21 JULY 2007, Page 42

Gale-force golf FRANK KEATING ‘H ere is the weeken

Gale-force golf FRANK KEATING ‘H ere is the weekend weather forecast, beginning with Scotland — severe gale-force sou'easterlies raging off the Firth of Tay, not moderating through Bell Rock and Red Head till at least late afternoon on Sunday.' Here's hoping. It is the Open at Carnoustie, where the Angus coast's zapping zephyrs so often see it as sacred duty to sort out golf's real men from its plaid-trewed journeymen. At spartan Carnoustie only the game's the thing, its taunting severity and challenge. Golf is Camoustie's sole business — and business is business; Carnoustie has none of the preening sanctum-swank of St Andrews, Troon or Muirfield. This weekend, the hazards should be more hazardous, the rough rougher. After Ben Hogan's fabled week here he told the Carnoustie committee: 'I've a real good lawnmower at home in Texas, and as soon as I'm back I'm sending it over.' My parchmenty old cuttings of Camoustie's half-dozen Opens are studded with golfers' disenchanted adjectives: brutal, evil, malicious, unfair, pitiless, impossible. When those zephyrs zap, that is. So blow winds and crack your cheeks.

No real wind, no real contest. It would be good this weekend to see the cream of the golfing world leaning, doubled-up, into the gales like terra-firma ski-jumpers. They have been bent over their `gouff' for centuries on these sandy, salty, scrubland acres although, mind you, not till that wise old sporty geographer James Baird expertly revamped the links only four-score years ago did the Open come to town. Tommy Armour won Camoustie's inaugural in 1931, after which its Open champions were, successively, Henry Cotton, Ben Hogan, Gary Player and Tom Watson, a rich quintet to prove it takes a golfer of imperishable grandeur to win there. After bold young Watson's play-off victory in 1975, his less charmed confreres from the manicured fairways of America bridled not only at the shaggy monster of the course but its austere surrounding amenities, so Carnoustie was rudely struck from the Open rota for a couple of decades — till its dramatic restoration eight summers ago when, spitefully to prove history's point, the gods made comparative dilettante French pro, charming Jean Van de Velde, turn Monsieur Hulot at the very last as, nitwit, he paddled perplexed in the Barry Burn which moats the 18th, hilariously to toss away a three-stroke lead, a preposterous triplebogey which dashed the very jug from his lips.

Half a century ago hero Henry Longhurst, relishable Hazlitt of golf, defined Carnoustie as the 'must' for connoisseurs: 'Duffers, wives and camp-followers should be left behind at Gleneagles with instructions to proceed to nearby Auchterarder and buy tweed. Carnoustie is the opposite of sympathetic. The inhabitants are small, dour and oppressed by liquor-licensing laws superior only to those in Oklahoma and Australia. But if you are thinking only of golf — and there isn't much else to think about — Carnoustie is terrific.' Since the game began to boom in the United States around the turn of the 20th century they reckon some 500 sons from this breezy, bracing edge of Scotland have left to spread the gospel and seek their fortune as professionals in America. One such was true-great Armour, who returned in style in 1931. Modem exemplar is the testy talent, Colin Montgomerie; all week neutrals have been willing on the veteran in, surely, his last tilt at an Open win. It would be thrilling to see the exasperating, exasperated old boy coiling up for a last-round charge. Or has he gone with the wind already?