My first impression of St Andrews was like many other people’s, one of being underwhelmed. The only difference being that I was still five miles away from the Auld Grey Toun at a train station called Leuchars.
When we booked the sleeper from London to Leuchars our understanding was that we would be dropped off bang in the centre of St Andrews, maybe even by the 1st tee. Instead we were standing on the platform of a station of a town that we had never heard of until a few hours ago, at 5am on a Sunday, four awkward and spotty 15-year-olds who were on the trip of a lifetime.
It was 1986, The Open was to take place on the same week 130 miles away at Turnberry but we would be spending the next seven days on the east coast of Scotland. Other than Seve’s heroics in ’84 we knew nothing about St Andrews aside from the very early days of the Dunhill Cup, a few highlights of Golf’s Greatest Shots on VHS and what we’d pored over in golf magazines. But it was the Home of Golf and we loved golf.
Video: Things You Didn’t Know About St Andrews
I don’t even know how we booked the tee times. The internet was a long way off, we had a telephone in the house but one of the dads had booked everything by post courtesy of his Benson & Hedges Golfers Handbook – we would have one round on the Jubilee, two on the New and Eden, and one on the Old Course leaving a blank day on the Saturday in the hope that we would emerge successful from the ballot.
The Jubilee back then was seen as the weak link (Donald Steel would change all that three years later) and therefore a bit of a warm-up on the Sunday afternoon and, from there, we would be cutting our teeth on some world-class links golf, not that any of us really knew what links golf was.
Our golfing experiences to that point had involved starting off at Richmond Park, joining either Wimbledon Park or Burhill, and then straying as far as junior matches against the likes of Coombe Wood and New Malden. There were no double bunkers, revetted bunkers or any sights or sounds of the sea at any of these places.
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