So much for roll back – the Old Course just got another 132 yards longer. We can’t go on like this

The house clearance is almost complete, the removal van is full to the brim on the drive waiting to leave, and all that is left to pick up is the final precious antique on the mantlepiece. Not even your most prized possession can withstand the inevitable and resist change.

The Old Course at St Andrews is golf’s most beloved relic, a vast exhibition of the sport’s rich history, featuring famous bridges, burns, and holes that have been enjoyed by the best players ever to pick up a club, as well as millions of weekend hackers.

But it is now in the box next to Portrush, Troon, and Hoylake, the most recent venues of The Open. It is absolutely not uncommon for these venues to be altered and lengthened ahead of hosting golf’s oldest major, as they have been in recent years, to cope with how far players hit the ball in this age.

It hits home when it’s the Old Course, though. It is the venue at the very centre of golf’s distance debate, and is used as key evidence as to why elite players can’t just hit the ball further and further, making the most interesting and exciting terrains redundant.

The debate has even been taken as far as to say that The Open should have no rota and copy the Masters. Use a purpose-built golf course, and leave our links havens alone. Let Rory and Bryson smash their way around an A.I. arena resembling the Old Course, while the Old Course can be the Old Course.

“I’ve had a few arguments about this at The Open at St Andrews Old. You could get someone like Bryson DeChambeau drive nine greens. It can make it look stupid,” 1991 Masters champion Ian Woosnam once pondered to the Top 100 Golf Courses.

“Why don’t you keep St Andrews Old as a souvenir, as history, and build another golf course on the side of it – on the old and the new – and make a golf course specifically for The Open and play it there every year like The Masters?”

ALSO: What is the golf ball roll back and what does it mean for me?

Tom Mackenzie and Martin Ebert are in charge of the changes that will see 132 yards added to the course’s official length for the 2027 Open. Players will notice the biggest change on the par-5 5th hole, which will be over 600 yards, and the 10th hole will stretch to 415 from 386 yards.

Hole 11, a par 3, will be 195, over 20 yards longer than what the players faced at the 2022 Open. As well as the length, players might also be startled by how this manifests itself in the actual course alterations.

The new tee box on 5 is proposed to be some way back down the 4th hole, which will make for compelling viewing, given the current course routing makes for long, arduous rounds and often discontent among the competitors. The proposed new 10th tee box has been shifted nearer the New Course at St Andrews.

The R&A are looking to ‘refine the strategic challenge for elite players in a small number of areas for future championships while restoring traditional features that have evolved over time to improve the everyday playing experience for local and visiting golfers’.

Frankly, roll back cannot come soon enough. While the efforts to enhance the playing experience for visitors like you and I is commendable, the underlying motivation to shape another historic venue around the needs of the few doesn’t feel right.

Golf courses and championship venues should be made more compelling and challenging by hazard and terrain manipulation which, to be fair, is part of Mackenzie and Ebert’s plans too.

A new left-hand fairway bunker is being added to the 6th hole, the bunkers on hole 9 are being widened, and there’ll be a new left-hand fairway bunker on hole 10.

But the headline of this press release is not what it does for social golfers, nor marginally more difficult hazards, but the distance increase. The game’s governing bodies evidently still see this as the most effective defence against the attack of 300-plus yard drives.

St Andrews Old Course length difference

ALSO: Which balls will be legal when roll back arrives?

If you can’t average this astonishing figure off the tee, it is extremely unlikely you’ll lift the Claret Jug, or any trophy in this era. It all feels ugly, dirty, and while prioritising skill and craft might sound fanciful and idealistic, that is what golf must do. Skill and craft are at the sport’s core.

And that is the problem, which has now been put in bolder capital letters and underlined several times, with the Old Course being stretched out. Let’s hope that this will be the last time it needs another 100 yards added to it. Roll back must come to its rescue; otherwise, what’s the point?

The alterations will also ring alarm bells to the cynics who have a greater concern for the general nature of Open rota courses, and their adaptation to the money-making corporate machine that the tournament has become.

New R&A chief exec Mark Darbon said that Muirfield needed to tackle practice ground and infrastructural issues before hosting its first Open since 2013, and there have been forms of golfing feng shui performed at Royal Lytham recently to cling on to the rota’s coattails as well.

Although President Trump’s presence in the highest US office has been a significant factor in Turnberry’s absence from the rota since 2009, infrastructural and logistical issues also stand in the way.

At Royal Birkdale, next year’s Open host, Mackenzie and Ebert have redesigned the 5th and 7th holes, removed the pre-existing 14th, and altered the par-5 15th to become the new 14th, and there is now a new par-3 15th hole. No doubt, improving the golf course was at the top of this famous architectural duo’s priority list, but The Open parade and everything that comes with it will have been at the forefront, too.

“I played it about a month and a half ago, and they’ve made some changes. I don’t want to judge it too early, but I didn’t think they’d improved it,” said Lee Westwood when I asked him about Birkdale at The Open at Portrush in July.

Everything just becomes bigger in the end. Par 5s, attendances, Mastercard tents. In the case of the Old Course, please no more.

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