CHANGING TIMES: One of the alterations at the Old Course at St. Andrews will be the flattening of the famed green No. 11, the Eden. (Colin J. Donaldson)
If you listen closely, you might hear golf ghosts whimpering.
If you open your ears, you will hear pundits screaming bloody murder from every corner of the golfing world.
For just about a week, the Old Course at St. Andrews in Scotland has been undergoing what crudely can be called a renovation. The ancestral home of golf, conservatively dating back three centuries, has not had a major change since 1949 when Hull’s Bunker on No. 15 was filled in. This project, headed by Scottish architect Martin Hawtree, has suggested moving bunkers, adding new bunkers, and changes to some of the land contours, including the large and undulating greens.
The sand-swept land of the links rises and falls in unique and quirky ways, a manner that in many places has never in its history been touched by the hand of man.
“The natural contours of The Old Course are its very soul,” world-renowned architect Tom Doak wrote in an email, “and something many of us think to be sacred and above the fray of design arguments.”
The Royal and Ancient Golf Club, along with the St. Andrews Links Trust, sent out a quiet press release on Friday days after the work started, stating their intentions on altering nine holes of the course. The people of the town of St. Andrews own the land, which is a public park and also houses five additional golf courses on the same peninsula, darting out into the Eden Estuary on the eastern shores of the Kingdom of Fife.
“We understand better than anyone, being based in St. Andrews, how controversial changes to Old Course might be,” Peter Dawson, Chief Executive of the R&A, told The Post yesterday. “We’ve taken great pains with the proposal, making sure the character of course is maintained. There will be very little change for the average player. Once they’ve been done, you won’t know.”
Of the proposed changes — which are set to take place over the next two winters before the upcoming 2015 British Open — the most egregious in the eyes of many is the flattening of the famed green at No. 11, the Eden. That process already has begun, with pictures taken yesterday of bulldozers having removed thousands of square feet of turf and lasers being used to judge the leveling off of the back of the putting surface.
“Very, very slightly, just a couple of percent of the grade,” Dawson said. “Modern green speeds are very different from the green speeds from [when] the hole was first built, if built is the right word.”
Also underway is the widening of the famed “Road Hole” bunker at the front of the 17th green, extending to the right some 20 inches and having the front part of the green contour altered so balls are more apt to roll into the already-penal sand pit.
“I think 17 is hard enough as it is,” Tiger Woods told the Associated Press. “I don’t think we need to make that bunker any deeper or bigger.”
Dawson noted the fact that all of the other venues in the Open rotation have had alterations to make them tougher, and at the Old Course, “we’d done nothing to require any extra precision,” he said.
“I’m more than happy to walk around the Old Course with any architect that wants to see it,” Dawson added. “We know that piece of land and cherish it like no one else.”