Ailsa can make it rough at the top

Published on Saturday 11 July 2009 21:18

THE GAME has changed in so many ways you couldn't list them here, but some things don't alter. The plaintive cries of the competitors are the same now as they were then, when Nick Price, Greg Norman and Tom Watson were kings of Turnberry.

We've been hearing a lot about the rough on the Ailsa, the prodigious length of it, the likelihood of mayhem should a ball veer ten yards offline and nestle in this stuff. Padraig Harrington played a practice round there on Monday and said he'd never seen rough as heavy so close to the greens. Rory McIlroy lost two balls. Ernie Els said the gameplan is safety off the tee and long irons into the green. "You can't risk the driver too much," he stressed.

The mantra is coming from everybody: if you're wild, you're dead.

It was like going back in time to 1986 when there were jungles flanking the fairways at Turnberry and storms beating down on the field from above. Norman won that year. After his first round, he asked the press boys, deadpan, if they knew his legal position should he break his wrist hacking out of the long grass. "Some of the players are getting humiliated," he said. "I've come off with a headache."

Nick Faldo followed him in: "That is the toughest course I have ever known," he said. In 1994, Faldo hit his drive on 18 into the rough and just about hacked it out. Only problem was that it wasn't his ball. That could happen this week even if it's calm. If it gets blowy, it might happen more than once.

There will be many mentions of 1986. The course is set up similarly. The fairways are wide but there's trouble in the margins. High winds killed them in '86 and that's what they'll fear this week. Turnberry is the most scenic golf course on earth but it doesn't take a lot for the old girl to become a harridan.

The scoring average on day one the year Norman broke his majors duck was 78.19. Only ten players managed to find the fairway on the Lighthouse hole, the ninth. Somebody asked Jack Nicklaus was he one of the ten. Nicklaus didn't answer, not directly. All he said was that reports of a fairway on nine had been greatly exaggerated. The players bitched and moaned but got no sympathy then and they will surely not get any this week either should they gripe like their predecessors. Back then, it was left to Michael Bonallack, the secretary of the R&A, to quash the mutiny. "This is not a common entrance exam," he said. "It's an honours degree."

Turnberry has only had three Opens but be it co-incidence or not, the winner on each occasion happened to be the finest player in the world at the time. If that pattern continues then the tournament will belong to Tiger Woods.

He is, of course, the short-price favourite. He has won three times since his comeback in February and he is looking ominous. His errant driving could let him down but there is one way to fix that; don't drive. There doesn't appear to be much need, not for Tiger. Nobody thinks strategy better than him, nobody can plot his way around an unforgiving terrain quite like the world's greatest player, nobody has the same discipline.

Woods can hit a 2-iron off the tee all week and win. If it's benign. He's done it before. He did it at Hoylake. Different course and different conditions, naturally. But he arrived in town yesterday and immediately got to work on his gameplan. If he can hit his stingers up the middle then it's hard to see quite who can beat him.

A Harrington renaissance? It's possible. A theatre such as Turnberry would be the very place where the sick man of the European tour would find his form again. Ernie Els? How the world wills him on these days, hoping against hope that we haven't seen all of his best stuff just yet.

Rory McIlroy will have a huge gallery wherever he goes. Half of Northern Ireland is coming over to see him, this superstar in the making. Retief Goosen has none of the magnetism of McIlroy but his form at Loch Lomond can't be ignored. It's been a while since the Goose contended in one of these things. You know he will again. Why not this week?

We can produce challengers to Tiger all over the place. Alas, Phil Mickelson will be absent to be with his wife, Amy, as she battles cancer. Some experts in America, for instance, are making a case for Brian Gay, who has won twice on the PGA tour this year already and who's an unerringly straight driver of the ball. Where accuracy counts, they say, Gay could matter in the shake-up.

Hard to see it but, then, nobody foresaw Paul Lawrie, Ben Curtis and Todd Hamilton winning the Open and certainly nobody thought that Norman, a man just passing through town during his honeymoon, would be our leader after 54 holes at Birkdale.

Tiger is a keen student of golf history and he will know the significance of a fourth Claret Jug. In the pantheon of Open winners it would put him beyond some of the greatest players the game has ever known; Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Henry Cotton and Bobby Jones all won three. The thought of surpassing them will inspire him, you can be sure. But if this wind blows and Turnberry shows its teeth, Tiger will have it all to do to fend off the field and the surprise chargers within.