Geoff Ogilvy Was The 1st Tee Of Kingarrock This Week

Most world-class golfers get ready for an Open Championship with a series of practice rounds, a counselling session or five with their sports psychologist and a meeting with their agent to discuss the financial implications of victory. Only one heads out to play the game as it was played more than 100 years ago.

Geoff Ogilvy is a US Open champion and the golfer ranked 20th in the word but he is also a curious man and a student of the royal and ancient game – twin traits that brought him this week to the 1st tee of Kingarrock, a golf club 10 miles from St Andrews where the game is played as it was in the days when tweed plus fours and flat caps were de rigour and not Ian Poulter’s latest assault on the fashion pages of GQ magazine.

“Everything is authentic,” says the club’s founder, Dave Anderson. Players use hickory-shafted clubs and a well‑struck ball flies 150 yards in the air on a good day. Par-five holes are just over 300 yards and the grass-cutting equipment goes by another name – sheep.

It is startling to find a world-class golfer on the eve of an Open Championship in such a setting – without his caddie, his logos and a golf bag filled with 21st century technology – but there is nowhere else the Ogilvy would rather be.

“Don’t get me wrong, I really like my modern equipment but there is something fun about playing golf like this. And it can really help your swing speed and your imagination when you go back to regular, modern golf,” he said. “It’s like being a kid. You’re learning all over again.”

Needless to say, the Australian is a quick learner, proving from his very first shot that talent transcends technology. The swing is as athletic and smooth as it always is, although the results are a little different. For one, a purely struck Ogilvy drive with a modern club will travel more than 300 yards; with a hickory-shafted driver he is lucky to break the 175-yard mark; and the bullet-like crack of modern ball against club-face is gone.

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“The most shocking thing is the sound – or rather the lack of it – when you hit the ball. You almost don’t realise you’ve hit it,” says Ogilvy. It took the Australian five shots to complete the 289-yard first hole at Kingarrock and a few more to get the hang of chipping (”Bite” he asked his ball as it landed on one green and scuttled on). But as the round progressed so did his appreciation of the skills that were needed to play golf in bygone days, and just how much they are still relevant in the modern day, especially at St Andrews.

The Old Course was once like Kingarrock, albeit on a much grander scale. It is a different animal now, with its fairways stretched, its bunkers tidied up and its rough allowed to grow in the effort to toughen up the challenge for the modern‑day pro.

It has been little noticed – probably to the relief of the R&A – that this year’s Open will be played with players teeing off from five different properties: the Old, the New Course, the Eden Course, the Himalayas putting green and St Andrews driving range (where the new 17th tee is situated).

The purists are appalled that the advance of modern technology has necessitated such changes and by the fact that the sport’s governing bodies, the R&A and the US Golf Association, did nothing to turn back the tide. But they are comforted by the fact that despite all the changes the spirit of this special place lives on, not least in the challenges it presents to even the very best players.

Mike Clayton, a former European tour player and now one of the most respected golf course architects in the world, has recently set up a design company with Ogilvy and, like his fellow Australian, is an unabashed admirer of the dear old place.

“It is still the ultimate strategic test because nothing is dictated to the player by the architect or the greenskeeper,” said Clayton. “You have to make up your mind about how and where to play every shot, which means it is about the player’s imagination and talent – as the game originally was.”

Such sentiments have found an echo all around St Andrews this week, where every review, from player to caddie to member of the public, has been a rave one. Even Tiger Woods, who has never noticeably shown much interest in the minutiae of golf course design, quickly abandoned his Trappist instincts yesterday when asked why a golf course formed by nature and first played around 500 years ago is still fit to host the greatest show in golf.

“It is because of the angles and the wind,” Woods said. “There is so much movement out there on the fairways and the greens that you have really got to hit the ball well and lag putt well.

“Players have gotten longer, equipment has changed but this golf course is still relevant and it can still be very difficult. That’s where its brilliance lies.”

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