“The upsurge of interest in the university can be traced to the annoucement of Prince William’s intent to enroll in 2001.”
an off-site meeting at Cameron House, a bucolic retreat on the banks of Lock Lomond, in the spring of 1998. Out of this confab came the very first mention of a seventh course.
he Links Trust assembled a Working Party charged with studying individual and collective golf course loads and limits, trends in golf tourism and both town and university population, as well as yield management for the yearly tickets offered to residents. Traffic on the Old Course reached 49,000 rounds in 1990, topping the target threshold by 4,000. (Exceeding the limit was possible because any golfer who arrived before the first or after the last tee time was free to play away.) Factor in that there is no Sunday play on the Old, the course is closed one month each year for rest and repair, and weather makes golf practically unplayable for maybe another month or two, and that leaves roughly 230 potential golfing days per year. If each of the 49,000 rounds were played as part of a foursome, which never happens, sent off at intervals of eight minutes, as was the custom back then, the result would be a tee sheet that is booked solid for seven hours every golfing day. To ease the load, the Links Trust in 1990 extended the interval between tee times from eight to ten minutes and posted opening and closing times from 7:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. However, that was merely a Band-Aid, applied only to the Old Course. The other courses, which allowed play on Sundays, were all suffering from chronic inundation, a condition for which there are only two cures: limit demand or increase capacity.
T
Jacking up green fees would limit demand by pricing out a portion of the less affluent golfing public, but golf is an everyman’s game in Scotland, and the Working Party never considered such cutthroat tactics. They did ponder tightening the screws on yearly tickets, a program beset by a Byzantine hierarchy of categories, waiting lists, and guest policies run on point systems. Instituting additional constraints on residents’ access to their links might well have exposed the trustees to torturous repercussions straight out of Braveheart. Increasing capacity could be achieved by extending playing hours and/or allowing play on
the Old Course on Sundays; however, the former would exacerbate wear and tear on the links, and the latter not only promised to further exceed the threshold of 42,000 rounds on the Old, but it also flew in the face of Old Tom Morris’s time-honored ipse dixit: “If the gowfer disna need a rest, the course does.” Another option was to look forward by looking back: a century before, similar struggles with overcrowding on the links led the town to pony up for the New, the Jubilee, and the Eden, all opened in a span of less than twenty years. The home of golf had outgrown the existing links, and the most logical course of action, the Working Party concluded, was to seek more spacious digs.
I
n the autumn of 1998 the Links Trust hosted a public gathering in the Links Clubhouse, where the executive team presented the findings of the
Working Party to an audience of some 60 people, most of whom were affiliated with the local golf clubs and interest groups, including the Community Council, an organized, articulate, and particularly hard-nosed lobby that takes exceptionally seriously its state purpose, “to ascertain, coordinate, and express to the local authorities for its area, and to public
authorities, the views of the community which it represents.” The
Community Council is the group that notoriously snubbed Jack Nicklaus during his swan song at the 2005 Open
Championship. Nicklaus’s nomination to receive the award of the title Honorary Citizen of the Royal Burgh of St. Andrews was killed by the council, whose dissenters, according to the meeting minutes, submitted that the award “should be for people who had done something directly for
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