When Bernard Darwin, the British golf writer and grandson of Charles Darwin, first came upon the Royal Liverpool links here nearly a century ago, his theory on the evolution of the golf course needed awhile to percolate, at least until the wind began to pick up.
"This place of dull and rather mean appearances is one of the most interesting and most difficult in the world, and preeminently one which is regarded with affection by all who know it well," he wrote. "There are few courses on which a change of wind more completely alters the character of each individual hole. Blessed indeed is the hole which can keep its good character whichever way the wind is blowing."
At the moment, there is very little of it. England is in the midst of a heat wave, and in the Liverpool suburbs the air is mostly still with only a timid breeze off the Irish Sea. Royal Liverpool's hard fairways are more brown than green, and even at 7,258 yards, distance will not be a problem if only because the bounce of the ball actually could produce the occasional 400-yard drive.
Royal Liverpool is playing host this week to its first British Open championship since 1967, and unless conditions change dramatically, the place may prove a birdie-eagle antidote to the last major, the U.S. Open, when a 72-hole score of 5 over par by Australian Geoff Ogilvy was just good enough to win.
"After the U.S. Open, this is a pleasant site," Mark Calcavecchia, the 1989 British Open champion, said Monday after his first practice round. "It's playing short and playing fast, and the rough, even though it's wispy, it's fairly thin. Unless it gets really windy, you're going to see some very good scores out there. They don't have too many humps and bumps so that's fine. It's fairly flat. We need a little wind to make it interesting."
The course on which Walter Hagen won the 1924 British Open is almost unknown because it has not been part of the recent Open rotation and last hosted a European Tour event in 1991. Until he began playing practice rounds Sunday, Tiger Woods said he had never even seen a picture of the place. Peter Dawson, chairman of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, recently said that one "senior American player" he declined to identify had called to ask if Royal Liverpool was a golf course.
Royal Liverpool was founded in 1869, ringed by a now-defunct horse racing grounds, and in 1872 the club held what is believed to be the first professional golf tournament, offering a first-place prize of 15 pounds won by the revered Scottish golfer Young Tom Morris. Royal Liverpool also held the world's first amateur championship in 1885, with a starting field of 44 players.
St. Andrews baker and plasterer Sandy Herd won the 1902 Open at Hoylake. For the first time, an Open champion used a rubber-core golf ball -- the Haskell, which signaled the end of the game's gutta-percha ball era. And in 1921, Royal Liverpool hosted the first competition between teams from the United States and Great Britain/Ireland, a match that led to the Walker Cup, still a prestigious amateur match-play event.
Ten Opens have been contested here, with the most storied occurring in 1930, when Bobby Jones captured the second leg of the only single-season Grand Slam in history despite a 75 in the final round. Jones had played here in 1921, his first experience on a windblown links. Nine years later, after winning the first major of the 1930 season -- the British Amateur at St. Andrews -- he won again at Royal Liverpool by two shots, despite enduring a triple bogey on the eighth hole in the final round that included a botched foot-long putt.
Playing with hickory-shafted clubs on a 6,700-yard course, Jones managed to pull himself together on the inward nine holes with a 37, then waited in the clubhouse for nearly two hours as his closest pursuers failed to overtake him. Years later, Jones described his butchering of No. 8 as "the most inexcusable hole I ever played. . . . I will play that hole over 1,000 times in my dreams."
Many believe the turmoil he endured that week at Royal Liverpool, especially after the triple bogey and the time spent wondering if his 291 would hold up, played a major role in Jones's decision to give up playing major tournament golf after winning the Slam that year at 28. For years he had had stomach problems from competing at the highest levels of the game.
Jones also took home something else aside from the Auld Claret Jug that year. He had been duly impressed with the portraits of past Royal Liverpool captains that still hang in the red-brick clubhouse, with each man attired in a bright red blazer. Jones liked the blazer concept, and the genesis of the green jackets at his signature creation, Augusta National, began at Royal Liverpool.
The last of Royal Liverpool's Open championships came in 1967 when Argentina's Roberto De Vicenzo produced a course-record 67 in the final round to hold off Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player for his only major title. A year later, De Vicenzo had the Masters won, only to sign an incorrect scorecard and get disqualified, leading to Bob Goalby being declared champion.
Royal Liverpool and the times have changed since '67. That year, about 30,000 spectators attended the event all week. This year, more than 200,000 are expected, with weekend crowds in the 40,000 range. The Open's popularity began to grow exponentially in the 1970s, and Royal Liverpool did not have the infrastructure or enough available land to handle such a modern-day mega-event.
But in recent years, the club purchased some nearby property to handle parking and corporate hospitality areas, and after tweaking the course to the R&A's satisfaction, Royal Liverpool was awarded this year's Open.
Now, if only the wind would pick up, perhaps by late Sunday afternoon Royal Liverpool will live up to Bernard Darwin's other memorable description of these historic links: "Blown upon by mighty winds, breeder of mighty champions."
