‘Nae golf’? Day 3 of British Open had no chance

ST. ANDREWS, Scotland

IT’S AN ANCIENT Scottish adage, as old as the game itself. Everyone who’s played golf and/or watched The Open Championship takes it as a matter of faith in this birthplace of fairways and greens.

“Nae wind, nae rain, nae golf.”

The meaning is clear: Real men (and presumably real women, too) play golf in Scotland come what may. The more of a challenge the elements pose, goes the thinking, the better.

So far, though, the first three days of the 144th Open Championship at the Old Course have revealed that even the Scots have their limits.

Friday’s second round began with a rain delay of three hours, 14 minutes – much of it involving men in rain gear shoveling water off the course – and failed to finish before darkness. On Saturday, winds gusting to 45 miles per hour forced a lengthy postponement of the second round’s conclusion when players started seeing their golf balls being blown along, and off, the greens.

After a 32-minute start, Royal & Ancient officials suspended play until 3 p.m. (local time) Saturday. That later was extended until 4 p.m., then 5 p.m., then 5:30 p.m., then 6 p.m. This all occurred long after the R&A decided to move the third round to Sunday. The second round at last finished at approximately 9:18 p.m.

“We spent an hour at the far end of the course (the 13th and 14th holes, hard by the wind-tossed Firth of Forth) before play started (Saturday), assessing whether the course was playable,” an R&A weather statement read. At that time, “we considered the golf course to be playable.

“(But) gusts of wind increased in strength by 10-15 percent after play resumed. This could not be foreseen ... and made a material difference to the playability of the golf course.”

Translation: Sorry, you players who watched the gusts play havoc with your early-morning shots.

Take first-round leader Dustin Johnson. The Columbia native flubbed a chip at the 14th hole that barely reached the green. Then, as he stared malevolently at the ball, a wind burst pushed it back off the putting surface. Bogey. In retrospect, maybe he should have run to the green and marked his ball first.

By mid-afternoon Saturday, winds were still howling even at the relatively protected first and 18th fairways. Fans walking on a crosswalk (and snapping selfies of the empty grandstands) along the 18th were buffeted by wind-tunnel-like blasts – which would’ve aided anyone playing to the 18th green, not so much those teeing off the first.

It remained to be seen the impact of the weather delay on Johnson’s quest for his first major championship. For The Open, though, such weather-induced calamities are hardly a new thing. Scotland didn’t discover wind, rain and chill this week.

Go back to 1995 at St. Andrews, when John Daly closed with a 1-under 71 in brisk conditions that erased third-round leader Michael Campbell (a Sunday 76). Or the 2010 Open, also at the Old Course; that year, Rory McIlroy opened with a record-tying 63, but when the winds kicked up Friday, eventually forcing an afternoon suspension, McIlroy literally was blown away with a ugly 80, opening the door for eventual winner Louis Oosthuizen, who shot 67 that day and beat a highly incensed McIlroy by eight shots.

McIlroy’s ire was due to having to finish his round before play was halted. But he hardly was the first, or last, player to see major ambitions ruined by weather.

In 2002 at Muirfield, Tiger Woods started 70-68 and was two shots behind eventual winner Ernie Els. Then the winds and rains came, and Woods skied to a then-career-worst 83. He shot 65 on Sunday – too little, too late.

Playing in the wind and rain is “very much a mental exercise,” Els said in 2008, when weather impacted the Open at Royal Birkdale. “You’ve got to be very patient. You’ve got to feel like a lot of guys are going to make mistakes, you’re going to make mistakes yourself and you’ve got to rebound from that.”

Or, in many cases, not.

Players weren’t the only ones affected by this week’s weather. Monday’s finish meant Arthur Ndhloun and Caleb Mulenga, from Lusaka, Zambia, would not see the finish. Worse: their 13-hour flight home via Dubai probably would prevent them watching on TV.

“I’m not surprised they (suspended play),” said Ndhloun (whose name, he said, means “elephant”). “We play sometimes in Durban (South Africa), so we know about wind. But this is something new to us. It’s a challenge.”

Reed and Misty Finney were in better shape, schedule-wise. “We’re staying Monday, then driving to Inverary,” said Reed Finney, a Spartanburg native. “We hoped the weather wouldn’t interfere this week, but suspending play is the right thing – you can’t play in this.” He laughed. “I can’t walk in 45-mph wind.”

The Finneys saw it all, walking 15 holes with Johnson and Jordan Spieth on Friday after being soaked by early showers – “it rained sideways,” she said – and watching Saturday’s winds turn umbrellas inside-out and send caps barreling down fairways.

If this schedule-wrecking weather was extreme even by Open standards, it hardly was a new thing. Lorne Rubenstein, a long-time Canadian golf writer, once wrote how Tom Watson, whose five Open titles made him “perhaps the best bad-weather golfer who ever lived,” shot an amazing 69 in brutal weather at the 1979 Memorial Tournament, played in 30-mph winds and a minus-11 wind-chill factor in Dublin – Ohio, not Ireland.

Friday under darkening skies, Watson, now 65, finished his last Open Championship at the Old Course’s 18th hole, then said he and family and friends planned to party late into the night. And why not?

Watson, after all, wouldn’t have to complete what is evolving into the Open that won’t end. “Nae rain, nae wind, nae golf”? Seems more like just “nae golf” anytime soon.

This story was originally published July 18, 2015 at 10:50 PM with the headline "‘Nae golf’? Day 3 of British Open had no chance."