The Old Course at St. Andrews is the oldest golf course in the world. When The Open Championship—which I will always call The British Open and you can’t stop me—is played at St. Andrews, as it was last year, it feels definitive in ways that other British Opens are not. Walk this course and you travel back to the year 1400, when the sport of golf itself was INVENTED on these grounds. You can walk across these undisturbed lands, view the great stone houses bordering the course, take in the scent of the iron sea nearby, and feel yourself standing in the middle of history…
…until you reach the 18th hole and have to walk onto this dogshit patio:
This is the Swilcan Bridge, which crosses over the Swilcan Burn (love the word “burn”), and until recently it looked like this:
Photo: St. Andrews Links Trust
This bridge is 700 years old and has done its job with workmanlike competence the entire time, keeping golfers’ trotters dry as they cross over the burn to finish up their rounds. The problem was the ground around the bridge, which was getting muddy and bogged down because of the massive amount of foot traffic that the Old Course gets every year. So the St. Andrews Links Trust decided to extend the foot of the bridge using stonework similar to the original design, a seemingly elegant solution that ended up pissing off the wrong people, including three-time Open champ Nick Faldo, along with … well, everyone, really.
Outspoken English pro Eddie Pepperell added: "It’s an absolute mess. The most famous bridge in golf, and look at what some fucker has come up with! Hard to believe."
Now, this is the part of the post where I’d normally shit on Faldo and the rest for being persnickety old fuddy-duddies about this relatively minor bit of golf course renovation. Golfers, and British people, hate change almost as much as they hate school integration. But I’m not gonna do that, because in this instance all of them are correct. That paving looks like shit. Makes the bridge look like a basic-ass McMansion patio. I’ve seen outdoor spaces behind mid-level Hiltons with more character than this thing. Fuck those rocks.
Here is an instance where practical issues have no place in determining the fate of centuries-old architecture. I care more about the Swilcan Bridge’s integrity than I do the spikes of some random group of duffers playing the course for the first time. And who the fuck goes to Scotland to AVOID getting muggy and bogged down? That whole country is a bog. Why don’t you stay home and hang out at a fucking mall if you’re so worried about your precious Footjoys? People who choose to renovate landmarks like this bridge often forget that aging and decay are part of the appeal. I want to see the mud. I want to see how centuries upon centuries of golfing have altered this landscape in ways that would make a modern-day course designer shit his Vineyard Vines trousers. History is not pristine, and it is rarely intact. You don’t see them installing luxury boxes in the fucking Coliseum, do you?
Thankfully, the Links Trust heard these complaints and ultimately realized the same thing, tearing the new extension up and restoring Swilcan Bridge back to its original form. Here’s where the de-renovation stands now.
Honestly? I wouldn’t even reseed that area. Leave it just the way it is. It’s perfect. And now that that's sorted, there are a few other new developments in the sport of golf that could use a similar dismantling.
