Donald Beaver remains merely a footnote in the grand history of Royal Lytham and St. Annes Golf Club, yet his play some 50 years ago could fill pages for those trying to read this sturdy links layout.
For to play Royal Lytham, where the 117th British Open opens Thursday, and its humps, heather, hillocks, hollows and hummocks, one must be ingenious if he is not to be accurate. That`s what Seve Ballesteros was in 1979, when he won by converting shots from territories still uncharted.
One must be bold, as Bobby Jones was here in 1926, when he nipped his mashie 175 yards from a bunker on No. 17 to put his ball inside his opponent`s and essentially win the tournament.
”It will take a very accurate driver,” said Bernhard Langer, ”a good iron-hitter to keep the ball on the green in the crosswinds, especially on the last six holes, and a tremendous short game, because most of us are going to miss several greens. And I don`t think I`ve ever seen as many bunkers on any golf course in my life.”
Royal Lytham has some 200 bunkers, 82 on the last six holes, considered the hardest closing stretch in British golf. An aerial view leads one to believe the nation still being bombed. In comparison, ”sandy” American courses like Merion, Oakland Hills and Baltusrol have about half as many.
Beaver`s odyssey began in a bunker, one of the half-dozen surrounding the 18th green.
He caught a little sand, and the ball flew toward the red-brick-and-ivy clubhouse behind the green and perched in the ivy on the second-floor window sill.
Carefully obeying the rules against wearing spikes in the clubhouse, Beaver removed his shoes, went upstairs, opened the window and, with one foot on the ledge, chipped safely back onto the green. It was not unlike the shot manufactured by Gary Player on the 18th hole of the final round in 1974, when he became only the second player to win the tournament in three different decades.
Player`s second shot slid through the green and nestled against the clubhouse, which is just a few feet behind the huge verdant oval.
After surveying the situation, Player took a left-handed swipe with his putter and put the ball on the green, then holed out to win the tournament.
Beaver wasn`t as fortunate. The club secretary disqualified him for leaving the course during play.
Beaver`s fate could cross the minds of some of the 153 contestants who`ll play for the $136,000 first prize and claret jug in this oldest of all major tournaments.
Lytham and St. Annes, in the Northwest of England on the Irish Sea, is a resort town, the product of a change in thinking among medieval physicians, who once thought the sea spread disease but later decided it cured disease.
So among the mountainous sandhills came the railroad, hotels, and today, at least up the coast in nearby Blackpool, ferris wheels, fun houses and trolleys reminiscent of American seaside amusements parks of the 1930s.
Bathers, though, remain few, for the only trunks one needs here are for shelter from the wind and rain.
Summertime temperatures rarely get above 70 degrees and are usually lower near the shore. And although Royal Lytham is about half a mile inland, set amidst the red brick cottages of the elderly who`ve retired here, it doesn`t escape nature`s wrath.
”The cold goes right through you to the muscle,” said Sandy Lyle, winner at Royal St. George`s in 1985. ”It makes the 3-iron a lot harder to pick up. The ball doesn`t fly as well. It works on your confidence.”
Weather had no effect on amateur Bobby Jones when he won in 1926, the first year the Open was played here. He remains the only American to win on this course.
That 1926 Open also was marked the first time admission was charged. In 1958, the first British Open was shown on television from here, and in 1974, the larger American ball was made mandatory in the tournament for the first time. (Since then, only Troon among the seven courses in the rota has produced a winner with a higher score).
Although he won, it was a costly day, for when the amateur adjourned for lunch on the final day (they played 36-hole conclusions then), he forgot his players` badge and had to pay to be readmitted.
Tied with American Al Watrous after 17, Jones pulled his drive into one of the 11 bunkers on the left side of the 18th fairway (the hole has 18 in all) while Watrous hit the front edge of the green in two.
Facing a blind shot to the green, the bunker wall up to his waist, Jones knocked his mashie (4-iron) inside of Watrous` ball. (A plaque now marks the site of the shot.) The stunned Watrous then three-putted while Jones parred and went on to win.
But not before the theatrical Walter Hagen, needing an eagle to tie on 18, sent his caddy 150 yards to the green to pull the pin, only to send his shot past the hole and off the green.
When Royal Lytham was opened 102 years ago, it contained 365 bunkers, one for every day of the year, it was said. More than 100 were removed in the 1960s. But Jack Nicklaus, who finished in the top six the last four times the tournament was held here, and Ben Crenshaw probably feel that at least one of those pits was especially for them.
Nicklaus bogied No. 18 in 1963 after hitting his drive into a bunker, thus missing a playoff with Bob Charles and Phil Rodgers. Charles won to become the only left-hander to capture in a major.
In 1979, Australian Rodger Davis went double bogey-bogey from bunkers on 14 and 15 to lose his fourth-round lead and the title. That same year, Crenshaw, tied with Ballesteros through 16, double-bogied from a bunker in front of the 17th green to fall out of chase.
”Usually, in the U.S., if there`s a bunker right, I`ll play left,” said Nicklaus. ”But here, the fairways are so narrow and there`s so much ground to pull your ball into the bunker, that club selection is based on playing short of or past the bunkers.”
That all these misfortunes occurred on the last six holes is no coincidence. The outward half is where a player must score, and there have been three 29s on the par 35 first nine. Including the first, there are three par 3s. But coming home is not particularly welcoming.
”It`s the toughest finishing holes in all the British Open rotation,”
said Nicklaus.
That`s because all are heavily bunkered and attacked by cross winds.
”You have to be able to play the ball both right to left and left to right,” saids Tom Watson.
The last six are all par 4s, No. 14 at 445 yards, No. 15 at 463 yards
(and never played to lower than a 4.8 average in 1979) and No. 17 at 462 yards. All are guarded by waist-deep bunkers, knee high hay and gorse and the occasional thunder storm. Rain is expected to move through the area Thursday and Friday.
”If the wind blows and it rains, 75 will be a good score, and two to five over could win,” said Lyle.
”I thought this might not be a traditional British Open course when I heard about it,” said 1987 runner-up Paul Azinger. ”But when you get out there, you don`t really see the houses or the railroad tracks. It`s windy, the fairways are narrow, the tall rough is closer to the landing area. It`s a harder course than Muirfield.”
And it has produced great champions like Jones, Ballesteros, four-time champion Bobby Locke in 1952 and five-time champion Peter Thompson in 1958.
Also, great shots, like Donald Beaver`s. And the ones of the man who`ll be holding the claret jug Sunday night.
