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Royal St George's under pressure of Open demands

Players need to take extra time to map the various bumps and hollows of Royal St George's © Getty Images

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ESPN will be providing live commentary during all four days of The Open Championship from Royal St George's - along with all the news, views and opinion from the course when the tournament gets underway on Thursday.

Plenty of golfers have something to prove this week, but only one golf course does.

While the 156 players in the field will be worrying about hitting their various targets for this year's Open Championship, the staff and members at Royal St George's will simply be hoping the noises those same players make about the quality of the course are not too negative.

Eight years ago, when the tournament last returned to Kent, the Sandwich course was the victim of something of a character assassination. Players didn't like the blind tee shots, the unfair bounces in the fairway, the wildly sloped greens with few sightlines to aim at.

Australian Robert Allenby was the most vocal in his criticism of those responsible for the course setup, unleashing both barrels after a second round 75 - despite still making the cut.

"It's stupid. It's the only word I have," Allenby said. "They're a bunch of dickheads. I've got to say it because it's so true.

"The golf course is tough because of the way it's playing. It's playing very hard and fast and you can't keep it on the fairways too often, and then . . . the greens are so tricky as it is and they go put them on the top of a mound. That just makes us look like idiots."

The fact that the eventual winner, Ben Curtis, was an unknown 300/1 shot hardly helped matters. Tiger Woods, Vijay Singh and Sergio Garcia may all have been near the top of the leaderboard - but the mere fact the winner was an American without a prior major appearance to his name was used as yet more evidence that the course was not a worthy Open venue.

Great courses produce great winners, as the received wisdom goes. Yet even Curtis, when asked this week, only ranked St George's fifth best of the courses on the Open rotation. And he's only played seven of them.

It's not a popular course with all the professionals, then, but it never has been. Before winning around the links in 1993, Greg Norman wondered aloud if the RAF had used the fairways for bombing practice during the Second World War.

Criticism is nothing new.

Unfortunately, neither would a change to the list of courses considered for Open hosting duties. Many fine tracks - including two within miles of St George's, Prince's and Royal Cinque Ports - have fallen by the wayside over the last century and more.

Just as surely as Royal Liverpool (Hoylake) could be added back onto the rota in 2006 (and will host again in 2014) after a long absence, a course like St George's could be removed.

In that regard, 2011's omens aren't exactly stellar. The Masters will never leave Augusta, that much we can take to the bank, but even so this year we've already seen one course effectively play itself off a major championship rotation.

The US Open at Congressional was simply too easy - for runaway winner Rory McIlroy especially, but for everyone else as well. Many players found themselves under par, and would still have done so even had the par-five sixth been kept as the devilish par-four it formerly was.

The USGA insist the low scoring was not an embarrassment, however - but the fact remains that the US Open has had an identity created for itself as a tournament where par is a challenge not a right.

"The scoring is representative of the soft golf course and the fact that, to these players, the greens are more receptive," USGA chief Mike Davis, the man 'credited' with changing the approach to setting up a US Open course, said during the tournament. "That's why the scores are where they are. I don't think we're going to try to trick Mother Nature. This is what we got in 2011. We ended up with a soft golf course.

"It's a heavy-soils golf course that if you have water and rain it's going to play softer. And with these, the greatest players in the world, it's going to enhance scoring."

Nevertheless, Congressional looks like it could be heading for a new career on the USPGA course rotation, where the likes of Hazeltine and Medinah now appear to ply their trade. Put simply, it just isn't tough enough any more.

Ironically, back in 2003 Allenby suspected the Royal & Ancient were trying too hard to provide a similarly tough challenge to the USGA's pride and joy.

"I think what they're trying to do is outdo the US Open," Allenby concluded. "They knew they've got a funky course and they've really tricked it up, and that's why there's only one guy under par."

This year, then, the pressure is on. Geography (the course is one of the few on the Open rotation in England, and one of even fewer to be in the south of the country), local support for the event (residents were instrumental in getting the tournament returned to the course after a 32-year absence between 1949-1981, by bringing up the surrounding infrastructure to a level suitable enough to host the tournament) and the ever-present financial considerations (the course capacity is one of the larger on the rotation) all play in its favour, but could all be for nothing if a second controversial event sees the crowning of a winner perceived unworthy of the famed Claret Jug.

Expect a slightly easier setup than in 2003, (although the weather could make a mockery of that), and expect to read and watch about a number of changes that have been made to fairways and greens in order to smooth out the rough edges a number of players have perceived over the years.

Then expect a lot of praying. Everyone around the game - the R&A, the fans, the sponsors and much of the media - want to see Royal St George's remain on the Open rotation.

But that could count for little if the golfers don't.

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