In Praise of the Old Course Park

If you’re reading this paragraph, I want you to know that I wrote it on my phone while sitting at the foot of the Swilcan Bridge on the Old Course at St. Andrews.

I was not holding up play, to be clear. There is no golf here on Sundays. It might be the game’s most important tradition.

I suppose I could have written these paragraphs with a pencil on the pages of a leather notebook, just to drive home the pretension, but it may shock you that some cliches are even too earnest and cheesy for me.

I think we tend to be overwrought about some of golf’s sacred places. I try to remind myself every year that Augusta National is not holy ground, it’s just dirt, grass, and ponds that are owned by some of the richest people in America. But I can make an exception for the Old Course, particularly on Sundays, when the course makes an important statement that land should still belong to the people who live and tend to it.

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I got to play the Old Course forward and backward this week as part of a project we’re working on that will come out when we have given it time to properly cook. Magical can scarcely begin to describe it. But I’m not sure any part of either round moved me as much as strolling around the course by myself at sunset, listening to music and talking to people as they walked their dogs. One day a week, the course is a public park. You can have a picnic here, you can hold hands with someone you love, and you can stand (as I did) in the spot where Costantino Rocca pounded the ground in 1995, all his prayers briefly answered.

You can also pet a dog right there in the Valley of Sin. I did that, too.

I’ve always believed that there is no better place on earth for a dog to live than my native Montana, but a Sunday at the Old Course has me reassessing that a bit. Where else could a dog run free and playfully across some of the most famous land on earth? Imagine, just for a second, the look on Fred Ridley’s face if he had to watch a dozen labs and golden retrievers descend on Golden Bell, their owners strolling casually with poop bags on their hips. I think Dude Perfect got a raw deal when you consider what is allowed on Sundays in St. Andrews.

But “allowed” also feels like the wrong word, once you really think about it. The Old Course doesn’t belong to a group of people who want to fence it off from the proletariat. It belongs to the town and to Fife and to the people who allow golfers to use it.

The St. Andrews Links Trust doesn’t get everything right. I’m not that naive. It’s harder than ever to book a round at the Old Course, and it is prohibitively expensive for many. That doesn’t negate how much I loved watching kids and dogs play in some of the world’s most famous bunkers, chasing balls and birds and sticks.

Golf can be ethereal if you love it. But we also don’t need to treat the canvas the game is played on like such a precious, breakable thing. Some days, it’s just a big field. A place for a good boy (or good girl) to get off the leash for an hour and run and run.