If the past is a foreign country, why was a visit to my old home town oh-so bittersweet?

JACK Nicklaus is not the most emotional of men. Seventeen years ago, when he stood on the Swilcan Bridge on the 18th and bade farewell to St Andrews and his unparalleled career in golf, it was his playing partner that day, Tom Watson, who was doing the blubbing.

The Golden Bear put a paw on his shoulder and told him to get a grip.

But on Tuesday as he received honorary citizenship of the town which adores him, the granite nerve that steered him to a record 18 majors finally failed him. Nicklaus was in bits. ‘Thank-you,’ rasped the 82-yearold through his tears, ‘for remembering and not forgetting me, and most importantly, thank you for allowing me to be what I always felt I was for so many decades – one of you.’

The player later admitted he had also wept when he was writing his speech and, as I read it and re-read it, I too have something in my eye.

Nicklaus spoke of the day in 1984 when the University of St Andrews bestowed on him an honorary doctor of law degree.

‘You humbled me then just as you are humbling me today,’ he said. ‘It remains one of my proudest moments as a golfer and a person.’

I remember the occasion well. My mother, a press officer at the university at the time, was heavily involved in the planning of it. I wish now that I had asked her if there was any chance of sneaking me in, but I was too wrapped up in teenage dramas, too busy taking my own citizenship of St Andrews for granted.

Timeless

Back then, as a son of the town, I golfed on its hallowed links for free – all except for the Old Course, that timeless test of seaside golf which sends Jack, Tiger, Rory et al into rhapsodies of superlatives. Yes, to play on the championship course, we young St Andreans had to pay £1.

‘Palmer, Player and Nicklaus, is it today?’ the man in the starter’s box used to say as three of us rocked up at his window with our golf bags.

Even at the zillionth time of telling, he was too amused by his joke to notice that one of our number was an interloper from Aberdeen using a fake local golf pass which we had fashioned from a cereal packet.

I had a ringside view on the day in 1984 Severiano Ballesteros sank an unlikely putt on the 18th to seal victory and celebrated like a matador as he put his own self-doubt to the sword.

He described the moment the ball had a little think, then plopped obligingly into the hole as the happiest in his sporting life and, 38 years on, it remains the most magical I have witnessed in any sport.

‘Really? You were there?’ a restaurateur, who moved to St Andrews in adulthood, said to me this week.

Of course I was. I grew up here. I went to school just across the road.

It is this ancient history which makes the speech by Jack Nicklaus such a challenge to read with dry eyes.

For, as he accepted his honorary citizenship of the town, I was accepting that my own citizenship there was but a fleeting moment in youth, never fully appreciated.

To return ticketless to St Andrews during Open week is to confront the hard facts of 35 years of self-imposed exile.

It is to behold the famous links which I used to think of as mine (because it was; it belongs to the people of the town) and to see barriers everywhere, a ring of steel around the place. Tickets please!

I guessed a crude fake wouldn’t cut it in 2022.

It is to lament that, even going home and watching it on the Beeb, the wry tones of Peter Alliss providing commentary, is not an option.

This is the first Open at St Andrews which requires a subscription to Sky Sports to see it on the telly. A memorial service was held for Alliss in the town this week.

Proud

Coming back to the home of golf and the home of my youth as 290,000 ticketholders from across the world converge on it, QR codes for entry stored on their phones, is a bittersweet return for the native.

You feel proud that so many want to be in this place you know more intimately than they do, but twinges of resentment too.

‘I used to play rugby for my school in this field,’ I told a man from Lincolnshire as he and his young sons perused their family tent on the vast campsite in Station Park.

Understandably, he was more interested in golf. Yes, there were a lot of ‘used tos’ that day, a lot of feeling like a child with his nose pressed up against the window, his memories locked behind the glass.

Over there, next to the 18th green, is where I used to sit as I waited for the caddy-master to notice me and pair me off with a paying customer on the Old Course.

I made a tenner a round and Americans used to cough up at least another fiver as a tip. Golden days.

There on the 15th is where, a few years earlier, we spied the course ranger riding purposefully towards us on one of the mopeds they used back then, and became convinced the Aberdeen interloper was finally to be rumbled. He never was.

The last time I was out at the turn was a Sunday walk with my mother in 2017, months before she died.

She jogged up and down the fairways’ little hillocks as if in defiance of the cancer diagnosis she had received weeks earlier and I, lost in too many emotions to process, looked for golf balls in the whins.

It’s all behind the cordon today and, even if I had one of those precious briefs, I’m not certain how I would feel about being inside it.

What I do know is that, even without citizenship, even though my life is elsewhere, St Andrews will always be my town.

Nicklaus, who first came to the place in 1964 and won the Open here in 1970 and 1978, does not imagine he will ever be back. I cannot imagine staying away.

The Open’s juggernaut will move on, the crowds will disperse and the sense of exclusion which the tournament inadvertently brings to a former St Andrews schoolboy will recede.

Fortunate

My father and many extended family members still live there.

While some visiting golf fans pay thousands for accommodation anywhere within a tenmile radius of the place during the Open, I’m fortunate not to struggle for a bed in the home of golf.

In the Criterion bar on South Street I see occasional familiar faces, some of them my contemporaries at Madras College in the 1980s, back when I had citizenship. Their easy greetings make me feel I still belong.

In a few weeks, when all this is over, I’ll tee off at one of the links’ more forgiving courses – the Eden or Strathtyrum – and, looking back at the old, grey town which Jack Nicklaus says ‘lights up’ for him whenever he is there, I’ll behold my own St Andrews light.

The older I get, the brighter its beam.