Back in 1955, the bold Gary Player couldn’t afford a hotel room for The Open in St Andrews, so he slept in the dunes by the seaside.
Well, with that intrepid enthusiasm in mind, and the fact that accommodation for any major event these days costs as much as an entire crate of Faberge eggs, a colleague and I are staying on a campsite at the Hoylake rugby club for this week’s showpiece on the Wirral. As Shakespeare didn’t quite scribble, ‘this is the summer of our discount tent.’ Now there’s a cornball gag that’s as ancient as auld Wullie himself.
After digesting that opening meander, your mind is probably now awash with deliciously appalling images of this correspondent shuffling from the communal showers and mulling over the vagaries and subtle nuances of links golf while waving a cheery hello to George and Elsie as they hang their semmits and bloomers up to dry on the awning of their ageing Datsun caravanette.
Talking of happy campers, Rory McIlroy will be so cock-a-hoop after his thrilling win in the Genesis Scottish Open at the weekend, I’m expecting his voice to wake us from our slumbers on a jovial tannoy announcement akin to the one Gladys Pugh would make during an episode of Hi-de-Hi.
Sunday’s showdown between McIlroy and our own Robert MacIntyre was a right old treat. The men’s professional scene has been riven with rancour and division over the last year or so. There have been occasions at certain tournaments when the all-consuming, wearying narrative has been us-versus-them as loyalists of the established tours parried and jousted with the LIV rebels. The Scottish Open, though, was simply about golfing competition with no underlying tensions, background grumblings or scores to settle. It was a feelgood Scottish Open and, in many ways, it was a refreshing tonic.
In this opinionated world of ours, where folk are constantly hissing, harrumphing and hectoring about all manner of things on the knee-jerk medium of social media, MacIntyre certainly proved a few doubters wrong.
After his play-off win over Matt Fitzpatrick in the Italian Open last year, MacIntyre went off the boil. By his own admission, he had lost the buzz for the game but, in this pursuit of bountiful peaks and troughs, that can be par for the course. Some of the outpourings on social media, an odd platform which has about as much calm, level-headed reason as a nuclear warhead, just about had him written off amid great hysterical torrents of downbeat analysis. ‘Twas ever thus in a country that has a nagging, irresistible predilection to snipe at our own. Here in the cradle of the game, there is a desperation for our players to have mighty success. It’s one of the burdens that comes with being from the home of golf. Let’s face it, we were spoiled by the exploits of the likes of Sandy Lyle, Sam Torrance, Colin Montgomerie, Paul Lawrie or Catriona Matthew down the years.
You’ll never please everybody, of course. Various observers have suggested MacIntyre should be doing this, that and a bit of the other. They compare him with other players of a similar vintage who have won here, there and everywhere amid impatient and often unrealistic expectation.
MacIntyre is only 26. He has two tour wins, two top-10s in The Open and a 12th at the Masters in recent years. His efforts at the weekend, in a field featuring eight of the world’s top-10, underlined his fondness for the big stage as he forced McIlroy to produce his very best on those closing two holes to steal the bounty. It’s an impressive body of work and the Oban lefty continues to chart his own course of progression, not anybody else’s.
As for McIlroy? Well, his victory at the Renaissance has only heightened the panting fever surrounding him as he seeks to end a major drought that’s been going on for so long, the Northern Irishman is in danger of being hit with a hose pipe ban. That he cancelled his pre-tournament press conference scheduled for today suggests that he is trying to avoid all the preview pandemonium. It worked for him in Scotland last week when he sidestepped his media engagements and lifted the title. McIlroy won The Open here at Hoylake in 2014 then landed the US PGA Championship a month later to take his major tally to four but he’s been stuck on that number ever since.
Without wanting to show any favouritism – us golf writers are an impartial old lot – a victory for McIlroy would do wonders for the wider game in its scrap for relevance in a jammed sporting market. A casual tune-in to various sport bulletins has the build-up to this week’s fourth Ashes test in cricket very much at the top of the agenda. If you wanted to watch highlights of the Scottish Open at yon time the other night, meanwhile, you had to wait until footage of the women’s Ashes had been on first. R&A officials will be well aware that an Open finishing on the same day as affairs at Old Trafford is not ideal in terms of focus and public interest.
No pressure then Rory. Then again, we wouldn’t be complaining about a MacIntyre win either, would we?
