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Imagine, if you like, driving into the old town of Prestwick from the north, past what used to be Scotland’s only international airport, and further along Monkton Road into the city itself. At traffic lights turn right onto Links Road. Then maybe half a mile along and after the trail slides under the bridge that carries the train track, turn right again. At Prestwick Golf Club. There, in 1860, the first Open Championship was played, a fact immediately confirmed by the commemorative cairn that stands just inside the entrance.
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On that very spot, 162 years ago, in October, Old Tom Morris and Robert Andrew teed off the first tee shots of what was a 36-hole event. Scoring 174, Musselburgh’s Willie Park Sr. beat Morris by two shots, who was the only man on the eight-man course to break 60 in all three 12-hole rounds.
But that was then. Now, the path from the car park to the pro shop leads us past the clubhouse on our right and, before and in close succession, the 14th fairway, the 14th green, the 15th tee, the 18th green and a small green. of practices. Just past the entrance to the building and outside club pro David Fleming’s shop window is the ‘new’ first tee, flush against the wall that separates the course from Prestwick railway station.
It is, as club secretary Ken Goodwin says, “a small footprint,” leaving little room for anything more than a few golfers and the occasional caddie. It may be perfect for 1860, but the idea that a 21st century Open could be played in its ancestral home is truly fanciful. There simply isn’t enough space to accommodate the wide variety of infrastructure and large crowds that are an integral part of the game’s oldest championship today. Not even close.
Nearly a century has passed since the endlessly eccentric links on the shore of the Firth of Clyde held their 24th and final Open. There is nothing to directly link the Open game to an unsuitable surface, although that immutable fact would have led to the course becoming the museum piece it is today. While Prestwick remains close to the hearts of those who appreciate eccentricity and quirkiness, he would hardly be a fitting test for the modern “bombers” who populate the sharp end of professional golf. Drive-pitch-and-putt would be the order of the four days.
Still, it certainly wasn’t a lack of challenge that caused the championship to go for good after “Long” Jim Barnes’ 1925 victory. Winner of the first two PGA championships in 1916 and 1919, as well as the 1921 US Open, the transplanted Cornishman hit his ball 300 times en route to claiming his fourth and last major title and the £75 first-place prize. George Duncan, the 1920 Open champion, scored the best (73) in a final round in which only 28 of 68 players went over 80. Prestwick back then was no pushover.
While no one said it out loud or even in writing at the time – neither the club nor the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, the organizers of the Open – the fact that Prestwick never saw a 25th Open was almost certainly the fault of overzealous fans. . This year’s Open at St. Andrews, the event’s celebrated 150th, is for the first time a full-ticket affair. Such caution would have helped in Prestwick around 1925, especially as warning signs were in full view as late as 11 years earlier.
Playing the third round of the 1914 Open, Harry Vardon and JH Taylor, two-thirds of the “Great Triumvirate” completed by James Braid, were seen by some 5,000 people. But, as reported in The history of the Open Championship (1860-1950) that figure doubled in the afternoon when “the Lanarkshire miners turned out en masse and their enthusiasm was so great as to make it difficult for others to watch the game”.
So proper precautions before the 1925 championship could have changed history. Indeed, the absence of such may explain the reluctance of anyone in authority to admit guilt.
“Although there are print and online sources mentioning link crowding, particularly during the closing round, as the reason the Open did not return to Prestwick after 1925, I have not been able to find anything in our archives that yields more light on the matter,” says Kieran George, assistant curator at the World Golf Museum, located just behind the R&A Clubhouse in St. Andrews. “The minutes of the Championship Committee do not reveal if or when the decision was made to remove Prestwick from the open rotation. Anything related to the Open host venues generally just indicates which field they plan to invite to host the Championship, without giving any reason for the choice.”
However, further investigation would suggest that the catalyst behind Prestwick’s demise as an Open venue was likely the popularity of a former Scottish patriot named Macdonald Smith. For that week at least, Smith was the 1920s equivalent of Tiger Woods in terms of fan appeal.
A quick look at his record makes it clear that the Carnoustie-born naturalized American was one of the best players of the era. Although without a victory in any of the four major men’s events in golf today, Smith has won 24 times on what is now the PGA Tour (an impressive feat that has so far not earned him induction into the Golf Hall of Fame). World Golf) and posted 17 top-10s in majors. That includes five top-five finishes at the US Open, seven top-five finishes at the Open Championship (and no less than one U-18 in nine total starts). In his only Masters of his, he was T-7. Strangely, he never played in a PGA Championship.
Statistically at least, Smith’s closest brushes with a major win were a trio of second-place finishes. In 1930, he was single-handedly beaten by Bobby Jones at both the US Open and The Open. And two years later he was runner-up in the Open again, this time against Gene Sarazen. Invariably, a player of the highest quality was needed to overcome a challenge from Smith.
But those numbers belie the certainty that his best chance came at Prestwick in 1925. Rounds of 76-69-76 gave Smith a five-shot, 54-hole lead over Barnes and Archie Compston, with 1912 champion Ted Ray and Abe Mitchell (whose image forms the figure atop the Ryder Cup) back seven strokes.
As was the custom back then, 36 holes were played on the final day, with the leaders not necessarily at the back of the course. So it was that, largely in anonymity, Barnes went first into the third round at 8 a.m. and started his final round of 74 at 12:30 p.m. a key to eventual victory, especially given Barnes’ recent history. . Just three weeks earlier, he shot a grotesque 85 in the final round of the US Open at Worcester Country Club in Massachusetts (won by Scotsman Willie Macfarlane), which, if nothing else, confirms that golf is the most fickle of games. . Away from the stress of head-to-head, head-to-head, and head-to-head competition, Barnes was in the clubhouse at 3 p.m. with his total of 300.
Smith began his final round 30 minutes later alongside Tom Fernie, so he knew for a fact that a round of 78 would be enough to gain possession of the jar of claret. And the round started pretty well with pars on the first two holes. But soon things began to unravel, courtesy of a crowd that was by all accounts largely out of control. Despite it being a Friday business day, the lack of an admission charge was too much of a temptation for many fans. Hundreds took the train from Glasgow and jumped over the wall from Prestwick station to the first tee. An estimated 15,000 people attended that afternoon, the vast majority watching Smith.
“They wanted the Scotsman to win and all that was wrong was that too many of them wanted him too much,” wrote Bernard Darwin. “It was a fatal misunderstanding and I doubt I ever got over it.”
It is clear that the bailiffs could not cope. “There were times when players were left with such narrow lanes to play in that some couldn’t see the flags,” was the verdict of Arthur Leonard Lee in The Guardian. Instructions advising stewards to “endeavour to keep spectators always on the right hand side of the track both when exiting and entering” were sadly lost in the shuffle.
“Smith was quoted as saying that spectators got in the way many times,” says Andrew Lockhead, archivist at Prestwick Golf Club. “There were holes where he had to play above people’s heads. So the crowd clearly invaded the playing areas of the field. The stewards couldn’t stop them.”
The irony, Lockhead points out, is that all the viewers were on Smith’s side. “They were a little more exuberant. They thought they were cheering him on. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to notice that fact and his concentration was gone.”
Just as damaging was Smith’s loss of control on the greens. Three putts on the 7th, 8th and 15th holes resulted in double bogeys. But theirs was more of a steady disintegration than a sudden and dramatic display of the dark art of drowning under pressure. After his promising start, Smith was three over par for the next three holes and headed for what was surely the biggest disappointment of a distinguished but unsatisfied career.
In the end, Smith’s 82—“a tragedy of waste,” Darwin called it—was four shots too many. Only fourth in 303, he finished two shots behind joint runners-up Ray and Compston. Fifth in 305, Mitchell was the only other man to finish within 10 strokes of the new champion.
“Poor Macdonald Smith was not strangely sad and bitter at the end of the day and blamed the crowd for his failure,” wrote Darwin. “You have to admit that Prestwick is not a good ground for spectators. The crowds are very large and enthusiastic and some of them are imbued with the spirit of the miner on vacation that he traditionally commented: ‘Damn the gamblers. I have come to see. In addition, the ground, especially near the clubhouse, is very poorly adapted as spectators watching one player are inextricably mixed with those watching another.
Thus it was that Barnes became Prestwick’s last open champion. That there could have been a 25 if Smith had gotten over his nerves and the proximity of so many of his countrymen is open to conjecture. But it is not unreasonable to assume that at least one more Open would have been played at the event’s original venue. Especially when the R&A didn’t blame the Prestwick club for the unfortunate scenes surrounding Smith’s final round. A letter from the chairman of the championship committee, Norman Boase, makes that clear.
“Your arrangements were excellent and I can’t think of anything else you could have done,” Boase wrote. “The stewards did everything possible.”
All of which will have been little consolation to Smith, who died of a heart attack in 1949 at age 59. But Prestwick’s men clearly did not want a repeat of the scenes that must have followed him to the grave. More than a quarter of a century later, the program for the 1952 Amateur Championship at Prestwick contained a stern instruction for spectators: “Obey the stewards and see that all players get clear runs and fair play.”
Somewhere, it’s safe to assume, Smith was nodding his head in agreement.