The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, which is the formal name of the members’ club that has owned the course at Muirfield since the late nineteenth century, holds the claim of being the oldest verifiable organised golf club in the world. The records of the club date continuously back to 1744. The course at Muirfield is not the oldest course in the world. The course is, however, the course that a long line of Open champions and a longer line of architects have pointed at as the model for what the modern Open Championship test is supposed to ask of the player.
The routing nobody has properly copied
The piece of architecture that everybody who has played or studied Muirfield comes back to is the routing. The course is laid out as two loops of nine holes, one running clockwise and one running anticlockwise. The two loops, in any given wind, are travelling in opposite directions for most of their length. No more than three consecutive holes follow the same direction at any point in the round. The player who has played the first nine into a quartering wind from the south-west will play the second nine with that quartering wind on the opposite side of his ball, and will, on the holes that turn, be asked to shape the ball into the wind on the front and away from it on the back. The wind, which on the East Lothian coast is rarely absent for more than the hour or two before sunset, becomes the second strategic question on every hole rather than the same strategic question on every hole.
The routing is not a coincidence. Old Tom Morris, who laid out the original course in 1891, worked from the principle that an Open Championship course should ask the player to play in every wind direction over the eighteen. The principle, applied to a piece of property that runs square and treeless and exposed inside the dunes between Gullane and Aberlady, produces the figure-eight that any reading of an aerial photograph of Muirfield makes obvious. The course was modified in significant ways through the late nineteen-twenties and has been broadly stable since.
The figure-eight has not been properly copied. Several courses have borrowed the language. A few of the newer Scottish links projects have gestured at it without committing. The reason the figure-eight has not travelled is that the routing needs the kind of square, treeless, exposed property the British Isles has in a small number of places and the rest of the world has at almost no price. Most American architects who set out to build a Muirfield-style links have settled, in practice, for two parallel nines and a different set of wind questions.
What the course actually asks
A Muirfield round is a test of every part of the game in roughly equal measure, which is the part of the course’s reputation the player who reads about Muirfield and then plays it for the first time is most surprised by. The course is, in its modern setup, around seven thousand two hundred and forty-five yards from the championship tees, playing to a par of seventy-one. The fairways ask the player to drive the ball with shape control rather than length. The bunkers, of which there are something close to one hundred and fifty on the course, are placed in the spots from which the second shot is most often hit, which is to say the spots the strong-and-blind tee shot tends to land in. The greens are large enough to give the approach shot a margin and small enough to punish the approach shot that misses the right portion of the green. The course has no water hazards in the strict sense and no out-of-bounds within the property. The penalty for every miss is the bunker or the rough.
The closing stretch is the part of the course the patrons watching the Open at home will remember. The seventeenth, a par five of around five hundred and seventy-eight yards that bends slightly left and rises to a green tucked into the dunes, is the hole on which an Open is most often won and most often lost. The eighteenth, a par four of around four hundred and seventy-three yards that runs back towards the clubhouse, is the second of the closing pair and the harder of the two on the day’s scoring. It is the kind of hole the leader, walking off the green, walks off knowing he has held his nerve through what the architecture was designed to ask of him.
The Open record reads like a roll-call
Muirfield has hosted the Open Championship sixteen times since 1892. The first of those, in 1892, was the first Open contested over four rounds rather than three. The list of winners reads like a short history of the Open’s modern era. Harold Hilton as an amateur, Harry Vardon, James Braid twice, Walter Hagen, Henry Cotton, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Lee Trevino, Tom Watson, Nick Faldo twice, Ernie Els, and Phil Mickelson have all lifted the Claret Jug at Muirfield. The list is the list of players whose games suit the every-part test the routing produces. No player has won at Muirfield on a one-dimensional game. Trevino, who won in 1972, hit fades. Nicklaus, who won the first of his three Open Championships at Muirfield in 1966, hit a controlled draw. Faldo, who won in 1987 and again in 1992, hit eighteen pars on the Sunday in 1987 and the right amount of nothing in between. The winners’ games, across the sixteen Opens, are different from one another in shape and similar in completeness.
The course has, twice in the post-war era, denied a player his third major of a year already containing the Masters and the U.S. Open. Nicklaus was a stroke short of Trevino in 1972. Tiger Woods, in 2002, ran into a gale on the Saturday and shot eighty-one, and finished the championship at level par after a Sunday sixty-five had brought him back to a finish six off the playoff. The two near-misses are the part of the course’s reputation the architects of the modern American major venue have, more often than not, failed to build into their own courses. The wind is the second variable. The figure-eight is the architecture that puts the wind to work.
Visiting
Muirfield is, by reputation, an exclusive club. The reputation is half correct. The Honourable Company allows visitor play on Tuesdays and Thursdays during the season, by application made well in advance through the club’s office. The green fee is at the upper end of what the great British links charge and is broadly in line with what the Old Course charges a non-resident visitor through the ballot. The starter, who has worked the first tee at Muirfield for longer than most members have been members, will ask a few questions about the visitor’s game before the round and will, on the strength of the answers, decide whether the visitor is fit to play the championship tees or the members’ tees. The decision, in most cases, will be the members’. The members’, on most days, are plenty.
The course is worth the application. The figure-eight, well into its second century, is still the part of the round the visitor who has read about it and arrived expecting to know what they are looking at will be most surprised by. The wind, on the second nine, is the thing the visitor will remember.