In the company of honourable gentlemen

As the 'third week of July' approaches it is once again time for one of the world’s oldest and greatest sporting events – the British Open golf championship.

This year The Open, as it is sometimes even referred to by major American players, returns to history-steeped Muirfield on the outskirts of Scotland’s magical capital Edinburgh.

Muirfield, the home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, has the longest continuously documented history of any golf club having been formed on March 7 in 1744.

It is now 258 years since a declaration by the city fathers of Edinburgh first chronicled the history of Muirfield.

In part it read: “At Edinburgh the Seventh Day of March, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Fourty Four years, the Lord Provost, Magistrates and Council, with the Deacon of Crafts Ordinary and Extraordinary of the City of Edinburgh, being in Council assembled, And it being represented to them, that Several Gentleman of Honour, skilfull in the Ancient and Healthfull exercise of the Golf, had from time to time Applied to Several Members of the Council for a Silver Club to be annual plaid for on the Links of Leith…”

According to my old friend Norman Mair, a former Scottish hooker and rugby and golf correspondent of “The Scotsman,” in his book “Muirfield – Home of the Honourable Company,” the petition for a city-sponsored trophy having been granted the written history of the Gentlemen Golfers of Leith had begun.

It was not, of course, the beginning of golf, for the game, as stated in the minute of the Edinburgh city council, was already “Ancient,” but it did mean that Leith’s Gentlemen golfers, later to become the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, can lay claim to being the oldest club with a proven history.

At first the Gentleman Golfers amused themselves over five holes at Leith before in 1836 they moved to nine new holes at Musselburgh. This course served them until 1891 when they moved further out along the shoreline of the Firth of Forth to Muirfield where they built a unique golf course that Jack Nicklaus loved so much he named his signature course in Columbus, Ohio Muirfield Village.

It is classic, sandy, treeless links land. The first nine holes wind around the outside of the property, clockwise, and the home nine former an inner counter-clockwise ring. Constant changes of direction are a feature so that the wind direction is never the same for more than two holes consecutively.

As Nicklaus, who won one of his Open titles there in 1966 has written: “I liked Muirfield from the first day I played it. It is essentially a fair course – as far as golf is meant to be fair – and, as everyone knows, it has more definition than most of the links on which the Open is played. What you see is what you get.”

Muirfield also represents a critical point in the great career of Gary Player who won the first of his three Opens and nine majors at the course in 1959.

Player dragged himself off the final green in tears utterly convinced that he had thrown away the greatest chance of his young (23) life. Player had finished with a double-bogey six and thought it had cost him the championship – the moment captured by a newspaper photographer who snapped a famous picture of the golfer being consoled by his wife Vivienne.

In those days 36 holes were played on the last day and Player had rallied well after a dreadful start – his first round of 75 having left him seven shots behind the leaders.

Player cut four shots off his score in the second round, but was still in no great shape only two inside the cut of 148.

In the third round Player shaved another stroke off his tally but was still four behind the leaders Fred Bullock and Sam King. There were as many as 13 players with scores equal to or better than his own; hence his anguish when, after going out in 34 in the final round, he spoilt a possible 66 by dropping those two shots at the last by bunkering his drive and then three-putting.

A long wait followed for the man who would become South Africa’s greatest sportsman but one after another his rivals found Players total of 284 beyond them and he became the youngest champion since Willie Aucterlonie in 1893.

In his book “To Be The Best,” Player described the torture of his wait to find out whether he had won his first major. “I had to wait two hours to discover whether I was British Open champion. I was convinced I had thrown the title away when it had been firmly within my grasp and I could only wait in anguish to see if any of my rivals at Muirfield could catch me.

“I went back to my hotel. I had a cold bath. I got dressed. I waited. Harold Henning phoned me with news of how the leaders were doing. I went back to Muirfield but could not bear to watch. I paced up and down the drive away from the clubhouse. Finally George Gibson of the PGA persuaded me to come into the building and watch the final moments of the championship from an upstairs room overlooking the last green.

“From there, I beheld Flory van Donck and Fred Bullock poised over their birdie putts for the chance to tie. At that moment I pondered on how I had squandered a glorious day’s play at the moment when I almost had a great score in my pocket. It was a lesson I was never to forget: The game is never over until the last putt drops."