The winning design of David Kidd
At every turn, mistrust trails the Links Trust like a shadow at sundown. Rancor continues to reign over another Links Trust initiative more than a decade after its undertaking: tired of watching the cash register ring for a proliferation of tour operators who bought tee times on the links at face value and then sold them at a premium as part of a package, the Links Trust decided to get in the game and made a deal with Keith Prowse Ltd. of London. Since 1995, Keith Prowse has enjoyed an exclusive agreement with the Links Trust to deliver The Old Course Experience, a luxury travel package that guarantees golf’s most precious commodity: fail-safe tee times on the Old Course. There are various methods for getting on the Old, but the vast majority of the golfing public must roll the dice in a daily ballot. Considering that the trek to St. Andrews is a once-in-a-lifetime proposition for most golfers, an extra thousand or three is an ersatz insurance premium against missing out on St. Andrew’s main attraction. Detractors of the arrangement claim the 800 or so prime tee times that Keith Prowse buys annually come at the expense of “the residents of the town of St. Andrews and others resorting thereto” per the Links Act, whether Keith Prowse sells them or not. On the other hand The Old Course Experience is a plump bird in the hand, a golden goose that delivers guaranteed income that the trustees can reinvest in projects like the state-of-the-art Jubilee
greenkeeping center, the Eden Clubhouse, and, now, Course No. 7.
The briar patch in which the Links Trust occasionally finds itself is due partly to an institutionalized aversion to controversy that inevitably invites more. In rebuffing a request for details of the Keith Prowse deal under Britain’s Freedom of Information Act, the Links Trust’s official “no comment” was an affronted “The Trust is not a public authority and is not covered by this legislation, so it has no relevance.” However, the sticky situations are more often the result of having to serve multiple, usually mutually exclusive, constituencies. Firstly, there are the aforementioned “residents of the town of St. Andrews,” for whom the Links Act provides that the trustees shall maintain the links as a place of recreation. No stipulation is made for how that is to be maintained, but since its inception the Links Trust (and the Town Council before it) has offered annual tickets to permanent, voting-eligible residents of the town. The ticket entitles residents to unlimited golf on the links. Times are variously restricted for tournaments, scheduled upkeep, and advanced bookings, but St. Andreans rarely have no place to play. Some 1,900 residents, 550 students, and 4,000 others in various and more restrictive categories, including members of the R&A, purchase the annual tickets, which are, without question, the biggest bargain in all of golf:
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