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The Frenchman opened the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship in stunning fashion on St. Andrews Old Course. Thanks to eight birdies and two eagles, Langasque tied the scoring record at the famed links and took the early lead in the annual DP World Tour event.

“I never thought I would have the course record at St. Andrews,” said Langasque, the No. 272-ranked player in the world. “But now my name is on the board.”

He shares the feat with Englishman Ross Fisher who posted a 61 in 2015 in the final round of the Alfred Dunhill.

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Langasque’s round not only tied the Old Course scoring record, but it also marks his career-low round on the DP World Tour. His previous low round had been 63 back in 2020.

The dazzling performance included six birdies and an eagle on his second nine (the front nine) as he posted 28 on his inward half. He was also seven under over his final six holes.

“The end of the course was amazing,” he said. “I holed a few long putts. The game was great but didn’t feel I shot 11 under.”

Langasque might not have felt like he had gone that low, but the rest of the field surely did. Just 10 players are within four strokes of Langasque’s lead as he turns the page to Round 2.

“It’s amazing,” he said. “I didn’t realize that I have the course record here now, and I think it’s something I will remember for rest of my life.”

More scores like Langasque’s seem unlikely over the weekend. St. Andrews is slated to get pummeled by heavy rain and winds in excess of 40 mph on Friday.

In an effort to dodge the worst of the weather, tournament organizers have opted for a shotgun start at 8:30 a.m. local time.

Langasque made history but he knows he still has long way to go.

“I’m really happy about this,” he said. “But it’s only the first round, so I’m also going to stay really focused for the next few days.”

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The post 4 ways to book an Old Course at St. Andrews tee time, according to an expert appeared first on Golf.

How to land a coveted tee time at the home of golf?

You could get your game in shape and try to qualify for the next Open Championship at the Old Course.

But then you’d have to wait until 2026.

Let’s get you out there sooner, with guidance from Gordon Dalgleish president of golf travel company PerryGolf.

1. Submit an online application

You could go straight to the source and try your luck through the St. Andrews Links Trust’s annual advance reservation program. The program accepts applications for times twice a year. The first deadline is in early September. The second is in early January. You must have at least two golfers in your group and no more than eight. In your application, you are asked to request the dates you’d like to play the Old Course, as well as one of the other courses in the Links Trust fold. There are seven altogether. Applications are selected randomly, but your odds of getting on this way are slim, Dalgleish says, as “demand is off the charts.”

2. Enter the ballot

It’s called the Daily Ballot, but that’s not exactly right, as it’s held every except Friday. It runs like a lottery. You enter your name, and hope you’re picked. It happens 48 hours in advance, so that Monday’s ballot is for Wednesday play, Tuesday’s ballot is for Thursday, and so on through the week. There is no ballot on Friday because on Sundays, the Old Course morphs from a golf course into a public park.

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3. Put your name on the waiting list

It doesn’t get much simpler than this. Show up early as a single and talk to the starter, who will put your name on a waiting list. If a slot opens, and your name is next, off you go.

4. Go through an operator

Dozens of private operators, including Perry Golf, have contracts with the Links Trust that give them access to a bundle of tee times, which they can book up to 12 to 15 months in advance. You’ll pay extra going this route. But with cost comes convenience, and a guarantee that you’ll get to golf your ball around these ancient grounds.

Need help unriddling the greens at your home course? Pick up a custom Green Book from 8AM Golf affiliate Golf Logix.

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“C’mon, Rory!” Leo cried as McIlroy strolled down the first fairway in the final round of the 150th Open Championship.

On the brownish-green expanse before Leo was one of the grandest stages in golf. To his left, the Swilcan Bridge; to his right, the sprawling 18th green and beyond that the 1st tee and stately R&A clubhouse. Directly ahead, on the far side of the 18th and 1st fairways, was a towering and packed grandstand topped by one of the Open’s iconic yellow scoreboards, which this week McIlroy said he could see from his hotel-room window.

It was a priceless moment for little Leo, which was fitting, because his parents, Mike and Kasey, didn’t pay a single euro for it.

The DeGiustis were soaking up the atmosphere from The Links, a public walkway that runs nearly the length of the 18th fairway. During Open weeks, the path is divided by a wire fence. The side closest to the course is for paying ticket-holders; populating the other side are non-paying onlookers, like the DeGiustis, who may have either strolled down from town to the Old Course with the intent of catching some of the action, or were simply passing through en route to another destination. Either way, The Links provides one of the best free seats in all of sports.

“Where else can you go where you can see the finishing hole or the finishing moments without a ticket, and you’re right there,” Mike said.

Nowhere else, because there’s nothing quite like it.

This year especially.

Tickets were not easy to come by for the historic 150th Open. The R&A sold 52,000 passes for each tournament round, but those were quickly scooped up via the R&A’s ballot system, meaning demand in the secondary market was high, with scalpers fetching well into the hundreds of dollars for a single ticket. Perhaps more than any previous Open, this was a story of the haves and have-nots.

On Sunday, the have-nots knew where to go: The Links.  

The DeGiustis — Mike’s father, Anthony, was also in tow — actually had planned to stay in town and watch the final round in a pub until they discovered that most of the watering holes around these parts don’t have TVs.

“We were hoping to be somewhere where there’s a lot of excitement, and where everyone’s cheering and booing and drinking, and it’s not happening,” Mike said. “So we came over here earlier than expected.”

They came to the right spot. The public side of The Links isn’t just a place to watch golf. It’s a microcosm of life in St. Andrews. There are shops hawking golf merchandise. Social clubs for the town’s elite. The St. Andrews Golf Club. The Rusacks Hotel, where many players stayed this week, including McIlroy and Jordan Spieth, and many other notables, including the Manning brothers, Peyton, Eli and Cooper, who are part-owners of the property.

There’s a posh B&B called the Walden House. A subterranean old-worldy pub called the One Under Bar (clever, right?). There are mothers pushing strollers, elderly couples out walking their dogs and fathers teaching their sons the basics of golf. (“This is just one of the holes,” a father wearing a gray backpack told his toddler. “There are lots of holes everywhere.”) And on Sunday, there were also hundreds of rabid golf fans peering through and over the border fence.

Among them was Chuck Kinne, an expat Virginian and former college golfer at Randolph Macon University, and his wife Nicola, who now live on Scotland’s west coast. The Kinnes were spending the weekend at Nicola’s sister’s holiday home just down the coast in Kingsbarns. Chuck was at the 2005 Open at the Old Course when Tiger Woods won — “on the 17th hole,” he said, “you could reach out and touch Tiger, but you can’t get that close anymore” — but this year they were unable to secure tickets.

Chuck and Nicola had grabbed lunch at The Adamson, a brasserie-style restaurant in town, and then moseyed down to The Links in time to see the last few pairings tee off. Nicola said she was unaware that the public could get so close to the course.

“This is lovely,” she said as she looked up the 18th fairway. “Absolutely amazing.”

Added her husband, “It gives people a chance who can’t afford the four or five hundred quid to see a tournament.”

Like, say, Cohen Millel and Ross Cuthbert, teenage friends from nearby Dundee. Like so many other Links-goers, Cohen was pulling for McIlroy and timed his visit so he could see the four-time major winner set off on his quest for major No. 5. He and his pal hadn’t actively pursued tickets this year — “we’re saving up for next time,” Cohen’s mother joked — and said their Links visit was really just a different way to pass a Sunday afternoon.

“Something to do,” Cohen said.

That’s the beauty of The Links: its casual vibe. No tickets, no pressure. Come and go as you please. Or don’t come at all.

To the properties that line The Links, however, visitors, boarders and VIPs were coming and staying. How could you not? The second- and third-floor rooms and balconies are akin to skyboxes at the Super Bowl, only with charm. Through the big bay windows at 15 The Links, you could see a pair of antler chandeliers dangling from the ceiling and a set of ceramic Dalmatians on the mantle. A man sat by the windowsill sipping a beer. Life was good.   

At the entrance to the Rusacks was the international sign for you’re-probably-not-getting-in-here: a security guard and a red velvet rope. Up on the rooftop, the 1995 Champion of the Golfer peered down on the scene and waved to fans. Yep, Sir John Daly. Up the way, on the balcony above the Old Course Shop, two elderly gentlemen in coats and ties sipped on glasses of red wine.

But the real fun was happening below, among the hustle and bustle of The Links legion. As the day progressed, new faces came and went, with the crowd increasingly growing — and sightlines increasingly dwindling — as the leaders neared 18. Around 6:30 p.m. local time, McIlroy arrived on the home hole, needing an eagle to force a playoff with Cameron Smith. Fans pressed up against the fence, desperate for a glimpse of the most popular player in golf. Children sat on their parents’ shoulders. A man in a dinosaur costume raised his selfie stick above the crowds. Drunkards climbed a lamppost and argued with police officers who tried to coax them down.

McIlroy missed his eagle try, a chip from short left of the green. The masses groaned. He missed his 20-foot birdie try, too. More groans.

But then came clapping and a roar of appreciation for their man.

“I thought the fans were great today,” McIlroy said after signing for a two-under 70 that left him in solo third. “I thought they were really, really good. Unbelievably supportive to me. Wish I could have given them a little more to cheer about.”

Nah, it was all good. The fans on The Links had plenty to cheer about, and not just the price of admission.

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“Ice is hard to get into a Coca-Cola over here,” Spieth joked Saturday evening after posting a third-round 68 that moved him to eight under for the championship, in a tie for 11th. “I’m very lucky that they have access to a big ice machine, and they bring [me] bags of ice.”

Spieth isn’t mixing Moscow Mules at his minibar. He has been using the ice to fix himself chilled baths, which help to rejuvenate his tired, aching legs. Cold therapy, he said, is “the most beneficial thing I’ve found.”

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“I feel like I get fresh legs the next day,” he said. “I try to get physio work on them and do that. I do that and NormaTec boots — you know, those compression pants that people wear. I do those every night on the road and ice bath. If I don’t do them, I actually feel my legs are fatigued the next morning. When I do, I don’t notice it.”

Spieth said the baths also help him sleep better.

Just as you never know what you might get from Spieth from one round to the next, same holds true of his press conferences. He’s typically some combination of honest, insightful, expansive and, sometimes, a little scattered. To put it in golf terms, you don’t know if you’re going to get a flop shot or a bump-and-run. Spieth’s Saturday-evening session at St. Andrews was no exception.

Here are 5 other fun nuggets he dropped before repairing to his room for an icy plunge:

1. Longest. Wait. Ever.

On the Old Course’s par-4 7th Saturday, Spieth blasted a 371-yard drive that left him 4 feet for eagle. Then, as has so often been the case this week for the field on a rambling links that crisscrosses over itself, Spieth waited to play his shot…and waited…and waited.  

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“It was probably 25, 30 minutes from when I teed off to when I had my putt,” he said.

That’s enough time to watch an episode of your favorite sitcom — with commercials!

“I just hate that,” he said of the delay. When the time finally did come to settle in over his putt, Spieth said, “I just overthought it and missed it.”

Disappointing birdies are rare. But this one fully qualified.

2. Why players are leaving so many putts short  

The variances of the Old Course’s green speeds have been giving players fits, Spieth said.

But he didn’t mean that as a setup knock. It’s a necessary evil.

“Some greens are green, and some are really brown now,” Spieth said. “The 7th and the 9th are just a totally different surface. One of them is super-green and kind of grabs the ball, and then the 9th is, like, watch out, it’s glass.

“It makes sense on those holes, though, because, on 7, if it was glass, it wouldn’t be fair. But on the 9th, if it was green, it would be too easy. I think they’ve done a great job of where that is. Like, 17 is super-green behind it, but if it was brown, it would be unplayable.”

The vicious pin positions have also contributed to players’ putting woes, Spieth said. Take the 16th green in the third round, where the hole was cut atop a knob no bigger than your dining room table. Nightmare stuff.

“A lot of the pin locations are in these tiny little tucked corners where, if you hit it more than 5 feet by, it goes 50 feet away,” Spieth said. “Guys are leaving them way short not for the same reason they were leaving them short last week. It’s because you almost have to.

“If you’re more than 30 feet away, it’s difficult to judge a bit with the wind. You’ve got a lot of ridge-riders where, if you hit it too firm, it takes that knob, but they’re not fast enough to be able to ride onto the fault line and get to the hole. It gets challenging if you don’t hit it on the flat spots of the greens. Does that answer that? That was a lot.”

It was, yeah, but keep it coming, Jordo!

3. Why he’s not doing that curious pre-swing “rehearsal” as much as he has been

If you’ve watched Spieth in recent months, you’ve seen his odd pre-swing rehearsal, in which, as my colleague Luke Kerr-Dineen has explained, “he gets into his setup position, makes a full backswing and transition move, then resumes his setup. A few seconds later, he starts his actual swing.”

This week and last (at the Scottish Open), Spieth has largely ditched the move, if not entirely.

Instruction

“I’m trying to go away from it, but I haven’t really swung the club very well this week at all,” he said. “Even the rehearsals I’m doing behind the ball aren’t quite hitting the spots I want to.”

And here he expounded, opening yet another channel into Spieth’s busy mind.

“That happens,” he said. “I go two steps forward, one step back kind of thing. Just from Round 1 it hasn’t really been on. I don’t think doing a rehearsal over the ball would help.

“I find myself doing a better job being shot focused if I’m not doing the rehearsal versus swing focused with the rehearsal. Having said that, I won with doing the rehearsal every swing. It can be done. It’s more I’d rather not and just kind of be reactive. Here and there, I think I’ll go back to different versions of it.”

Your head spinning yet? Ours is, too.

4. How to sleep on a 54-hole lead

“I’ve been fortunate to have quite a number of them,” Spieth began. “It’s always a little uneasy. If you can take your mind off of it going to bed, watch a show or a movie and stay off your phone.”

And then? Well, yeah, go to sleep!

What you want to avoid, Spieth said, is waking up in the wee hours and thinking about the challenge that awaits. If you don’t sleep well, he added, try again in the morning.   

“You’ve got time from 8 [a.m.] to noon if you need to go back to sleep,” he said. “Over here, it’s more so the fact that you tee off so late. It’s almost frustrating that the tee times are so late over here.”

On Sunday, co-leaders Rory McIlroy and Viktor Hovland will set off at 2:50 p.m. local time, which, to be fair, is actually 65 minutes earlier than the final pairing of Cameron Young and Cameron Smith teed off Saturday.

5. Can Spieth win Sunday?

Spieth has work — like, serious work — to do Sunday if he wants to put a scare into the leaders. At eight under through three rounds, he’s eight back of McIlroy and Hovland.  

“Even if I shoot 8 [under on Sunday], I still think I lose by more than three,” he said. “I would need to finish my round and have some kind of crazy monsoon tomorrow to have a chance.”

The forecast in St. Andrews calls for light rain and a moderate breeze, but alas no monsoon.

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The post How a crazy bet on the Warriors funded this epic buddies’ trip to the 150th Open appeared first on Golf.

Beliveau, who played on the golf team at Concordia and has caddied at swanky Whisper Rock Golf Club, in Scottsdale, Ariz., is a big golf guy. So are his pals. So as they mulled ideas for their 2022 excursion last year, they didn’t take long to settle on a destination: the 150th Open Championship at the Old Course.     

One problem: It wouldn’t be cheap. With flights, accommodations, tickets and more than a few pints, their bucket-list boondoggle would cost each of them thousands. Beliveau had a potential solution. A diehard Golden State Warriors fan — Beliveau rarely misses a game — he was bullish on their chances to win another NBA title in the 2021-22 season.

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“I go, ‘Let’s just throw a sh-tload of money on them,’” Beliveau told me Saturday.  

His friends liked the idea.

Sport betting isn’t legal in Minnesota, so Beliveau and three other members of his buddy-trip crew took a field trip to Diamond Jo, a casino just over the border in Iowa.

“We hit all the kiosks, as much as we could get on it,” Beliveau said. “We all chipped in.”

At that point, they found odds of 10-1. Midway through the season, feeling even more confident that the Warriors were primed to make a post-season run, they doubled down, albeit now with smaller odds of 6-1. All in, Beliveau said, they had somewhere between $5,000 and $6,000 on the line.

If you’re a basketball fan, you know what happened next. The Warriors advanced through the playoffs and knocked off the Boston Celtics, 4-2, in the finals. Steph Curry had won his fourth ring, and a gaggle of old college pals from Minnesota had won roughly $30,000.

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If you’re on site at the Open this week, this explains why in the third round you may have spotted a group of seven fans roaming around the Old Course in golden-yellow Kevon Looney jerseys.

Beliveau and his boys were all smiles and laughs as they watched the action under sun-splashed skies on Saturday. Not only are they attending a historic sporting event on golfing holy land but they’re also staying in a primo property across the street from the 18th green for which they paid $18,000 on Airbnb.

“We got a great deal, I think,” one of Beliveau’s friends said as they strained for a view of Rory McIlroy on the 1st green.

“And we don’t have to use the public restrooms,” he added with a laugh.

There was a reason the crew was following McIlroy: They have a bet on him to win. Same goes for Cameron Smith and Cameron Young. But the most lucrative payout — which if it hits, they said, will help fund a trip to an Ole Miss football game in the fall — will come if McIlroy claims the Claret Jug.

“If Rory wins,” Beliveau’s friend said, “we’re going to be the happiest people on the course, other than Rory.”

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Greg Norman, LIV’s vocal leader and proud owner of two Claret Jugs, was told by the R&A to stay home this week. Mickelson, an Open winner in 2013, was not officially blacklisted from the past-champion festivities on Monday and Tuesday, but he was strongly encouraged not to attend. On the 1st tee on Thursday, Poulter heard something you virtually never hear from the reserved and respectful Open galleries: boos.      

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Nary a single LIV player — not Phil, nor DJ, nor King Louis, a past Open winner at the Old Course — was invited into the media center to sit for a pre-tournament press conference. None were assigned what might be described as a marquee tee time, either. Mickelson was in the fifth group out on Thursday with Lucas Herbert and Kurt Kitayama. Patrick Reed, who this week has LIV branding on his shirt sleeve, collar and hat, went off with Tom Hoge and JooHyung Kim. Westwood, historically a crowd favorite at the Open, played with J.T. Poston and Stephen Dodd. Garcia, Bland and Oosthuizen were all grouped with amateurs.

But wait, there’s more! When R&A chief Martin Slumbers met with the media Wednesday, he required no prompting from reporters to reveal his feelings about the LIV movement. Near the top of his opening remarks, Slumbers said, “Before we get the press conference underway, I would like to briefly address a topic which is no doubt on most of your minds.” He wasn’t talking about Princess Anne’s plans to attend the Open.

Without mentioning LIV by name, Slumbers went on to say of LIV’s first two events, “I believe the model we’ve seen at Centurion and Pumpkin Ridge is not in the best long-term interests of the sport as a whole and is entirely driven by money. We believe it undermines the merit-based culture and the spirit of open competition that makes golf so special. I would also like to say that in my opinion the continued commentary that this is about growing the game is just not credible and if anything, is harming the perception of our sport which we are working so hard to improve.”

Whether the R&A’s cold shoulder — and the steady drumbeat of LIV-related questions in player press conferences — has affected LIV pros is hard to say. But if the leaderboard through two rounds is any indication, at least some of them appear undaunted. Among the LIV’ers in the red, and in the hunt, are DJ (nine under), Talor Gooch (seven under), Abraham Ancer (five under), Poulter and Westwood (both four under).

After his second-round 69, Gooch was asked whether LIV players have been galvanized by the R&A’s chilly reception.  

“Yeah, for sure,” he said. “Everybody, it feels like, is against us, and that’s OK. Like you said, it’s kind of banded us together, I think.”

Band of LIV brothers.

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You could see those cliques in action in practice rounds earlier this week. Garcia played with Ancer. Poulter and Bland joined Sam Horsfield. Mickelson set out with fellow LIV’ers Garcia, Bernd Wiesberger and LIV newbie Paul Casey. There’s no designated LIV section in player dining (that we know of) but you can’t help but wonder if that’s coming next.

PGA Tour loyalists like Justin Thomas and Billy Horschel have spoken of feeling betrayed by players who have not been forthright about the reasons why they’ve jumped ship for LIV (i.e., money). But it’s unclear whether the turmoil has actually uprooted personal relationships.

At the Scottish Open last week, Thomas said about being grouped with LIV players: “If I know all four of them, then it will be fine. It will be easy. But even if I don’t, I don’t necessarily think we’re going to be having any gamesmanship or needling each other.”  

Padraig Harrington has said he won’t let the LIV tension spoil his friendships, likening the friction to something you might encounter with extended family at Thanksgiving. “You could be a Republican, they could be a Democrat,” he said a couple of weeks ago. “But you’re friends at that particular time, and maybe politics isn’t mentioned at the dinner table.”

Read: Don’t talk LIV in the locker room.

Westwood wasn’t quite so diplomatic when speaking with reporters after his first round Thursday. When asked about Tiger Woods’ rebuke of LIV from earlier this week, Westwood said, “He’s got a vested interest, hasn’t he? The LIV players will talk up LIV. The PGA Tour players that aren’t on the LIV Tour will talk the PGA Tour up and put down the LIV tour. I don’t pay too much to people’s opinions.”

To which a reporter said, “But he’s saying players that have gone to LIV have turned their back on those who made them.”

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Westwood: “Tiger’s entitled to his opinion.”

One key question looming over the LIV drama is whether LIV players will be barred from the majors. There’s no indication that they will be but there also has been no indication that they won’t. The matter hinges in large part on whether LIV is accredited by the Official World Golf Ranking; if that happens, Norman has said, “everything takes care of itself.”

Meantime, players are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Gooch, 30, who is playing in his just his second Open — he finished T33 a year ago at Royal St. George’s — was asked if he feels any “extra motivation” this week given this could potentially be his last Open start.

“I mean, it would be a cool one to go out on,” he said. “Hopefully not, though.

“I’d like to think that the majors would like to have the best players in the world playing in their events in spite of everything that’s going on, but obviously that’s not up to me. It’s up to other people. Hopefully this won’t be my last one.”

Presumably, Dustin Johnson feels the same way. Johnson this week is playing in his 13th Open; four times he has finished in the top 10, including a runner-up finish in 2011. He said he fell in love with links golf when he first visited the U.K. during his senior year at Coastal Carolina. “I like the way it makes you think on every shot, where you want to hit it, where you want the ball to end up,” he said.

After posting a five-under 67 Friday, Johnson was asked the same question that Gooch had been: Were he and the other LIV players near the top of the leaderboard galvanized by the anti-LIV rhetoric?

“I don’t really know what you’re talking about,” he said. “For me, obviously, they’re all good players and playing well this week.”

Garcia was also posed the same question. He was even more dismissive.

“I don’t care what they say,” he said. 

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On Thursday, Stewart Cink didn’t have it.

“It really hurts to have a day like today, because I love playing here,” Cink said following his six-over 78 in the opening round of the 150th Open Championship on the storied Old Course.

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That can happen to even the best players in the world here on this bumpy, wind-battered links, and not only because their swings aren’t cooperating. To post a number on the Old Course, you also need to have your wits about you. Avoiding pot bunkers and leaving approach shots in the right spots on and around the greens requires golfers to think their way around the course like a captain tacking a vessel through stormy waters. One poor choice can Cink…er, sink you.

Take the par-3 8th, which on the card in the first round played about 190 yards. With the wind and the crispiness of the ground, Cink estimated he needed to play only a 170-yard shot to the back-left pin. Nope, too much. His ball trundled off the back, leading to a bogey. Later, Cink estimated that to be pin high he needed only to carry his ball about 155 yards.

“I felt like it was just one bad decision after another out there,” said Cink, who this week is playing in his 23rd Open Championship. “I kept being wrong. I’m not really accustomed to that.”

He added, “You get off the rails, and you just feel like you stay off the rails.”

The derailing began early, at the par-4 1st. After splitting the sprawling fairway, Cink had only 83 yards left to the hole. But when he hit his approach only 72 yards, it disappeared into the burn that fronts the green. A drop, chip and putt later, Cink had an opening bogey.

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Over the ensuing 16 holes, he made five more bogeys against a lone birdie, which brings us to his tee shot at the iconic 18th hole, which shares a fairway with the 1st. There’s only one place you can’t afford to miss with your tee shot on 18, and that’s right, where a busy pedestrian thoroughfare called The Links lines the entirety of the hole.

Cink missed right. Like, way right. A lucky fan on The Links had an unexpected souvenir.  

Cink is a jovial soul and good sport, so despite the tough start and finish to his round, he still found a positive in his struggles.

“I might have set a record today,” he said. “I might be the first person ever to hit it in the burn on 1 and hit it O.B. on 18 in the same round. I don’t know, but it was just not a day for me in any way. I couldn’t judge lies right. I read putts wrong, and I also executed some shots pretty poorly. Overall, it adds up to about 78.”

Here’s some better news: On Friday, Cink parred the 1st and birdied 18. With three other birdies against as many bogeys, it added up to a much-improved score, a one-under 71.

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Just not when Enya is around.

Enya is a red-backed hawk that is on site here this week with an important role: scaring off seagulls and other avian nuisances from nabbing fans’ lunches. It’s a real problem. Turn your back for a second or two in the areas around the course where food and ice-cream trucks are congregated and there’s a better-than-decent chance that a gull will swoop in for a nibble of your fish and chips.

“It’s been relatively quiet but that’s because she’s been on site since this morning,” Enya’s minder, Stuart Milne, told me Tuesday morning. He had a thick beard and even thicker Scottish accent. “If I was to go away and pop her back in the van for half an hour, the gulls would be back.”

Milne works for Elite Falconry, which as part of its pest-riddance services offers “the country’s very best birds of prey.” Last week, another of the company’s staffers — an Indian eagle owl with a six-foot wingspan named Sage — was here patrolling the Old Course and letting gulls and crows that they are not welcome. At least not during Open week. Another concern was that their droppings could muddy the playing field.

The gulls aren’t just a problem at the golf course. A couple of weeks ago, Linden Grigg, a student at St. Andrews University, wrote a column for a Scottish paper, The Courier and Evening Telegraph, with the alarming headline: “Are we going to let gulls wreck St. Andrews’ shot at Open glory?”

“These pests are large, single-minded, and dangerous,” Grigg wrote. “And as the student population increases here year-on-year, so does the size and boldness of the gulls. It is not uncommon now to see them pinching food from unsuspecting tourists and raiding any lidless bins they can find. They have become a serious public nuisance.”

Alas, not if Enya is about.

On Tuesday, as Enya rested on Milne’s left arm, her talons clasped to his hand — and with not a seagull in sight — I asked Milne if his hawk had an Open pick.
 
“I’m not sure she’s that into golf,” he said, laughing.
 
To be fair, she has more important things to worry about.

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The post St. Andrews, Scotland: More than the Old Course appeared first on Golf.