The Open 2011: Bond's battle royal

Published on Friday 8 July 2011 16:53

Ian Fleming's secret agent has fought all kinds of bad guy in all kinds of places but one of 007's more unusual encounters came on a thinly-diguised version of this year's Open venue

ROYAL St George's has produced its share of winners down the years, from Walter Hagen and Bobby Locke to Sandy Lyle and Greg Norman, but none was a match for the smooth-talking, trilby-wearing womaniser who emerged successfully from a bitter and twisted duel on the links that will host this week's Open Championship. His name was Bond, James Bond.

You don't need to be a film buff to recall the high-stakes showdown between 007 and a cheating gold smuggler, one of the best-loved golf scenes in movie history. Goldfinger, released in 1964, and based on Ian Fleming's 1959 novel of the same name, was the third film in the Bond series, with Sean Connery playing the suave, sophisticated MI6 agent, and Gert Frobe the eponymous international criminal.

On a mission to learn more about Auric Goldfinger's shadowy underworld, Bond contrives to set up an accidental meeting with him at a prestigious golf club - Royal St George's is thinly disguised as Royal St Mark's in the book - where the two end up playing for one of the crook's precious gold bars. What follows is no more a dramatic masterpiece than it is a sporting insight, but what the hell? This is a Bond film remember. Just enjoy.

Shirley Bassey's theme is legendary, the cast well known to movie-goers of a certain age. Connery starred in seven Bond films, while Frode also entertained a generation of families in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Monte Carlo or Bust and Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines. His thick German accent was such that he had to be dubbed in Goldfinger, which also included Oddjob, the Korean bodyguard who decapitated a statue with his steel-rimmed bowler hat. When Connery tosses him a golf ball, the lethal manservant crushes it in his palm.

Although the scene in the film was shot at Stoke Poges Golf Club in Berkshire, the two chapters devoted to it in the novel are clearly set at this week's Open venue, where Fleming had been a member for 11 years. Albert and Cyril Whiting, the professional and his son, appeared in the book as Alfred and Cecil Blacking. Bond's caddie, Hawker, was based on Alf Hawkes, the club's leading bagman at the time. Even Bond's "flat, scything action" is thought to have been reminiscent of Fleming, who spent much of his writing career making 007 a romanticised version of himself.

Fleming knew his golf all right. Although only a mid-handicapper, he understood its foibles and the small margin for error in every swing. "The difference between a good golf shot and a bad one," he wrote after one of Bond's approaches found a bunker, "is the same as the difference between a beautiful and a plain woman - a matter of millimetres". Most of all, he knew about cheating, a dark art perfected by the evil Goldfinger. Jangling the coins in his pocket, improving his lie with an innocent step behind the ball and moving his shadow just as his opponent is about to hit: all the classics of golfing gamesmanship are there in black and white. The villain's party piece comes on the 17th, where he hits a poor drive into the rough, and just as his statutory five minutes' searching time is about to expire, a ball appears from the bottom of his caddy's trouser leg. When Goldfinger smacks it on to the green with his "spoon", Bond asks his own caddy: "Is my friend in the bunker, or is the bastard on the green?" At which point, Bond - shaken, not stirred - decides that, if he can't beat him, he might as well join him, dishing out a measure of poetic justice on the decisive final hole. Hawker gives Goldfinger the wrong ball as they walk off the 17th green so that, as soon as he drives from the 18th tee, Goldfinger is bound to be disqualified. "The clubhead was going back, coming down, the left knee bent correctly in towards the ball, the left arm straight as a ramrod. Crack! The ball sailed off, a beautiful drive, as good as Goldfinger had hit, straight down the fairway.

"Bond's heart sang. Got you, you bastard! Got you!"

Connery would later write in his memoirs that Goldfinger inspired in him a love of golf that shaped his life. While the film was being shot, he took lessons at nearby Pinewood Studios. He met his second wife, Micheline, when the two were playing at a tournament in Morocco. "I began to see golf as a metaphor for living, for in golf you are basically on your own, competing against yourself and always trying to do better," he wrote. "If you cheat, you will be the loser, because you are cheating yourself. When Ian Fleming portrayed Auric Goldfinger as a smooth cheater, James Bond had no regrets when he switched his golf balls, since to be cheated is the just reward of the cheater."

Fleming also loved the game, which was always a feature of his aristocratic upbringing. When he was a teenager, his granny Katie drove him to the course in a Rolls-Royce so that they could play 18 holes together. In later life, he kept up with his old Etonian schoolfriends, on one occasion donating to their golf society a large chamber pot that he christened "The James Bond All Purpose Grand Challenge Trophy Vase".

His was a hedonistic lifestyle. In the 1930s, he formed a social group called Le Cercle Gastronomique et Des Jeux d'Hasard, which played bridge and draughts during the week, raced cars at the weekends and went on golf trips to the likes of Rye and Deauville.One particularly decadent jaunt was to the newly-opened Gleneagles resort in 1934, with what he described as "assorted wives and concubines". Fifty of them travelled from London on a private train of two carriages, one for gambling, the other for dancing. A photograph shows Fleming striding across a fairway at the King's Course with Charlie Baillie Hamilton, the MP for Bath.

Le Cercle often gathered at Fleming's house in St Margaret's Bay, not far from Royal St George's, to which they sometimes repaired with a hangover. When he died aged 56 in 1964, a victim of too much wine, smoking and rich food, he was the club's captain-elect. However gratuitous and self-indulgent his blow-by-blow account of the Goldfinger match, it is an authoritative description of the course and its manifold challenges, relevant even now.

Take, for instance, his portrayal of the 10th, which he says is the most dangerous hole on the course. "The second shot, to the skiddy plateau green with cavernous bunkers to right and left and a steep hill beyond, has broken many hearts. Bond remembered that Philip Scrutton ... had taken a 14 at this hole, seven of them ping-pong shots from one bunker to another, to and fro across the green." Tom Kite would not dismiss this as fiction, for it was here that he took six shots, including from bunker to bunker, to lose his lead in the 1985 Open.

Then, as now, Royal St George's had a reputation as an old-fashioned links, with an "old-money" feel to it. When Bond walks into the locker room, he notes the smell of "last summer's sweat" and asks himself why the standard of hygiene at famous golf clubs is akin to that of a Victorian private school?

But he enjoys the links, and the feeling he has when he slips a Penfold Heart from its sleeve, and smacks it down the first fairway. As Bond strolls after it, anything is possible. "He smelled the sweet smell of the beginning of a knock-down-and-drag-out game of golf on a beautiful day in May with the larks singing over the greatest seaside course in the world."

This week, 156 of the world's finest golfers will follow in his footsteps. Who are they to argue with the spy who loved it? ?