All courses are to some degree copies of the Old Course he says
“All courses are to some degree copies of the Old Course,” he says. “We have 18 holes because that’s what it’s like on the Old Course, and for the same reason, sand bunkers of all shapes and depths. On the Old Course the bunkers are the creations of Tom Morris, or sheep. Have you played Brora, north of Dornoch? It’s wonderful, one of the most interesting and exciting courses I’ve ever played, and it’s looked after by a man, two boys, and 200 sheep.”Thomson chuckles. At 70, this quietly-spoken, droll, sometimes acerbic but always engaging man has lost none of his enthusiasm for the game, and is particularly excited about a new project in Australia, provisionally called Moonah Links. “It’s great to work in different landscapes like woodland,” he says. “But I think the pure form of golf is played in the wind off bare turf I get dismayed watching golf on television Let me take your mind back to the Ryder Cup in Boston.
The 17th is a drive-and-pitch hole and the green has two levels. The logical shot is to play it low, land it on the bottom level and run it up. But every player, on both sides, hit a sand wedge, landed on top and spun back down I was laughing. I was saying ‘doesn’t one of them have a brain?’”Which was not a criticism ever levelled at him. For golfing nous, combined with an unflappable temperament, there was nobody to beat Thomson At St Andrews in 1955, nobody did.
He arrived as the Open champion, having won the year before at Birkdale, and duly joined James Braid, Bobby Jones, Walter Hagen and Bobby Locke as the only men in the 20th Century to defend the claret jug successfully. By winning the following year too, at Hoylake, he reached a plateau all of his own. Only Young Tom Morris (1868, 1869, 1870) keeps him company in the record books.He is well-acquainted with the snipe that he beat an inferior field, and brushes it off. “Okay, Hogan wasn’t here in 1955, but Cary Middlecoff was, and he was the leading US money-winner Byron Nelson was here Ed Furgol, who was the US Open champion, was here.
