The Links Experience

With great golf courses comes great responsibility, that responsibility being: every student must play golf, whether you are a casual golfer on a day out and admiring the stunning coastline or a hardened veteran who has been around the course before.

Links golf attracts people from all over the world for its challenging aspects. Why is it so challenging? Well, on some days, rare as they might be, it’s actuallynot. Relatively short holes and wide-ish fairways allow you to attack the course full on. However, on most days conditions change from a howling gale to blinding sunlight within the space of a few holes. One slight miscalculation and your ball is heading into the Eden estuary. Mistakes are inevitable when a 30mph wind is blowing across your face, but that’s the beauty of the battle.

Forget Tory Pines, and Augusta, the picture perfect courses with gleaming grass, each a perfect shade of green, and trimmed trees, red, brown and amber. Links golf is real golf. Dunes, dry patches and sodden patches: where your ball can bounce a mile or stop dead; where the perfect shot can catch a ridge and throw the ball into the mouth of the rough; where the greens are as unreadable as Colin Montgomerie’s autobiography.

This is a battle against yourself. You need to keep your nerve, and that’s what makes these courses not only tough but beautiful. If your head goes down after one mistake then you have been defeated. You may as well have come to St Andrews for a Jannettas ice cream and a wander on West Sands. You must maintain focus when a good shot turns bad and must carry on and battle with everything you have. And if you emerge after eighteen holes unscathed then the reward is even bigger than if you were playing a postcard.

This is why golfers love playing here. St Andrews has the best golf courses in the world – an opinion shared by arguably the best golfer in the world, Tiger Woods: a significant statement for someone who has experienced many holes. Individuals come from all round the world to play these courses, but we have them on our doorstep. This is why every student should spend their four years doing nothing but playing golf.

image courtesy of The Telegraph