PeoPle’s game: Strong sense of community reflects Scottish society

Where does the true heart of Scottish golf lie?

You’d instinctively say St Andrews, probably. But the Home of Golf is really the world’s capital of the game that Scots possibly didn’t invent but certainly perfected and exported around the globe.

St Andrews was the nursery ground of golf, no question.

But the majority of the missionaries who planted the obsession across the world were from a different place, a place where the traditions of the game are quite different to the “big rooms” in the clubhouses at the R&A, at Muirfield and at Royal Troon.

Carnoustie is the path not regularly travelled in golf, where the game is run not exclusively but collectively, by ordinary golfers for their peers. Golf really is the people’s game in the little Angus town, maybe more than any other place in the world where it is played.

In that respect I think it’s more the heart of the Scottish game than any other place as well. The strong sense of community in the way Carnoustie’s links is run – occasionally acrimoniously, but better for that – reflects Scottish society.

But it’s definitely not inward looking. For a small, relatively isolated town, Carnoustie has had a massive effect on the growth of the game worldwide. Like the Scottish engineers who travelled the world in the industrial revolution, scores of young men from the town went across the globe – as many as 300 in the early part of the 20th Century, which would have been roughly 10% of the male population at the time – to be teachers and professionals.

The Carnoustie Golf Club, formed in 1839 and the oldest artisan – that is, working man’s – golf club in the world, proclaims itself the birthplace of American and Australian golf. It’s quite a boast, but one founded largely in fact, as so many members of the club were so influential in those countries as golf boomed.

There was hardly a leading golf club in America in the 1910s and ’20s that didn’t have some kind of Carnoustie connection. Men like the three Smith brothers, all professionals, who were the earliest winners of the US Open, or like Stewart Maiden, who settled in Atlanta and taught the immortal Bobby Jones how to play the game.

Being golf’s primary missionary station would be enough. But Carnoustie also has the Championship Course, a relative newcomer in the town’s golfing history, but now the prized asset.

The first record of golf at Carnoustie dates from 1560, but like other links land up and down the east coast it was probably being played long before that.

It wasn’t until around 1834 that a basic course was established and not until 1842 that a 10-hole layout was formalised by Allan Robertson, the game’s first professional. That became 18 holes, at a modest 4,500 yards, by Old Tom Morris in 1867.

The course came into the town’s ownership in 1892, by which time a “gentleman’s club”, the Dalhousie, a second artisan club, the Caledonia, and the first women’s club in history, Carnoustie Ladies, had also been formed. In 1901 the clubs came together to form the Links Management Committee.

But the “Old Course” at Carnoustie was not sufficiently challenging for championship golf, and in 1926 the chairman of the links, James Wright, decided to do something about that.

A local accountant, Wright knew that hosting the Open Championship would be crucial to the prosperity of the town. He was also no doubt aware that the championship had recently outgrown Prestwick, its spiritual home, and the R&A needed an alternative.

Wright and the committee naturally went to the most prolific and famous golf architect in Britain, five-time Open champion James Braid, and gave him carte blanche to upgrade the course to championship standard.

Braid retained some features but to all intents and purposes this was a complete redesign. Carnoustie is still the only Open venue built for the specific purpose of hosting the championship.

However, the celebrated Braid’s original finish of three short-to-medium par fours and a par three across the Barry Burn was underwhelming to say the least. A dry-run at the 1927 Scottish Amateur Championship brought scathing reviews.

Wright and his committee, knowing they had Carnoustie’s debut at the 1931 Open coming up fast, went back to the drawing board and decided on a solution. They took out the short hole – the same design, without the burn, became the short 13th – made one par four into the long par three 16th, and stretched out the last two holes, utilising the snaking Barry Burn to full effect on both.

Braid came back and made further alterations, but apart from a couple of bunkers, left the amateurs’ alterations alone. Other than a couple of tees and some mounding, those three holes remain almost exactly the same today – the toughest finish on the Open rota, if not in major championship golf.

Seven Opens have followed, the last two since the course was brought back into the guardianship of the links committee after some years of neglect under the local authority.

The eighth Open finds Carnoustie thriving with a new £4.7 million golfers’ centre just completed. But that facility is for the ordinary townspeople and club members as much as the visitors.

Inside there’s a plush new boardroom overlooking the first tee for the 12-strong committee, two members each from the six clubs who play the links’ three courses.

Carnoustie is still run collectively, and golf is still the people’s game here.

Twitter: @C_SScott