Why golf is really coming home this summer

SCOTLAND, as we all know, is regarded as the Home of Golf and it certainly will be during the months of July and August when three of the world’s Major championships will be staged north of the border in consecutive weeks.

The Open Championship, the Senior British Open Championship and the Ricoh Women’s British Open Championship should all provide compelling viewing and will also all be hugely significant in their own right. Paternal duties permitting, The Open, to be played at Carnoustie on July 19 to 22, provides Tiger Woods with the opportunity to become the first man since Peter Thomson in the 1950 to win the title for three years in-a-row.

However, to achieve that feat, and to emulate Thomson, Tom Morris Jnr, Jamie Anderson and Bob Ferguson, he will have to overcome a resurgent Phil Mickelson and a much-maligned home challenger – not to mention unquestionably the toughest course on the Open rota.

The R and A held its annual Open Media Day at Carnoustie last month and I can report the course is in magnificent shape ahead of this year’s event. Thanks, in no small part to a dry winter, the rough will be nothing like as punitive as it was in 1999, the last time the championship was held in Angus – witness Andrew Coltart (right) up to his waist in the long grass during that infamous championship.

But that does not mean it will be easy. Carnoustie never is, as the statistics from its most recent Opens show.
Carnoustie is always two to three shots harder than most other Open venues. Eight years ago, the average score was 76.82 and that was by no means out of line with 1975, when it was 74.35, or 1968, when the average score ballooned to a remarkable 77.05.

This year the course has also been lengthened some 60 yards to 7,241 yards meaning it will continue to provide a man-sized test, irrespective of the weather conditions.

On paper at least, it seems the course, and its relative lack of rough, will suit Woods to the proverbial ‘T’.

That said, Mickelson, aided and abetted by new swing coach Butch Harmon, looked back at his imperious best while winning the recent Players Championship.

And, laugh if you like, but I would not discount the chances of course specialist, Paul Lawrie either. I, for one, would be delighted if Lawrie was to repeat his victory of 1999, not least because he has never received anything like the credit he deserved for the performance he put in that final afternoon.

However, if I was to be honest, I would have to admit that it is more likely that history will repeat itself not at Carnoustie but at Muirfield where, one week later, the Senior British Open is staged there for the first time on July 26 to 29.

Back in 1987, Nick Faldo won his first of three Open titles at the home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers and by coincidence, or grand design, the Englishman turns 50 just in time for this year’s Seniors event on the same course. How good it would be if Faldo were to celebrate his Seniors’ debut with another victory, although this time we can only hope there will be no repeat of his excruciating 1992 victory address when inexplicably he chose to sully the moment by thanking the assorted media from “the heart of his bottom”.

Faldo, of course, is now a member of the fourth estate and therefore should know a good story when he sees one. That being the case, he would probably admit that the golfing story of the summer might not revolve around his exploits, or those of Woods and his contemporaries, but around women professional golfers playing on the historic Old Course, St Andrews, for the very first time.

I am sure I will enjoy The Open and the Senior British Open but, of the three successive events in Scotland this summer, the one I am looking forward to most is the Ricoh Women’s British Open, to be played on the Old Course on August 2-5. Like all golf fans, I cherish many vivid memories of the leading male professionals competing on the Old Course and I am impatient to see how the exploits of the top women compare.

Interestingly, the Old Course will be only 641 yards shorter than it was for The Open in 2005. Interestingly, too, few of the leading contestants have ever played the course before, although one who has is Annika Sorenstam who won the annual St Rule Trophy as an amateur in 1990 before embarking on a peerless professional career.

Recently, Sorenstam was knocked off the top spot on the Rolex World Ranking by Mexico’s Lorena Ochoa. Clearly, the Swede is not quite the force she once was but how fitting it would be were she to bring down the curtain on a sensational career by claiming a Major title on the Old Course.

That would put her on a par with Braid, Jones, Thomson, Nicklaus, Faldo and Ballesteros. In other words, in exactly the company she deserves.