World's toughest course?

By Ron Whitten
Photo By Stephen Szurlej

The main road through the town of Carnoustie is a bleak street, framed by gray, sooty storefronts, a macadam so narrow you'll find yourself jumping a curb to let an oncoming double-decker bus rumble by. Turn right and ease through a skinny tunnel beneath the Dundee to Arbroath railway line, then right again, and you're at the municipally owned Carnoustie Golf Links, equally bleak, at first glance.

Carnoustie's Championship Course, acknowledged as one of the toughest in the world-perhaps the toughest-takes time to savor and appreciate.

Just inland from the North Sea, which is visible only from the 15th hole, the course is always exposed to the elements. But unlike most firm, fast, sand-based links, Carnoustie doesn't march out in one direction, then backtrack on the inward nine. Its holes change direction constantly. No more than two in a row face the same angle to the wind.

Its bunkers, as at most Scottish links, have vertical revetted walls of turf. But some aren't ovals. They twist and turn, distorting their walls into canted, even convex faces. Braid bunkers, locals call those concoctions, after their author, architect James Braid.

In other words, it's a fascinating design. The more you dig at Carnoustie, the more you understand. But, in this age of instant analysis, it's easier to be glib than accurate. Which is why, as Carnoustie prepares for its seventh British Open Championship, most will revisit the howls it generated at its last meeting.

In 1999, Carnoustie was considered one big unplayable lie, a links that demanded target golf, a scheme to make the best golfers in the world look like idiots. The finish was a Frenchman's folly (see page 138) and the wrong guy won, in the minds of most sportswriters. Scottish fans were thrilled that local hero Paul Lawrie prevailed, but most writers sniffed that Lawrie was a square peg in the shining round table of previous Carnoustie victors: Tommy Armour, Henry Cotton, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Tom Watson.

Writers in '99 designated a villain. Not the Royal & Ancient, which conducts the Open and dictated its setup, but course superintendent John Philp, who was accused of putting a noose in Carnoustie by squeezing fairways into footpaths through a deliberately cultivated jungle of waist-high hay, and then cackling about it like some demonic sorcerer.

There are those who believe Philp got his comeuppance and was summarily fired after the event. No, what he got after the Open was investiture as a Member of the British Empire. (And therein lies another misconception. He is not now Sir John Philp. He wasn't granted knighthood, just an MBE.) Philp is still Carnoustie's superintendent, still there to make sure in 2007 that "no one makes an arse of my course."

Sure, Carnoustie's setup in 1999 was severe. Each fairway varied in width at several spots from tee to green. One stretch on the 18th was just 18 yards wide, but it got wider at the landing area, then narrower again short of the burn in front of the green. The fairways averaged about 28 yards wide, the same widths they had been in the 1996 Scottish Open, when nobody complained, and mostly the same widths they'll be this year.

The secondary rough-that waist-high hay-was thick, but Philp hadn't fiendishly irrigated and fertilized it. The months prior to the Open were rainy and warm, perfect for native grasses to grow amok. Every course on Scotland's eastern seaboard was throttled with tall, thick rough that summer. By August, things had dried out and the tall stuff had wilted. But the Open was played in July. What exacerbated the situation were howling winds on the first two days of the championship, blowing hard from the west, opposite of the prevailing wind.

Let's quash the rumors that Philp chemically enhanced the rough in the months before the Open. There's almost no way to realistically spread fertilizer through the areas at Carnoustie where the tall rough grows: There are humps, dunes, clumps of gorse, unimproved ground. Second, we're talking about native grasses. Hit them with commercial fertilizers-especially chemical sprays-and you'll probably kill them, not improve them. Third, Carnoustie is a public facility with three 18s. I've seen its maintenance building. I've seen the equipment. I can't believe Philp and his people, without help from the R&A, would have spent the excess money to fertilize the acres and acres of tall rough. The setup in '99 didn't cause Jean Van de Velde's last-round collapse (he started the day at even par, ahead by five), and it didn't prevent Lawrie from closing with a Hogan-like round of 67, to tie at six-over-par 290, and then birdieing the 17th and 18th in the four-hole playoff to win easily over Van de Velde and Justin Leonard.