£5m bill to upgrade Open venues

SOME have had significant surgery, others just minor tweaks. All nine courses that stage the Open Championship have now undergone work to bring them into the modern era at a total cost of close to £5 million.

Modifications at Turnberry, St Andrews and Royal St George’s have already been put to the test over the past three years. More changes, this time at Royal Lytham, are set to be unveiled this summer when it stages the world’s oldest major while Muirfield has been tweaked as well for next year’s event.

Royal Troon, which is expected to be announced as the 2016 venue in the near future, has also had the treatment, as have Carnoustie, Royal Birkdale and Royal Liverpool in a bid to combat the game’s big-hitters.

The work has been shared by Martin Ebert, who cut his teeth in golf course design under the tutelage of Donald Steel, and Martin Hawtree, who is fine-tuning Trump International Golf Links at the moment ahead of its grand opening in July.

Both have impressed Peter Dawson, the R&A chief executive, who instigated the extensive project soon after he joined the St Andrews-based organisation in 1999 and has kept a watchful eye on the work at all of the courses.

“I went to a committee just after I started and said we need a fund for this,” Dawson told The Scotsman in Lancashire. “We allocated the money and we did them all – they’ve all had the treatment. The average we have spent is half-a-million on each, I’d say. Some have had a lot more done than others. Clubs have had a key role in deciding what they want to have done on each occasion. It’s been money well spent.”

Dawson, who turns 65 next year, bristles at the suggestion the changes could be perceived as his legacy. “I don’t see it that way at all,” he insisted. “This is not a personality job. I’m here to serve. I’m renting space, so to speak.”

The handiwork at Royal Lytham has been Ebert’s. It includes the lengthening of both the second and third to around 480 yards, creating two stiff par-4s early in the round. Other significant changes have been made at the seventh and 11th holes – the only two par-5s on the championship card this year after it was decided that the sixth will be a par-4. A new green has been built at the seventh, improving the angle there, while a new elevated tee at the 11th has stretched it to 598 yards.

Yet, as this correspondent discovered in the media’s customary test run of the course earlier this week, the main defence of this particular Open venue is undoubtedly its bunkers. For starters, there are lots of them. Two hundred and six, to be exact, which calculates at an average of 11 per hole. It’s also around 50 more than Muirfield, which ranks second on the Open list when it comes to bunkers. “I don’t think they are the most vertical bunkers we have for an Open Championship, St Andrews is probably more severe, but they are the main defence of the golf course,” admitted Dawson.

Many are unsighted from the tee, other big brutes stick out from a mile away and will prove problematical for even the best players in the world should they stray into them. There’s one at the front left of the raised green at the eighth, for instance, that has disaster written all over it. Just ask Dawson. “That’s not a place to be,” he said from experience. “The last time I played here I plugged in that and when that happens get yourself back down the fairway and try again.”

It’s a course where strategy is more important than power. That’s why Luke Donald, the man who doesn’t often stray from the fairway, was the name being mentioned by most people this week when asked to pick a potential winner for July. “We are famous for not getting that right,” replied Dawson when asked to pin his colours to the mast. “All these guys are very good and while you might think Luke Donald is the type of player to win here – and I personally think he is – Bubba Watson will probably win.”

At Muirfield, some of Hawtree’s changes had already been made when it staged the Amateur Championship two years ago, though the players then didn’t get to try out the biggest of the alterations, which is a new tee at the ninth that extends it by close to 70 yards. More recently, the fairway at the tenth has been moved slightly to the left, the main aim of that being to create more room around the practice ground.

“Every hole at Muirfield has had something done, though quite a few of the changes are very subtle,” said Dawson of the East Lothian venue, which last staged the event in 2002, when Ernie Els claimed the Claret Jug after winning a four-man play-off. “In fact, you’d never know most of the changes have been done.”

Most of the venues have now been pushed to the limit. “We don’t envisage lengthening courses going forward,” concluded the R&A chief.