A Braw Brawl For Tom And Jack

Turnberry, when it was not functioning as an air base during world wars, consisted of one massive hotel up on the hill overlooking the RAF runways, the Firth of Clyde, in which fishermen still hook onto crashed Hudson bombers, the island bird sanctuary known as Ailsa Craig, and the gleaming lighthouse out on the point, which had long since become the Turnberry golf club's logo.

All the objections to Turnberry as a site might have been valid before the British Open had regained its reputation as one of the Big Four in golf, before the Arnold Palmers and Jack Nicklauses had turned it into something other than a rickety event in which Peter Thomson beat half a dozen guys from Stoke Poges. The people would come streaming in to see it nowadays, no matter what, the R and A figured. And how right it was.

Each day the great grandstands scattered over the dunes were filled by 10 a.m. and thousands more were tromping through the whin and heather as if a Mark Hayes wearing his Amana hat or a John Schroeder were real people. They stormed the tented village, as it is called, that hodgepodge of commercial exhibitions featuring everything from shooting sticks to pork pies to cashmeres at discount. Only in this championship among the Grand Slam tournaments can the spectator see players from as many as 27 different countries. Leap over a burn in the British Open and you can go from a Severiano Ballesteros waist-deep in non-Spanish flora to a Baldovino Dassu neckdeep in non-Italian fauna.

To the British, the charm of Turnberry's links lay in the fact that its holes are closer to the sea than those of any other of their Open courses. At a Carnoustie, Muirfield, Birkdale or Lytham, for example, you can't even catch a glimpse of the water from a tee or green. You can see it at St. Andrews, but there is no way to strike a ball into watery oblivion without a hydroplane. Ah, but Turnberry! The water is always there, furnishing a series of backdrops, washing up against a competitor's concentration.

The best of Turnberry is bound up in its golf, and, delightedly, the rest of the world learned about that last week. Although it got caught in a warm calm that produced the lowest scoring in the 106-year-old championship's elegant history, Turnberry earned its way onto the R and A's Open rota both with the record crowds it drew and the breathtaking action it provided, and not just from Tom and Jack.

It has never been any secret that if you could catch one of the famous old courses in England or Scotland in a dead calm, you could scorch it. Unlike American layouts, wind is 50% of the danger, as much a part of linksland golf as a pot bunker or gnarled heather. The necessity of wind to British golf is why the Open has always been staged on courses by the sea—to ensure the sternest test. But throughout the four rounds there was no wind at Turnberry.

And so with hundreds of spectators wearing no shirts at all instead of the customary Open garb of topcoats and rain gear, and with the course looking more like a Farrah Fawcett-Majors than a Lotte Lenya, the players leaped at it with glee and daring. The result was a raft of scores that would have sent old Tom Morris staggering dizzily toward a barrel of ale. It was so easy that a couple of American tour regulars, John Schroeder and then Roger Maltbie, led the first and second rounds, Schroeder with a 66 on Wednesday and then Maltbie with 71-66—137. These were Americans who would have looked more at home at the Quad Cities tournament. It was their first time over, even though Maltbie's mother is Scottish and his dad had been a flyer stationed in Scotland during the big one. The British considered them unknowns, unaware of Maltbie's three victories on the U.S. tour.

It was in Thursday's second round that Turnberry began to take some real lumps. Hubert Green came very close to going around in a figure as weird as a California license plate. He went seven under par through the first 13 holes. Then mistakes got him when, as he later admitted, "a 59 crossed my mind." He settled for 66. At more or less the same time, however, Mark Hayes was out there shoving Turnberry inside an Amana refrigerator. Hayes plays golf in hiding, pulling a brimmed hat down over his shy, almost terrifyingly modest, expressions, and although he is a superb golfer who makes his own clubs in Edmond, Okla., and is one of the new wave of young stars, words flow from his lips every other eon. With a cross-handed putting style he was trying out for only the second time in competition, he flattened Turnberry with a 63.

It was the lowest single round—by two strokes—ever shot in the world's oldest major championship. Back in 1934 a golf ball had been hurried into production after Henry Cotton's 65 at Sandwich—the Dunlop 65, of course. And now Hayes had shot 63 and everyone was goofy over it. Except Mark Hayes. He was another American in the British Open for the first time and he didn't know about the record, which would have been even lower if he hadn't started thinking cross-handed and chosen the wrong clubs on the 18th hole and finished with a bogey. Surrounded by a mere 900 million members of the press, then, Mark Hayes was asked what his reaction was to his monumental feat. He sat there. He looked down. He thought. Finally, he said. "I have a lot of trouble figuring out the distances over here."

That was it. The Eagle has landed. If I have but one life to give. Give me liberty or give me. Lafayette, we are somewhere. And so forth. Mark Hayes had shattered Britain with a 63 and Amana had not sent a poet with him to Turnberry.