Why St Andrews Remains The Most Special Place On The Planet

My first impression of St Andrews was like many other people’s, one of being underwhelmed. The only difference being that I was still five miles away from the Auld Grey Toun at a train station called Leuchars. 

When we booked the sleeper from London to Leuchars our understanding was that we would be dropped off bang in the centre of St Andrews, maybe even by the 1st tee. Instead we were standing on the platform of a station of a town that we had never heard of until a few hours ago, at 5am on a Sunday, four awkward and spotty 15-year-olds who were on the trip of a lifetime. 

It was 1986, The Open was to take place on the same week 130 miles away at Turnberry but we would be spending the next seven days on the east coast of Scotland. Other than Seve’s heroics in '84 we knew nothing about St Andrews aside from the very early days of the Dunhill Cup, a few highlights of Golf’s Greatest Shots on VHS and what we’d pored over in golf magazines. But it was the Home of Golf and we loved golf.

Video: Things You Didn't Know About St Andrews

I don’t even know how we booked the tee times. The internet was a long way off, we had a telephone in the house but one of the dads had booked everything by post courtesy of his Benson & Hedges Golfers Handbook – we would have one round on the Jubilee, two on the New and Eden, and one on the Old Course leaving a blank day on the Saturday in the hope that we would emerge successful from the ballot. 

The Jubilee back then was seen as the weak link (Donald Steel would change all that three years later) and therefore a bit of a warm-up on the Sunday afternoon and, from there, we would be cutting our teeth on some world-class links golf, not that any of us really knew what links golf was.

Our golfing experiences to that point had involved starting off at Richmond Park, joining either Wimbledon Park or Burhill, and then straying as far as junior matches against the likes of Coombe Wood and New Malden. There were no double bunkers, revetted bunkers or any sights or sounds of the sea at any of these places.

A few minutes later a taxi – ’the golf course please’ – dropped us at the end of Granny Clark’s Wynd from where we made our way to the first and last fairways. Even on the back of no sleep and no sign of any golfers, I’ll remember the sight of the turf, the colour of the buildings, the proximity of the cars 

On Sunday July 13, 1986, I first set my eyes on the Old Course.

Even given the rose-tinted nature of the passing of nearly 30 years I don’t remember speaking for the first few minutes. We would run our hands over the carpet-like expanse of baked turf, looked towards the nearby 18th green where Seve had rolled in that 20-footer and giggled to one another. We’d cracked it.

We had been given £100 for the week, which would include having enough for a second round on the Old Course (£16…. £16!) if we were lucky enough. Taxis were around £3 a trip, fish and chips was even less and breakfast would be included in our David Russell halls of residence which was a 10-minute walk from the town – a walk we would do several times a day to save on taxis.

The Eden and New were pretty special but nothing could come close to that Wednesday morning on the Old Course. We had familiarised ourselves by walking the course every evening where, other than all the pot bunkers and enormous greens, our teenage heads were turned by Tennent’s latest marketing campaign. This, put simply, involved having their cans decorated by their Lager Lovelies, a collection of different scantily clad women on each can. The campaign ran from 1962 to 1991 when public sensibilities took over.

We had saved our best Slazenger knitwear for that morning and the chatter was a little bit less buoyant and cocksure the nearer we got to Hamilton Hall.

There were a few pointers from the starter, another first, and then we were sent on our way. One member of the party was immediately crestfallen when he blew his driver over the out of bounds stakes down the right, one of us very nearly went out of town on the other side while two of us were safely down the middle. I managed to hit the green, with a 6-iron, something that I’ve never done since in five further attempts, and the next nine holes was an exhibition of ball striking, cunning and lag putting, all helped by a lot of help from the wind – 40 strokes and inside my handicap of 12.

The back nine, back into the wind, was a car crash. I’m not sure any of us had previously played in a wind over 10mph and that was demonstrated for the next two hours as we were unable to make head nor tail of what to do. The long-awaited 17th was a trudge up the left-hand side as I put myself more and more out of position and I signed off by very nearly four-putting the 18th after half-shanking one to the right edge of the green – 88 shots and the best golfing education of quite how inadequate and limited my skills were.

Related post: Old Course Review

Also staying in our halls of residence were a collection of American teenagers who were on a European ‘vacation’. And there were girls and girls who thought that our accents were ‘cute’, again, another first. For one part of the quartet golf was immediately put on the back burner and that reload on the 1st was soon forgotten.

Conversations were awkward but, on our final evening we sat down to a plate of macaroni and cheese, cooked lovingly by our new friends and, you would imagine, future wives. They still had three years to run at school, in Connecticut, but these were just teething problems.

The second half of the week would fly by in a haze of scores in the high mid to 80s – we did get in via the ballot – high levels of anxiety over how to behave, the joint purchasing of a bottle of Brut and an introduction to pubs.

Given the lack of mobile phones, and any interest from their perspective, we never did keep in touch with our new friends. They moved on to Spain, and probably into the arms of more experienced European lotharios, while we got the Sunday sleeper back to London and tossed a coin to see who would keep the remaining Brut.

Thirty-six years later I still see the Old Course and the town through the prism of that 15-year-old. It’s easy and obvious to say but I love the bones of the place. The designer Pat Ruddy says, and I'm paraphrasing here, 'Every time I see St Andrews, it makes me want to cry'. Which is precisely how I felt this morning when catching sight of the old place. A town where I’ve seen four Opens, caddied in a couple of Dunhill Links, been on stag dos and somewhere that I will make a detour from any journey merely to get a sniff of the place.

I spend far too long looking at ‘second homes’ in or around St Andrews even though I can’t really afford my first one. Lots of people would love to retire to the heat of mainland Europe, I’d give anything to pack up and point the car down the A92 and call it quits here.

There’s almost nothing that we don’t know about the place and yet we still can’t get enough of it. Some people moan about The Open coming back here every five years, this week it’s been seven and that feels like a lifetime away.

If you've never been to St Andrews, go. If it's been a while, go again. It will never disappoint.