SPECTATOR SPORT
A matter of course
Frank Keating
THE OPEN needs winds to blow far more than a Test match needs sun. Gales of them. I was late to golf — but come of age at the Open this weekend. Twenty-one years ago, a Scunthorpe train-driver's son with a crewcut, tapered, half-mast trousers showing day-glo blue nylon socks, and a hideous purple pullover, gloriously won the Open at Lytham and you thought there really might be something in this game after all. Tony Jacklin looked like an amiably bashful young Northern comic making a hash of his start on the night-club circuit. But he couldn't half play golf. He stood on the 18th tee at teatime on that final Saturday afternoon (this was before US television demanded Sunday finishes at all the big events) and waggled his driver. Crack! — and Henry Longhurst, sublime old whisperer with a face as purple as Tony's woolly, purred, 'Oh, what a corker. My word. What an heroic finish this is. What a beauty. So, a new star rises . .
Half the nation, who knew not the remotest difference between Sandwich and a sandwedge, must also have been hook- line-and-sinkered by Jacklin and Long- hurst that day on television. Certainly I was in front of the set the following year when the Open came round. In 1970 it was at St Andrews, home of the game and the raging gales off the sea. The American, Doug Sanders (he was wearing pale mauve) weathered the winds to have a tap-in for the title under the granite-grey, gaunt clubhouse. He addressed the ball, matter-of-fact. Then wobbled, and un- accountably bent forward on one leg to brush away some imagined wormcast in the 20-odd inches between his ball and the hole. 'Oh, dear,' muttered Longhurst, all he needed to tell the world that Sanders was bound to miss it now. And, of course, he did.
Sanders didn't even bother to shower. He vanished. Hours later, his wife found him high in the hills above the wind-racked old town, talking through his boob with a herd of uninterested Ayrshires. Shrugged Doug: 'I guess nobody actually wins the Open; the Open wins you.' Just a re- phrasing of the ancient verity — which applies even more so at St Andrews. For as Jack Nicklaus, who won that day after Sanders had muffed it, says, 'There are three British Opens: the one played in Scotland, the one played in England, and the one played at St Andrews.'
By the time it came round to St Andrews again, in 1978, I was there for real, and enthralled. The first three days had been clammy, still, and sultry. In the hotel dining-room on Friday night, after a third- round 69 had kept him in only reasonable contention for the final day, Nicklaus quietly left his family table and went outside to sniff the air. The wind was getting up, the weathercocks were restless. On his way back, Jack stopped at reception and put in a call to the airport, altering the family's flight out from Saturday night to Sunday morning. Then he resumed his baked haddock at the table. The wind had told him it would probably scatter the leaders. (`You don't win the Open; the Open wins you.') Suddenly the Nicklauses might need Saturday night for celebrating. Sure enough, they did: the sun stayed strong, but the fierce Fife zephyrs zapped and cracked their cheeks, and up the 72nd in solo state that afternoon it was Nicklaus, the nonpareil, who walked into the great amphitheatre of hurrahs. Then they gave him the old claret jug, and he thanked everyone in general and, in particular, 'nature itself for those winds up there'.
Romantics should always pray for wind in Open week. It sorts out the greatest , from the greats. You've got to muscle, manhandle the wretched, dimpled little thing through the gales, or under them, or across them — yet have it land, just so, spot-on, like a butterfly with sore feet.
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