Golf Digest Magazine on a British Open Venue Golf Itinerary Planned by Celtic Golf

11-Jul-2010 Joe Dwyer of Celtic Golf planned a golf travel itinerary for David Owen of Golf Digest magazine. The itinerary covered all venues the British Open has been held. Mr. Owen writes of his trip in the July Issue of Golf Digest.

To celebrate the playing of the 2010 British Open Championship – St. Andrews, the home of golf – we share a paragraph of David Owens' story below. Read the full article here.

Mr. Owens writes of his trip ...

In the century and a half since it began, the British Open has been played on just 14 courses: seven in Scotland, six in England and one in Northern Ireland. That list seems so modest that an ambitious golfer might be tempted to try to play them all, like a birder crossing warblers off a life list. I know that's possible because last spring -- in anticipation of the Open's sesquicentennial, which will be celebrated at St. Andrews in July -- I tackled the lot, in a single, two-week trip.

My Open tour was infinitely easier to execute than any equivalent American pilgrimage would have been. The geographical area bounded by the British rota would fit inside Texas, and all 14 courses -- unlike most of the 51 that have hosted the U.S. Open -- are accessible to unaccompanied strangers. Still, the logistics were more than I thought I could handle on my own, so I got help from Joe Dwyer, of Celtic Golf, who planned my itinerary. I wouldn't recommend my Open tour as a model for leisurely golf travel, because I put more than a thousand miles on three rental cars, lugged my clubs back and forth across the Irish Sea and stayed in eight hotels. But I had an unforgettable trip, and I even managed to squeeze in a few bonus rounds, off the books.

About St. Andrews ...

In the mid-19th century, the only major Scottish golf organization that wasn't based in Musselburgh was the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. The R&A is less ancient than the Honourable Company, but it now rules the game everywhere in the world except the United States and Mexico. It's the outfit that puts on the Open, and its clubhouse is the bank-shaped hunk of stone and glass that looms above the first tee of the Old Course -- which I played the next day. My group included an American university student from St. Louis, whose name was Walker. He had transferred to St. Andrews from Duke -- with the enthusiastic approval of his father, a member at Bellerive -- and had been pursuing an unofficial year-long elective in the Old Course, as a supplement to his thesis research on David Hume. At the beginning of the school year, he said, he had paid £170 for a student golf ticket, which allowed him to play any Links Trust course whenever he felt like it, ho-hum. As we stood on the first tee, the wind was blowing so hard from the left that the starter advised a petite woman in the group ahead of ours to aim her tee shot well into the 18th fairway, so that the gale and her presumed slice would bring her ball safely back into play; she aimed where he pointed, then power-hooked her drive very nearly onto Old Station Road.

Read the full article here.

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