Sure, no one has seen Royal Liverpool in a lifetime and most dont’ know why it is called Hoylake, but it is Open Championship week all the same.
To gain some sense of the course, head to the Scotsman and read John Huggan’s column on Hoylake. This is, by all accounts, a good members’ course, but no one is sure how it will hold up for the Open.
Especially galling to Royal Liverpool members is the knowledge that the quality or otherwise of their historic links was not the reason for its absence from golf’s front line.
“We’ve never had a problem with the golf course,” confirms Peter Dawson, chief executive of the Royal & Ancient. “But there simply wasn’t room for an Open. Now there is. The old land of the Lees School, which sits to the left of the sixth fairway, was sold partly for housing, and the rest was purchased by Royal Liverpool. That gave us the acreage we needed to start fitting the jigsaw. It will house the television compound and some car parking.”
The entire piece is here.
If you are interested in a contrary piece written by Ron Whitten for Golf Digest, look here. It is in this story that Whitten coined the term “Royal O.B.” in reference to the internal out-of-bounds at Hoylake.
