This Scottish Course Is Ancient, but No Less Royal : Golf: A British Open victory at St. Andrews still is the supreme symbol of success for the game’s best players.

Question: Why are there always 18 holes on a golf course?

Answer: Because in 1764, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews needed some room and cut up what had been 22 holes to leave 18. Eighteen has been the standard ever since.

Q: Why do golf courses have an “out” nine and an “in” nine?

A: Because in 1552, when Scotsmen started playing the game in the Kingdome of Fife, along the bluffs above St. Andrews Bay on the North Sea, they played in a direct line from the clubhouse to the River Eden, where they turned around and came back.

Q: Why is a golf cup 4 1/4 inches in diameter?

A: Because when the members of St. Andrews decided in 1891 that the size needed to be uniform, they choose 4 1/4 inches. For the first 300 years, there was no official size.

When the Royal and Ancient speaks, the golf world listens. And obeys.

Well, almost.

One R&A; idea that didn’t catch on was not charging greens fees to play. Until 1913, all a person--resident or visitor--had to do to play the Old Course at St. Andrews was walk out to the first tee and hit away. For players to get that concession, however, residents were given permission to raise rabbits on the north side of the links and hang out their fish nets on the fairways.

Hitting away Thursday will be 156 of the finest golfers in the world, from defending champion Mark Calcavecchia, Curtis Strange and Jack Nicklaus of the United States to Greg Norman of Australia, Ian Woosnam of Wales, Nick Faldo of Britain and Seve Ballesteros and Jose-Maria Olazabal of Spain.

It will be the 24th time in 119 years that the British Open--it is referred to in Britain only as The Open--has been held here at the legendary birthplace of golf.

There is evidence that people batted a ball along the ground with sticks from point to point before St. Andrews, but there is something almost mystical about the Old Course because it has remained virtually the same through all the centuries. It is as if the original baseball diamond laid out by Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, N.Y., was the site of the World Series.

When a golfer walks up to the first tee, sticks his tee in the turf only a few feet from the R&A; clubhouse and looks down at what must be the widest fairway in the world, there is a sense of history that is awesome. If goose pimples could be marketed, a fortune could be made when the realization hits that not only Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer and Sam Snead and Bobby Jones stood there, but also Old Tom and Young Tom Morris, Mungo Park, Willie Fernie and Harry Vardon, all of whom won the Open before Nicklaus, Palmer, Snead or even Jones were born.

The Open was first held in 1860 at Prestwick, which played host to 12 of them before St. Andrews got into the act.

Tom Kidd was the first winner here in 1893, shooting a 91-88--179, certainly the worst 36-hole score ever to win a major championship.

Scoring was different then, however. A torrential rain left St. Andrews heavy with water, turning the swale in front of the 18th green, called the Valley of Sin, into a small lake. In 1873, there was no such thing as casual water. If a shot ended up in a puddle, it cost a stroke if it was lifted and dropped on dry land.

The Open wasn’t such a big deal back then, even at St. Andrews. Three years later, when the captain of the club neglected to reserve the course for two days for the Open, the members demanded their regularly scheduled tee times. The tournament players wound up being interspersed with local regulars. The ensuing confusion helped cause Bob Martin’s winning score of 176 to be perilously close to Kidd’s record high total.

It was not until 1892, for the 32nd Open, that the tournament was expanded from 36 to 72 holes.

John Henry Taylor became the first to win consecutive Opens at St. Andrews, shooting a 322 in 1895 and a 309 in 1900. This sudden improvement in scoring, which was attributed to a switch from the old gutta-percha ball to the core-wound ball, did not go unnoticed by the moguls of St. Andrews.

Their reaction was to pock the course with deep pot bunkers, barely big enough, according to golf historian Robert Burnet, “for an angry man and his sand iron.”

James Braid repeated Taylor’s successive victories here, in 1905 and 1910, a feat that would not again be done until Nicklaus did it in 1970 and 1978.

Few Americans entered, and none won, the Open before World War I. When it was resumed, Jock Hutchinson, a native of St. Andrews who was a naturalized American citizen, became the first U.S. winner in 1921 on what had been his home course.

Hutchinson made a hole in one on the eighth hole in the first round and almost made one on the next hole, the 356-yard ninth, when he caught a drive with the wind at his back. A spectator, apparently seeing the ball rolling toward the hole, raced across the green and pulled the pin. The ball rolled over the hole, and other spectators said it might have fallen in had the pin been in place.

That was also the year that a teen-ager, Bobby Jones, got so mad during the third round--when he had trouble getting out of a pesky pot bunker on the 11th hole--that he tore up his scorecard and stalked off the course.

Jones returned the next time the Open was at St. Andrews, in 1927, and won the second of his three championships. He had won in 1926 at Royal Lytham and would win again in his Grand Slam year of 1930 at Hoylake, two weeks after winning the British Amateur at St. Andrews.

Densmore Shute beat Craig Wood in a playoff in 1933, becoming the last American to win at St. Andrews before World War II closed the course again, this time for six years. Gene Sarazen appeared to have that Open in hand, before he took a triple-bogey six on No. 11--the same hole that had given Jones fits.

Sarazen, in the bunker that had entrapped Jones, later called it “the most dreadful bunker in all of golf.”

Three holes later, at the 14th, he made another triple bogey when his second shot landed in Hell Bunker. He finished a stroke behind Shute and Wood.

Snead came in 1946, complaining loudly about how much he disliked the course, but he won by four strokes over South Africa’s Bobby Locke and never came back.

Snead’s complaints apparently were taken to heart by American professionals because for the next 12 years the British Open was virtually boycotted by U.S. players, except for 1953, when Ben Hogan made his only European voyage to win at Carnoustie.

Palmer revived interest in the tournament when he came to St. Andrews in the Centennial Open of 1960, as the only top-ranking American, and lost by a shot to Kel Nagle of Australia. Palmer won the next two years, at Royal Birkdale and Troon, and since then, American golfers have won 15 of the 27 tournaments.

Palmer, now 60, is here for what he says will be his final British Open. It is the 22nd time in 30 years that he has played.

“I think it is appropriate that I make this my final one, here at St. Andrews, where I started 30 years ago,” he said. “Winnie (his wife) and I have the same suite at Rusacks Hotel we had 30 years ago.”

There is a longstanding theory about St. Andrews that you need to play here a few times in order to win, though some players would discount that.

Champagne Tony Lema showed up in 1964 without ever having seen St. Andrews and breezed to a five-shot victory over Nicklaus and Roberto de Vicenzo of Argentina. Nicklaus started off 76-74 when winds raked the course, and even a closing 66-68 was not good enough to challenge Lema.

Nicklaus was not to be denied in the next two St. Andrews Opens, winning a playoff from Doug Sanders in 1970, and repeating in 1978 after holding off a challenge by a little-known New Zealander named Simon Owen.

Sanders took three putts on the 72nd hole in 1970, missing the second one from three feet, to allow Nicklaus to tie. In the 18-hole playoff the next day, the match went down to the final hole, where Nicklaus sank an eight-foot putt from the same direction that Sanders had misfired the day before. The putt appeared to be taking the same quick break that cost Sanders the championship, then caught the lip of the cup and toppled in.

Tony Jacklin, the defending champion, was on the verge of running away with the tournament in the opening round when he shot the outgoing nine in 29, only to be cut short by a violent rainstorm that postponed play. The next day, he hit his second shot on the 14th hole into a thicket of gorse, took a double bogey and finished at 67, only one shot ahead of Nicklaus.

Now it is Ballesteros’ turn to try to make it two Opens in a row at St. Andrews.

It was the fiery Spaniard’s play on the legendary Road Hole, No. 17, that brought him his second of three British Open titles in 1984. The hole is a 461-yard dogleg, considered by many as the toughest par-four in golf.

When Ballesteros made a par by hitting a six-iron second shot from the rough that landed on the green close enough to get down in two putts, he said he felt like he’d made a birdie.

“The six-iron at 17, the more I look at the shot, the more impressed I get with myself,” Ballesteros said Tuesday after a practice round. “If you look very close where I was and how (little) room on the green to put the ball right there, I guess I was very lucky.”

The victory came when Tom Watson, a five-time British Open winner--but not at St. Andrews--gambled and lost on the same hole. Watson pushed his tee shot so far to the right that he thought it was out of bounds, but it was in by about six feet. He hit his second shot, a two-iron, even worse. The ball hit the road and bounced against a stone wall, but instead of caroming back toward the green, it stopped in a depression about two feet from the wall. With no room to maneuver a chip shot, he flailed at the ball and sent it skidding across the green, 30 feet past the pin.

When he missed the long putt and took a bogey five, Ballesteros began celebrating. The championship was his.

Watson hopes some of Ballesteros’ magic will rub off on him this week. He has Nick de Paul, Seve’s old caddie, carrying his bags.

“The secret to winning at St. Andrews is to keep out of the bunkers, and Seve never knocked it in a fairway bunker all four days,” Watson said. “Nick got a lot of credit for that, keeping him alert to where he needed to aim his drives. You can’t see most of them from the tee, so you need help.”

So the Old Course, drying out in a midsummer sun after Monday night’s drenching, is waiting for another challenge, as it has done for hundreds of years.

It’s easy to say when you have won twice here, but nevertheless, Nicklaus probably summed up the feelings of most players when he said: “To be remembered, you have to win at St. Andrews.”