It Isn’t Really Par for the Course, but Pros Like Layout

“And this is good old Boston, “The home of the bean and the cod, “Where the Lowells talk to the Cabots “And the Cabots talk only to God.” --JOHN COLLINS BOSSIDY

Welcome to the 1910 Open!

Please turn your clocks back about a century. We’re in New England. The Open will be won, I’m sure, by some guy wearing knickers and a tie and smoking a pipe and shooting 301 or more.

No, I don’t mean Payne Stewart. Whoever it is will probably be swinging hickory clubs and calling a 7-iron a mashie niblick and a pitching wedge a cleek. Maybe it’ll be Bobby Jones. Maybe it’ll be Laurie Auchterlonie.

Listen! You’re used to golf where they pipe in the water and truck in the trees? Cart-path, sprinkler-head golf? Forget it. This is a course where they just chased the sheep off, grew grass wherever the ground wasn’t too rocky.

First, they probably had to chase the red coats off. This is where Paul Revere started, George Washington slept and the Tea Party was organized.

This place just reeks of history. You get in this part of the country and you keep expecting to see guys playing in three-cornered hats or powdered wigs. The clubhouse was probably General Burgoyne’s.

I won’t say this place is stuffy but if you ever want to play here, bring your monocle. If your folks came over on the Mayflower, you can get on--for nine holes. The club roster should be a honeycomb. It’s full of Wasps. John Kennedy was born here but if you mention their ex-President, they’ll say “Yes, I knew him and Mrs. Coolidge very well.”

They call this course The Country Club, as if there weren’t any others. The way the Brits refer to their Open as The Championship or San Franciscans to their town as The City. Everything else is camping out.

Pebble Beach is just a public course on the other side of the tracks to these Brahmins. You half-expect them to look down their nose and ask you, “Tell me, do they have rubber mats on the tees there?”

You remember the story of the two old dowagers who drove from Boston to San Francisco and someone asked them how they did it and they answered, “Through Newton.”

The clubhouse has been here since balls were made out of feathers and you putted with a tree limb.

Still, I hate to throw spitballs at statues or paint a mustaches on Mona Lisa but I’m a little unconvinced by this fount of all golf. It might be all right for Ben Franklin or the Adams family but what about the ruffians they’re going to turn loose on it this week? I mean, this is the Open. And the nice thing about it is, the guys who will play on this historic Revolutionary War shrine this week, would probably be cleaning clubs or carrying somebody else’s bag any other time.

But, the worst thing is, they all like it. That’s got to worry you if you know Open golf.

You see, these guys--Ben Crenshaw excepted--are no lovers of the history and traditions of golf. What these guys want is a treeless track in Palm Springs you can play with a driver, 8-iron and one putt. Their idea of golf is a whole bunch of 63s where you don’t even get grass on your shoes.

Normally when these corsairs hit an Open course, they bare their teeth, throw themselves on the locker room floor and hold their breath and throw tantrums and scream about the unfairness of it all. Imagine, having to use all 14 clubs. Imagine a fairway that isn’t as straight as a yardstick, that makes you think before you shoot?

The silence this week is deafening. No screams of, “Unfair!” no howls for the scalps of the United States Golf Assn. brass, nobody wondering what they’re going to do with the lions in the rough, nobody asking why they spoiled a good swamp to make this hall of horrors.

These guys this year are acting as if the course just rode into town with the egg money and they might sell the Brooklyn Bridge to it.

I mean, they’re almost purring. You’d think they were talking about Sally Field. They act as if it were going to be three days in the Caribbean.

Look, the last time they played on this track, 293 didn’t win it, 293 only got you in a three-way playoff. The time before that--1913--304 didn’t win it, 304 only got you in a three-way playoff.

You can see where this venerable old social lion was a very tough customer, indeed. So, I expected a whole lot of guys to suddenly remember they had promised to repaint the garage this week or to get this bad pain in the neck.

Instead of that, listen to Crenshaw:

“Why do the guys like this course? Well, it’s a throwback to what golf courses were meant to be. It’s honest, it challenges your whole game. You’ll get all the clubs out of the bag. It means a great deal to American golf. The golfers will know they’re really tested.

“Everybody is in for a nice week here. The greens are nice. You got to play a lot of good honest golf, play a lot of good honest shots. I’m so excited to play it, I’ll have to calm myself down a little bit but I can’t help the way I feel. This is a course you can’t take liberties with. If you’re in trouble on a par-4, you play for a 5. You respect this course.”

If you think that’s the way golfers talk about Open courses, you don’t know golf. They talk about Open courses the way J. Edgar Hoover talked about John Dillinger, or a doctor talks about cholera, or the parties in a divorce refer to each other. When a golfer rhapsodizes about Open acreage, you can be sure he either thinks there’s oil under it--or he can shoot 62 on it.

It’s like the Sherlock Holmes story of the dog that didn’t bark. When you walk through the locker room and guys are humming show tunes and worrying more about their clothes than their shots, you have to figure they think they have this course trussed and taped and lying on the tracks and they can’t wait to run over it and stuff it and take it home and hang it on their walls.

Either that or they’re awed to be surrounded by all this history, to be playing over the same hallowed ground where the Minutemen stopped the British squares.

Believe that, and I got a waterfront lot in Bulgaria for you. In fact, if these guys can’t birdie these fields, they’ll not only want to give it back to the Crown, they’ll want to retract the battle of Bunker Hill. When they like a golf course, you can bet me, they think it’s their butler.