Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club is not easy to love.
The links is situated a full mile from the coast and that while you may get the
occasional whiff of the Irish
Sea, you will never see nor hear it. But golf, especially in the
north of England, is not a beauty pageant. It
is about challenge and character—and few courses on earth can provide as great a
challenge and exude as much character as Lytham.
Alone among perennial major championship layouts, Royal
Lytham starts with a par 3. But by Lytham standards such an anomaly is par for
the course—the entire layout has maverick tendencies. In addition to beginning
with a short hole, the course contains successive par 5s on the front nine.
Frankly, Lytham is lopsided. It is the type of course on which a scratch player
can scorch to the turn in 31 or 32, only to limp home in 40.
The turf itself is excellent—true links terrain with firm,
fast greens. Over the years various course architects, beginning with George
Lowe Jr. and including such master craftsmen as Tom Simpson, Herbert Fowler and
Harry Colt, have contributed to the design. In architectural terms, Lytham could
be classed as a mongrel, even if it has an extremely fine pedigree.
A fine sequence begins at the 6th, the first of the
back-to-back par 5s. Whether your preference is for the 6th or the 7th depends
on whether you favor the Royal St.
George’s (crumpled fairway—awkward stance) type of links
hole or the Royal Birkdale (level fairway—even stance) approach.
The 417-yard 8th pays homage to no links. It is a truly
heroic hole. The view from the elevated tee is positively inspiring. It features
some vast sandhills and a cavernous fairway bunker to the left; the railway line
and trees form a continuous boundary to the right, and straight ahead as you
drive lie a trio of large cross bunkers set into a rise in the fairway some 60
yards short of the green.
With five holes to play, Royal Lytham throws down the
gauntlet. For optimists it is the hour of reckoning; for pessimists, the
wrecking hour. The 14th, 15th and 17th are prodigiously long par 4s. The 15th is
possibly the most difficult of the trio: a slightly uphill drive paves the way
for a long and semi-blind approach. The fairway undulates more than most and is
strewn with a sea of seemingly magnetic pot bunkers. The Killing Fields of
Lytham.
History envelops the 17th and 18th. The former doglegs to the
left and is almost as long and difficult as the 15th. It was on this hole that
Bobby Jones effectively won the 1926 Open. Sharing the lead with his playing
partner, Al Watrous, Jones had hooked his tee shot wildly into an area of sand
and scrub. With his partner safely on the green, Jones was 175 yards from the
flag and faced a blind shot across a wilderness of dunes and rough. Jones played
the greatest shot of his life, his ball finishing on the green, inside
Watrous.
The 18th owes its reputation as one of the world’s most
celebrated finishing holes to some magnificent fairway and greenside bunkering.
After his outrageous stroke, Jones finished his round with two 4s, which left
only one player with a chance of catching him. Walter Hagen came to the 72nd
hole needing to hole his second to tie. Hagen hit a good drive and after contemplating
his approach for several moments, sent his caddie forward to hold the flag.
Suffice to say, he very nearly executed the day’s second miracle.
In The Lytham
Century, Tony Nickson relates how at the prize-giving ceremony, “Hagen
presented Jones with a niblick with a face the size of a soup plate and then
left, sitting up on the back of an open Rolls Royce, bouncing golf balls off the
road to the crowd.”
