[Photo: Thibaut Durand]
I was nursing a coffee, watching fellow scribes tee off at the Old Course, waiting behind the first tee for a St. Andrews local to arrive for an interview in the middle of a summer spent bouncing around the linksland. Because standing in front of the Old Course never gets old, or because I’m an idiot, I forgot to hit record on my phone, so the word-for-word transcript of that interview is lost to the North Sea winds. But I remember saying, at some point, how wonderful it is that you can’t shoot baskets at Madison Square Garden or take batting practice at Wrigley Field, yet anyone with some sticks and golf soul is allowed to play St. Andrews. And I remember his face, the confusion of a man watching a stranger marvel at something he’d never had reason to notice.
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“Allowed? No one has to be given permission,” was the gist of his answer. “Golf is for everyone.”
That’s what trips up most Americans the first time they play links golf. The best courses are open, and that includes the ones on the Open rota. Royal Birkdale will host its 11th competition for the claret jug next week, then spend the rest of the season selling tee times to whoever shows up and asks. Not as a favour, or as a quaint local custom to charm the tourists. It’s their policy, and maybe more, their identity.
To understand why a links course opens its gates, you have to know it was never really gated to begin with. Golf was played on linksland, the rumpled, sandy ground between farmland and sea, too salt-stunted for crops, too wind-whipped for much else. Which meant it belonged, in an age before real estate developers, to everyone and no one. And though golf in the United Kingdom is much more than links—in fact, the majority of courses are considered parkland—the sentiment still applies. Municipal courses dot Scotland and England the way corner pubs are littered across main streets, woven into daily life rather than set apart from it. Of the roughly 3,000 golf courses in the United Kingdom, the overwhelming majority welcome outside play in some form. Ask around the top 100 courses in the region and only a half dozen don’t—most notably, Wisley, Loch Lomond and Queenwood. They are clubs built through an American prism of private retreats with corporate memberships and waiting lists, the exception precisely because they imported a foreign idea of what a golf club is for.
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Because, while the American dynamics are starting to change, a quarter of U.S. golf facilities remain private. A look at Golf Digest’s ranking of America’s Top 100 and the ceiling only lowers the higher you climb: of the top 10, only Pebble Beach is public and Bethpage Black is the sole municipal course inside the top 40. And “public” has become its own euphemism in American golf. Run the math across the best public courses in the country and the average green fee among the top 10 clears $570. Here, access tends to carry a price tag that functions as a barrier.
Over there, however, access is more than a round of golf. Members speak of their course like they are stewards, something they’re minding for a while. Green fees from visitors, often set at modest levels compared to American public courses, keep annual dues low enough that a retired schoolteacher and a hedge fund manager can belong to the same institution without either one noticing the gap. The exclusivity American clubs chase with manicured grounds, the members-only quiet, and the sense of having arrived is replaced here by having earned nothing except the willingness to show up and play.
And frankly, it’s good business. A UK club that prices out visitors would have to raise dues to its normal customers. Instead, visitors are subsidising the membership rather than the other way around, which is precisely backward from the American model, where dues from an exclusive membership fund the amenities that keep outsiders out. It’s a bit sentimental, but it’s also math. The local golfer keeps playing the course he grew up on for a few hundred pounds a year because a few thousand strangers a season are willing to pay considerably more for a single round and a story to tell.
It’s fair to wonder if there’s a cost to that arrangement, if enough out-of-towners come through the turnstiles to polish the shine off what made the place special in the first place. But I saw the system up close all that summer abroad. Most mornings I’d walk my dog down to whatever local course I was near, to the first tee, to watch the early groups off. Whether it was St. Andrews or North Berwick, Nairn or Royal Dornoch, Cruden Bay or Machrihanish, the clubs and starters waved visitors through without breaking stride, the way a maître d’ seats a party without anyone clocking the choreography. The members were welcoming; no one made a visitor feel like the help, or that he was being squeezed into a schedule never built for him. He was simply next on the sheet, same as anyone, and the member group waiting behind him didn’t so much as glance at a watch. Everyone is the same; for that day, you’re one of them.
That extends to the ground itself. Scottish and English links rarely get watered beyond the greens, which means the land could be lush and green in winter or gold and hard and fast in summer, and neither condition is treated as a flaw to be corrected. Augusta’s perpetual, unnatural green has trained a generation of American golfers to expect perfection and to pay for it. It’s the water, labor, chemicals, all of it cascading down into the green fee. Links golf asks you to play the course nature hands you that week. It’s viewed as an aesthetic choice, and certainly it helps keep costs down, yet it’s also a small act of humility, repeated daily, by everyone who tees it up.
[Photo: David Cannon]
American golfers can often be accused of romanticising golf over there, yet none of this is a fairy tale. Rota clubs still guard windows for member tee times and can bristle at being reduced to a museum piece for tourists with checklists. That extends to etiquette itself, which functions as its own gatekeeping that catches first-timers off guard. Dress properly. Keep pace or the group behind will be sent through, and no one will feel obligated to be polite about it. Understand that the honour of playing this ground comes with the obligation to leave it as you found it.
Theoretically, that etiquette is a barrier to entry, yet it’s built from neither money nor bloodline but whether you understand you’re a guest in something bigger than your own round.
I think about that St. Andrews local sometimes, the way he looked at me like I’d asked why the sky was blue. He genuinely didn’t understand the question, because in his golfing life, the idea of a stranger needing permission to walk a links course had simply never come up. Maybe that’s the point. The “Member for a Day” concept has never really been about pretending to belong somewhere you don’t. It’s an admission that golf, at its oldest and truest, was never anyone’s to own.
