St Andrews: The Old Course
This year's Open will be the 29th played on The Old Course.
The Old Course occupies a narrow strip of ground, about 2 1/2 miles long between St. Andrews Bay and the Eden Estuary.
The course will total 7,297 yards for the Open, eight yards less than in 2010.
Hitting a lot of fairways and greens is easy here; putting together a good 18-hole score is hard.
There are despicable, invisible pot bunkers in the middle of fairways.
The Old Course makes all the rules and breaks them all, too.
It's a course that used to be played backward.
Bad shots are punished here, and sometimes good shots are, too.
This is a primordial landscape of infinite mystery.
There'll be many more broken dreams at St. Andrews this year. And plenty of magic, too.