The Old Course originally consisted of twenty-
two holes, eleven out and eleven back. On
completing a hole, the player teed up his ball
within two club lengths of the previous hole,
using a handful of sand scooped out from the
hole to form a tee. In 1764, the Society of St
Andrews Golfers, which later became the Royal
and Ancient Golf Club, decided that some holes
were too short and combined them. This reduced
the course to eighteen holes and created what
became the standard round of golf throughout
the world.
The track through the whin bushes on which the
Old Course evolved was so narrow that golfers
played to the same holes going out and coming
in. As the game became increasingly popular in
the nineteenth century, golfers in different
matches would find themselves playing to the
same hole, but from opposite directions. To
relieve the congestion, two holes were cut on
each green, those for the first nine were
equipped with a white flag and those for the
second nine with a red flag.
When Old Tom Morris created a separate green
for the first hole, it became possible to play the
course in an anti-clockwise direction, rather than
clockwise which had previously been the norm.
For many years, the course was played
clockwise an anti-clockwise on alternate weeks,
but now the anti-clockwise, or right-hand circuit
has become the accepted direction. Many of the
course's 112 bunkers, however, are clearly
designed to catch the wayward shots of golfers
playing the course on the left-hand circuit.
The Open Championship was first played on the
Old Course at St Andrews in 1873. With the 27th
staging of the world's premier golf event taking
place again on the Old Course in 2005, St
Andrews has held the event more often than
anywhere else. In modern times, the Dunhill Cup
and the subsequent Dunhill Links Championship
have been played at St Andrews since 1985,
while the Walker Cup, the Amateur
Championship and a host of other professional
and amateur competitions for men and women
have been held over the fabled links at the
Home of Golf.