Thoughts From Birkdale

Autos, not practice balls, piled up at Hillside GC (right); it's not the same as his name engraved on the claret jug, but at least one top pro left his mark at a local coffee shop. Photos: Darren Carroll

The fans, of course, love it when someone hits an iron no higher than a basketball hoop. There is a sophistication among many British spectators that exceeds that of their American counterparts. Certainly the "You the man" fan exists in the U.K., but they are fewer and far between. In signature-hunting locations, particularly on the practice days, you can see kids with genuine autograph books that haven't been common in America for a long time.

This isn't to say the fans don't have their quirks. Camilo Villegas pushed his drive on the difficult 10th hole Saturday, and as the ball rolled along the tamped-down turf, a marshal backpedaled -- knees flexed, arms extended -- as if he were defending a fast break. Dozens of fans scurried toward the ball as if they had spotted a four-carat diamond unclaimed on a crowded sidewalk. Once the ball stopped, they bent down for a closer look and settled in as close as possible to view the forthcoming recovery shot. The golf at "the golf," as many Brits call the championship, really does matter to a lot of them.

Before they were banned some years ago, stepladders, sometimes sizable ones, were toted around by a noticeable minority of fans for whom nothing impeded their view. I photographed 10 Opens before I began writing about them, and one of my favorite images was taken in the late-1980s. It has about a dozen fans on ladders, looking toward action that can only be imagined, with a cerulean vista in the distance. The golf-as-running-of-the-bulls stampede of people on the final hole isn't allowed anymore, either, and riot-control-type heavy barriers are in place, but the BBC ran a crawl periodically during its final-round broadcast: 72ND HOLE SPECTATOR REQUEST PLEASE STAY OFF THE FAIRWAY AND FOLLOW MARSHALS' INSTRUCTIONS. In an ugly scene at the 2000 Open at St. Andrews, some fans got pushed into the Swilcan Burn.

So many mobile phones were ringing at Opens this century that officials have barred them, but unlike in the States, backpacks are still permitted. Many of them seem loaded with enough provisions for a weekend camping trip. Among the contents I observed in the gallery were a thermos of tea, a flask of something, a peanut butter sandwich, shortbread cookies and a set of watercolor paints. One fellow in Sunday's gallery of 40,000 was sans knapsack but had on his person a shooting stick, a high-tech viewing periscope, a small radio on which to hear the Open broadcast, a pair of binoculars and The Sunday Times. Newspapers, moribund in America, also are having financial troubles in the United Kingdom, but they're not quite on life support. Come Open week, they're alive with copy written in engaging styles and grabby headlines. In The Sunday Telegraph, Mark Reason refuted two-time Birkdale Open champion Peter Thomson's description of the layout as "man-sized but not a monster." Reason wrote, "Yesterday, a combination of wind and the course tossed the golfers around like Godzilla with a handful of popcorn."

In the Sunday Express, one story was teased with the following headline: Aussie colossus defies treacherous conditions to set galleries alight and leave young rivals trailing/NORMAN IN A VINTAGE SHOW/Great Grey Shark is on a title hunt. For one of its pieces, The Sunday Observer asked, "Who needs Tiger when a shark and some minnows do battle?"

Restraint was not one of the properties possessed by a mustachioed, middle-age man who approached me Saturday afternoon as I stood just inside the gallery rope waiting for Duval and Harrington to tee off on No. 9. Best I could tell with his accent he said, "I'm just going for a pee down here." He then walked 40 feet down the rope line and urinated against the green mesh at the back of a large grandstand. There were, I noticed, two other men doing the same thing next to some bushes slightly farther away, all as a row of people looked on from the top row of the stand.

The chilly weather dramatically cut into ice-cream sales, according to one vendor, but from the looks of the traffic from one of the concession stands toward a large area of plastic chairs and tables in front of a huge television screen near the first hole Saturday afternoon, the fish and chips business was good (indeed, one TV report said 20,000 portions were consumed Thursday -- a total sellout). Nearby, a smaller group of fans stood in front of the main leader board watching fortunes rise and fall, the championship's stock ticker.

The numbers were being posted by teens from Giggleswick, a day and boarding school in North Yorkshire. Giggleswickians started manning the Open leader board in 1989 when an R&A committeeman's children were enrolled, and they've been volunteering ever since. "We've stayed in cricket-club changing rooms and church-hall floors. This year we're in a hostel," said Dorothy Lambert, the trip organizer. "We started out with five boys and three staff. This year we have 16 children and four staff."