ST. ANDREWS, Scotland — You need not work hard to find proof of the merciless conditions Thursday at the Old Course. Balls blew off tees. Sand blew out of bunkers. Hats flew off heads. Even Hinako Shibuno, rightly nicknamed the Smiling Assassin, was frowning. Shooting 80 will do that.
The first round of the AIG Women’s Open was major championship golf in its most tantalizing form. For spectators, at least.
“My head’s, like, pounding,” Rose Zhang said after shooting an even-par 72. “I think this is a first, honestly.”
Zhang played driver, 3-wood into the 375-yard 1st, and she was far from alone. A handshake opener that had to feel like playing in handcuffs.
“I don’t know how it’s very playable, to be honest,” offered Gemma Dryburgh, born up the coast in Aberdeen. It’s always the best sign of brutish conditions: when a Scot tells you the weather is too much. Out came the earmuffs and the mittens.
But that was part of the brilliance in what Thursday offered golf fans. It was golf on the edge of a cliff. A sunny cliff, too! The girls had to play. Tournament officials watered the course on Wednesday to grow up the greens, hopeful they could make them a bit stickier. But any more wind and tournament officials would have postponed play. They nearly had to.
The Old Course may feel like an out-and-back layout but in reality, it curls through the coast in the shape of a fish hook, slowly changing direction each hole until you reach holes 7 through 11, out at the furthest reach of the property, next to the Eden Estuary. There are no buildings out there. No hills providing a buffer. Just a barren expanse of muddy sand that seems to act like a wind accelerant, blowing everything out to the North Sea.
By midday, gusts out at the 11th lived up to the ominous weather report the R&A sent out Thursday morning: 40-45 miles per hour. Wind that’ll knock you over. Wind that had players ducking behind gorse bushes for cover. Or turning their bodies and widening their stance, not to hit shots, but just to watch, for fear of falling into a bunker. Those villainous falcons brought into town to keep seagulls out of the sky had nothing to do. Mother Nature kept the gulls on the ground.
Thursday helped answer an important golf viewing question: How can you tell 20-mph winds from 30? From 30 mph to 40? North of 40? You feel it. And you hear it. Not in the flags flapping or windgear whipping, but in the bleachers. When that much wind flows into the grandstands, it doesn’t creak as much as it hums — loudly, too, a constant in the background — air flowing rapidly through the iron corridors.
It was out there at the 11th — in the part of the course known as the loop — that this round got as close as you can to postponement. Nicole Broch Estrup stood on the 11th green looking at a downhill 20-footer. She had marked her ball at least 10 minutes ago, but every time she replaced it, it refused to stay still. She’d line up to the hole, step back from the ball and within 15 seconds it would be trickling. Once, twice, three times. Broch Estrup brought in a rules official to watch it happen a fourth time. Then another official arrived, without sympathy. Play on.
