IT’S FRIGHTENING : Royal Troon Course Is a Haunted Ground of British Open Ghosts

You can hear the siren wail of ghosts at the British Open. Golfers trod on ground where their game was born with sticks and rocks, ground over which kings and dukes feuded with bows and arrows, leaving a legacy of ruined castles and great volumes of history. The courses, centuries old, lie in lonely, grandmotherly villages along the stark Scottish coast, the tides lapping right up to the fairways, the constant cawing of sea gulls interrupting the silence.

Clouds, the color of dirty laundry, hang low enough to touch. Fog obscures dawn and dusk, rain most moments in between. Everyone cowers in the gloaming beneath umbrellas, whispering, their faces obscured. All that is missing is a motive and a murder, although, in a sense, there are dozens of murders at every Open, the miserable evidence found at the bottom of the scoreboard, where, inevitably, jangled nerves and the horrific weather conspire to shatter dreams.

The Royal Troon Golf Club, where the Open begins Thursday for the sixth time since 1923 (the weather is hot and dry, but no one believes that will last) is a haunted ground full of Open ghosts. When the tournament was played here in 1982, 26 players failed to break 80 the first day. In 1962, a bloke from Blackpool named Terry Lee shot 90. In 1950, a German amateur named Hermann Tissies needed 15 shots to escape from the eighth hole, a 126-yard par-3. Bloody awful business.

The course does not cross over the ruins of the home of a famous 13th-century leper, as does the one at Turnberry, a few miles down the Ayrshire coast. Nor are the fairways so steep that players have to ring cowbells to let those behind them know it is unsafe to hit, as is the case at Prestwick, where the first 10 Opens were played. Still, the eccentric Open atmosphere is as vivid here as at any of the courses on which the tournament is played.

Royal Troon is a classic links course, sculpted not by bulldozers or an architect’s hand, but naturally; by years of wind, rain, erosion, salt air, even sheep that helped form bunkers burrowing against the wind. No course in championship golf runs nearer the sea; Troon, which means “nose” in the Gaelic tongue, is so named because the course and village jut into the Firth of Clyde much in the manner of Jimmy Durante’s proboscis.

The club was opened in 1878 with 40 members, its existence a byproduct of the growth of the western Scottish coast, made possible by railway expansion. James Dickie, a local businessman, was the instigator. The first secretary was John Highet, a doctor, which apparently is why the club’s insignia is five golf clubs tied together by a snake - symbol of medicine.

In the beginning, membership dues were one guinea per year and the land was leased from the sixth Duke of Portland. (A Mrs. Briggs, who had grazing rights to the land, agreed to allow her 300 sheep to be used as “lawn mowers,” but only if the club would provide $30 worth of turnips.)

The first course was only five holes, but it was up to 12 by 1883 and to 18 five years later. The members were ambitious; they wanted a championship course, not unlike the one in nearby Prestwick, and spent money to keep up with a rapidly modernizing game. The national women’s championship was held here in 1904, symbolizing Troon’s arrival as a top course.

Still, the Open was not held here until 1923, and then only because the course at Muirfield was being renovated and the site had to be changed at the last minute. An Englishman, Arthur Havers, won by a stroke, and then the Open did not return for another 27 years; some believed it was because tournament organizers were unhappy that planes from Prestwick airport were flying over the course and inadvertently dumping fuel on spectators.

During World War II, soldiers used the beach off the sixth hole for hand-grenade practice. One day, a pilot took off in a Spitfire from Prestwick, crashed on the fourth green, climbed out of the cockpit and pointed to the stately building behind the clubhouse. “Say, is that the Marine Hotel?” he asked casually, as if he were out for a morning stroll.

Bobby Locke, a South African, earned $450 for winning the Open here in 1950, but Tissies earned true golfing fame. He hit his tee shot into the steep, 6-foot deep bunker in front of the green and took five shots to get out, the ball finally flying across the green into another bunker. He then flailed away a few more times, took a penalty stroke and spent some time in a third bunker before landing on the green and one-putting for a quadruple-triple- bogey (if there is such a thing).

Arnold Palmer was a six-stroke winner here in 1962, overcoming poor weather, a cold and a sore back with long underwear that the Scots found hilarious, for some reason (“all the way to his feet!” wrote one incredulous newsman). Tom Weiskopf was a three-stroke winner 11 years later, and when Tom Watson won the fourth of his five British Opens in 1982, the name of the club had been changed from Old Troon to Royal Troon, the acknowledgement from the palace a matter of the highest honor.

The course is now more than 7,000 yards, very long, and the fairways are as uneven as a rumpled bedsheet. The front nine runs entirely alongside the water, the back nine parallel and inland. “It can be four or five different courses depending on the wind,” Curtis Strange said. All that is missing is the wind, rain and fog, and something tells me we will have it before the week is through. This is the British Open, after all: There are ghosts hovering, and they are mischievous little rascals.