Scott Macpherson

So once I put together, within the book, for those who have it, towards the back, there's a double-page fold-out.

And it shows the length of all the holes for all the Open Championships held in St Andrews.

And that was, for me, my entry into trying to figure out when the old course had changed, which led to a why.

So it became, there's very little data from early on.

So the first Open was at St Andrews in 1873.

And then it's sort of been played reasonably regularly ever since.

But there's not a lot of early data until really the late 1800s, 1890, 1895.

And then it's very good data from then on.

And I started to see really quite significant changes to the length of the old course.

And particularly around 1900 was the first big one which we can track with accuracy.

there was a, huh, moment.

Like, why would that be?

And at the same time I was tracking length, I was starting to look at technology as well, and it was quite clear that if we follow the ball in particular,

Golf had been played in St Andrews in the 1400s, and then the feathery golf ball came in in 1618, and we went for about 220 years until the gutter percher, which everyone will know had a big impact on old Tom and his relationship with Alan Robertson.

And we ran with that ball for quite a long time, and then in 1848 came the gutter percher, and then we moved into the Haskell, which was 1901.

So here you're starting to have this alignment now between changes to length of the old course and technology.

And they added between those two opens, 1900 and 1905, exactly 200 yards, most of it to the front nine.

And you can correlate it exactly back to the introduction of the Haskell ball.

So for me, that was like, oh, that's quite interesting.

And then as you track that information through as the ball changes and we get different versions of the gutter percher and then moving into the Haskell and the rubber core ball, and more recently, the Pro V1, there is this returning theme of improvement in equipment, primarily the ball, also shafts, obviously.