specify a favorite single malt but does admit to being a big fan of Islay’s potent and smoky whiskies—Ardbeg and Lagavulin for example, and also some Speyside malts such as Mortlach and Macallan.

Together, Zeiss and I work through a trio of Scotland’s finest; Laphroig, from Islay, even a faint whiff of which can put the unprepared tester off whisky for life; the very popular Macallan which is produced in the Speyside town of Craigellachie, forty miles east of Inverness, and Highland Park which I’d never actually heard of but which became my favorite whisky by about the third sip.

The Centenary Course

Leaving the Old Course Hotel is so very hard to do but the next day, I made the hour-long drive to Gleneagles and the PGA Centenary Course, venue for the 2014 Ryder Cup.

Christened the Monarch’s Course and opened in 1993, the PGA Centenary Course (renamed in 2001 to celebrate the British PGA’s first 100 years) at the magnificent Gleneagles Hotel in Auchterarder, Perthshire, is to the resort’s King’s and Queen’s Courses what Bandon Trails is to Bandon and Pacific Dunes—a worthy addition that  will probably never be afforded the same level of affection as the originals. Had it been built 100 miles away, this Jack Nicklaus design would no doubt rank higher than 88th in Golf World’s top 100 in the UK. 

The mystical Ochil Hills and sublime Scottish heathland give character to the site. Recently, however, the Golden Bear threatened to remove his name from the course after McLay Kidd was asked to make some alterations—without Nicklaus’s consent—in readiness for the Ryder Cup. Thankfully, the two sides settled their differences during Nicklaus’s visit last May, and the signature remains in place.

Castle Stuart

After this inland odyssey, it’s time for another visit to the dunes. Castle Stuart, the new Mark Parsinen/Gil Hanse design near Inverness is where I’m headed. I’ve heard it’s so good it won’t be five years before it breaks into the world’s top 100.

Parsinen, a Californian who studied in London in the 1970s, was the driving force behind the superb Kingsbarns in Fife, which he designed alongside fellow Californian Kyle Phillips. Following Kingsbarns’ 2000 debut, the 60-year-old then spent a number of years combing the Ayrshire, Perthshire, Aberdeenshire, Morayshire and Banffshire coastlines in search of another desirable site and, having found it, chose Pennsylvania-based Gil Hanse to craft the new course.

“Dr. Robert Price, who wrote a book about the geomorphology of Scottish golf courses, pointed me to this area,” Parsinen told golfcoursearchitecture.net in July about locating his site. “I followed his directions and went out to where the 9th green is now. I found an open piece of ground that looked like a bunker—obviously an animal scrape – and the soils were wonderful. You stand right there and can see the lower topography and what the whole site was about. And that was immediately interesting to me. I called and thanked Dr. Price for tipping me off and it turned out I had been in the wrong place. He was actually telling me to go near another farmhouse which has since become part of our property.”

With views over the Moray Firth and west toward the Kessock Bridge which golfers cross on their way to Royal Dornoch, Castle Stuart is a modern masterpiece that Parsinen likens to Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. It has quite justifiably put its hat in the ring for future Open Championships. “Call it a fantasy; call it a dream, but we want the Open Championship to come here,” Parsinen says. “And when Peter Dawson (Secretary of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club which controls the championship) was here, unlike Donald Trump, I didn’t say we deserve it. I just told him that we’d like to think if Castle Stuart is worthy of an Open, that we’d get his consideration.”

There is, of course, a catch. Open venues tend to be well into their second century, while one notable course is in its sixth or even seventh. Castle Stuart is barely six months old and adding it to the list will have its opponents for sure. But if the world we lived in was simple and could award Open Championships to clubs based purely on the merit of its course, then Castle Stuart would take its place alongside the Old Course, Troon, Birkdale, Hoylake, Sandwich, Muirfield and the rest of them before very long. Lump it in with Royal Dornoch, Royal Aberdeen, Nairn, Cruden Bay, Boat of Garten and the wonderful Moray Golf Club in Lossiemouth and you have a Northern Scotland itinerary you will never forget and which many might consider the equal of Fife and Ayrshire.

The perfect preparation for a round at Castle Stuart is a night at the exquisite 28-room Culloden House Hotel in Balloch. The existing house is over 200 years old, but certainly not the first ever built here. Originally a 16th century Jacobean castle owned by the Forbes family, it was taken over by Bonnie Price Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart) just prior to the 1746 Battle of Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil. In the 1770s architect Robert Adam rebuilt the place, leaving intact its thick walls and dungeon.

The rooms at Culloden House are delightful, but it’s as much for the food that the hotel earns its reputation. You may baulk, indeed wretch, at the very idea, but I urge you to try the award-winning black pudding (or “blood pudding”), made with pig or cattle blood and typically filled with meat, fat, suet, bread, sweet potato, barley and oatmeal. Bought from a supermarket, it can be somewhat bland. Culloden’s pudding is absolutely delectable, however, and though nutritionists might not wholeheartedly agree, the perfect prelude to a round of golf. 

It would be wrong, however, to judge Chef Michael Simpson’s superb menus by the black pudding alone. Simpson has been here for over 20 years and in that time created one of the finest restaurants in Scotland. The Tournado of Scottish Beef Fillet, and Timbale of Haggis, Neeps and Tatties with Whisky and Chive Jus are the creations of a genius.

So too are Scotland’s golf courses, some of which are the work of the divine creator Himself. The good Lord is omnipresent, of course, but after a week like the one I recently enjoyed in Fife and the Highlands, you come away thinking He must have spent an awful lot of time in Scotland.

INFO TO GO

www.oldcoursehotel.kohler.com (Duke’s Course)
www.standrews.org.uk (Castle Course)
www.gleneagles.com (PGA Centenary Course)
www.castlestuartgolf.com
www.cullodenhouse.co.uk

British-born Contributing Editor Tony Dear currently lives in Washington State.