ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES | There were glimpses of the European Tour’s past, present and future in Abu Dhabi last week. The past was represented by the annual reminder that the European Tour has been playing in the Middle East since the first Dubai Desert Classic in 1989.

The present was represented by the playing of the seven-year-old Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship that has leaped to such prominence and attractiveness that it had six of the world’s top 10 players and Tiger Woods competing in it and thus more world ranking points than the concurrent Farmer’s Insurance Open in the U.S. In fact, it had one of the strongest fields for any event on either tour other than major championships and World Golf Championships.

And the future of the European Tour in the Middle East? There’s the Arab Spring to deal with, the series of democratic uprisings that spread across many of the nations of the Middle East, starting in 2010, which caused the Volvo Golf Champions in Bahrain to fall off the schedule for 2012.

Once the Arab Spring becomes a thing of the past and Bahrain and Syria return to stability, the future surely includes more events in a part of the world where the sun (almost) always shines, the fairways are firm, the greens fast, the purses adequate and the appearance money is enough for a sheikh to shake a club at.

The advance into the Middle East has been one of the European Tour’s greatest recent achievements. Suddenly, the cold weather in wintry Europe does not matter. The poor condition of many golf courses on that continent at the beginning of the year is not a worry and nor is the lure of the U.S. tour, which is so strong at other times of the year. Good golf events are being staged on good, well-prepared courses in sunny, almost windless conditions.

The players have noticed and are grateful.

“To start with, the courses are usually in good shape,” Sergio Garcia said. “They are usually good challenges for us to start the year. It is usually nice weather, which is tough to get in most parts of Europe at this time of year. And they manage to get great fields. When you get a tournament with the calibre of players that you get here, in Qatar and in Dubai … it is obviously an asset.”

If it’s easy to see the attraction of the events for players and administrators on the European Tour, it is equally easy to realise why more countries in this part of the world want to stage big golf tournaments.

“This event has been invaluable in establishing (Abu Dhabi) on the international golf tourism map,” Faisal Shaikh of the Abu Dhabi Tourism Authority said. “Our golf tourism proposition is being driven by the diversity of our offering; we have three stunning championship courses within a 25-mile radius of the capital city as well as an 18-hole country course, a unique sand golf course. Golf tourists can now come to Abu Dhabi and play a different course for six consecutive days. That is diversity.”

Abu Dhabi was at its diverse best last Friday. While a cricket Test match between England and Pakistan was going on down the road, the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship was putting on a show of its own a few miles away. Little girls in pigtails and with painted faces ran around behind the ninth and 18th greens. The sky was blue and cloudless and the palm trees swayed gently in the soft desert wind. English was the predominant language, often spoken with a Scottish accent, though German was heard as well as Arabic. It was a reminder that this part of the Middle East is where the Occident meets the Orient.

This desert swing dates to the 1980s after the European Tour moved into north Africa and embraced the 1982 Tunisian Open followed by the Moroccan Open five years later.

“I think these factors influenced Karl Litton, the designer of the Emirates course in Dubai, to approach us with a view to starting the Desert Classic,” Ken Schofield, the former executive director of the European Tour, said. “We were immediately keen to add the event to the growing Tour schedule and we had little or no issue with the players in this further extension “away from Europe.”

After the Desert Classic started in 1989, another event was added in 1998 in Qatar, a sovereign Arab state bordering Saudi Arabia on the Arabian peninsula. Suddenly, a run of events in this part of the world became a possibility. But for the Arab Spring, the Bahrain tournament might still be on the European Tour’s schedule.

“I am not hearing good things about Bahrain being back in 2013,” George O’Grady, the European Tour’s chief executive, said last week.

On the other hand, there are rumours about Oman wanting to join the swing of tournaments in the Middle East and Saudi Arabia might join in, too. So, from one event in this part of the world 23 years ago, it could be as many as six in the next couple of years.

“Abu Dhabi is the first fully sanctioned event of the year,” O’Grady said. “The course is in great shape. The players are feted and put up in the world’s best hotel. Despite the economic recession and the Arab Spring, I would have to give it close to ten marks out of ten.”

It is doubtful if even a single voice was raised in disagreement.

RYE, ENGLAND l An annual golfing event of huge importance but little significance took place in the bottom right hand corner of England last week. In a five-club wind and rain squalls, men from England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and a brave sextet from North America competed in the President’s Putter at Rye.
Started in 1920, the Putter is played each January by male and female members of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society, which was founded in 1898. It is an annual demonstration of extreme eccentricity by polymaths of varying golfing standards played over a doughty links course in the worst weather of any event in the world. With any luck it takes place in conditions when many would think twice about putting the dog out. In fact, the worse the weather the better it is. That has always been the spirit of the event and one hopes it will always remain so. It would be as daft to play the Putter in July as it would the Open in January.
In Britain these past months it has been impossible not to know that the Olympics will take place in London in the summer when thousands will run, swim or throw, among other feats, faster (citius), higher (altius) and stronger (fortius) than ever. One other Olympic ideal has already been achieved this year. Those who competed in the 2012 Putter demonstrated it is not the winning that matters but the taking part.
Forty mph winds? Difficult but playable. Fourteen putts were recorded on one green. Rock-hard fairways and greens? Tricky but you just have to land the ball well short of where you want it to end up. Biting wind and below freezing temperatures? Wrap up well and get on with it. One competitor once wore three pairs of socks, underwear, pajamas, trousers, rain trousers, a heavy shirt, six sweaters, two scarves, two pairs of gloves, and a woolen bobble hat topped by a balaclava. Rainsqualls? Keep playing and get into the clubhouse for a few restorative glasses of Kummel, known as the putting mixture, as quickly as possible.
To win the right to have the golf ball you used hung on an old hickory-shafted putter used by Hugh Kirkcaldy when he won the 1891 Open, the winner will probably have played eight rounds of matchplay golf in four days. Any aches and pains resulting from these exertions will be massaged into oblivion by the warm feeling the winner acquires as he realises that he has won one of the game’s most eccentric events and thus joined a list of champions that reads like a Who’s Who of British golf in the past century. The 1926 Great Britain and Ireland Walker Cup team contained five members of the Oxford and Cambridge Golfing Society – Cyril Tolley, Roger Wethered, Ernest Holderness, Eustace Story and Brian Low. The last member of the Society to compete in a Walker Cup was Dr David Marsh in 1971.
Competed for by male (and a few female) golfers who have represented one or other university, it is a competition that spans the ages. Michael Grint, 77, who played in the winning Oxford team of 1957, was the oldest competitor this year, and Martin Yates, 69, the oldest man to reach the fourth round. It is a competition of short putters and long memories, of fast play and slow meals, of low shots and high winds, of Labrador dogs and Barbour jackets, of birdies and bogeys and plus-twos and plus-fours.
Bernard Darwin was a President of the Society, a winner of the event, as well as twice captain of Rye. He wrote about the Putter in the days before The Times bylined its writers. When he won it in 1924 he referred to himself in the paper the next morning as follows: “I do not think Mr Darwin will be hurt in his feelings by any remarks I make about him and so I will say that he is one of the most enigmatical golfers of my acquaintance. You never can tell to what depths of futility he may fall.”
Thus The Times has had more than a passing interest in the event and just after I had become golf correspondent, I caddied for Peter Gracey, 72, who was making his 46th appearance. “Before every shot a ritual as serious as the taking of communion was enacted,” I wrote. “Gracey would arrive at the ball, take off his brown leather gloves and hand them over taking care not to drop the handwarmers. In return he would be given the club of his choice. There was no discussion, no practice swing, no wasted time.
“Thank you,” he said as he handed over his gloves. “Thank you,” he said as he received his club. “Thank you,” he said as he returned his club to his caddie. “Oh bugger,” he said when he hit a bad shot.
Andrew Stracey, 58, won this year’s Putter, the oldest winner ever. In the gloaming of a benign January afternoon when the lights of Rye were twinkling in the distance he put his cold hands around a medal inscribed with the words “primus inter pares,” which means first among equals. Another Putter had ended. An event that demonstrated the importance of amateur golf had gone for another year.

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES l What you need to know about Dubai, a speck of a place in the Middle East where the Tom Cruise film Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol opened last week, is that most of the world’s cranes used to be at work here. Once, if you raised your eyes from lining up a putt on one of its eight golf courses or from marvelling at the skyscrapers thrusting into the azure sky that make it resemble Manhattan, you could look in any direction and see cranes. You could hear them, too, clanking, creaking, squeaking and screeching as they went about their noisy business.
For the past two years, the cranes have been still and silent, as if in a painting. Dubai’s once-booming economy has been hit by the global economic crisis. In a country that was first built on its supplies of oil, the black gold, and then on property, prices slumped. In 2009, the prize fund of The Race to Dubai was reduced by 25 percent from $20 million. At its worst, people were depositing cars with the keys in the ignition at the airport and fleeing the country.
Dubai is the most populous of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. It has been spared the actions of the Arab Spring that sent Egypt and then Libya into turmoil and is now splitting nearby Syria, where 4,000 people have been killed since March by troops acting on behalf of president, Bashar Al Assad. Dubai has been spared this unrest because its wealth enables its citizens to enjoy free education and schooling and to pay no income tax.
Also, they have jobs. In Syria “…the people want jobs, they want opportunities. And unless Bashar changes and starts making things good for the people, they will carry on like that,” Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai as well as vice-president and prime minister of the UAE, said. “In Dubai, we must serve our people. The people must always come first. We must get the education, universities, hospitals, housing right.”
Not a little defensively, he pointed out that even in the economic crisis, some things were done in Dubai. “The metro was completed. The Meydan (a magnificent racetrack that is unquestionably the world’s most luxurious) was completed. So not all the projects stopped.”
There is turmoil in other parts of the Middle East, where the Orient meets the occident, but here in Dubai, there is now an air of cautious optimism even though the cranes remain largely silent, the houses at the Jumeirah Golf Estates are empty and unfinished and the clubhouse is a shell because, so the story goes, Nakheel, the property company that has developed the project, does not pay its bills.
The threat of this huge event moving to Sun City in South Africa or even Abu Dhabi, a few miles down the road, has receded. To their credit, the players, often accused of being self-serving and greedy, have shown themselves aware and understanding of the economic difficulties. “Golf’s been very lucky that the money has not dropped significantly,” Lee Westwood said. “We’ve lost a few tournaments but I think we have been fortunate to hang on to the ones we’ve got. We are all in a fortunate position because we earn a lot of money. In fact, it is an amazing amount of money for doing what you enjoy.”
In 1989, the Dubai Desert Classic, named after the sponsor, Dubai Aluminium, was the first tournament on the European Tour to be held in this part of the world. It was new. It was exciting. It was unusual. Professional golfers from Britain had been used to going to South Africa or Kenya, Zambia, Botswana, the Ivory Coast and Nigeria for warm-weather golf. Now they could go to Dubai. “There was nothing here then,” Greg Norman, who played in some of the early Desert Classics, said. “The Hard Rock Cafe was the tallest building in this part of the world. I stayed at the Jebel Ali hotel and what was that, a three-story hotel?”
As Dubai recovers, it is possible to see the country for what it once was and what it hopes it will become once again – a sporting playground that offers exceptional facilities and unmatchable weather. It has an average daily temperature of 75F in January and 103F in June. Either as a destination on its own or in conjunction with some of its rich neighbours such as Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Bahrain, where the Volvo Golf Champions was cancelled this year because of the Arab Spring, it represents an ideal place to be in December and January when the weather is bad almost everywhere else.
Nick Tarratt works for the European Tour in Dubai and has lived in the UAE for 20 years. He has been in the eye of the storm. “My property has doubled in price, then halved and is now on the way back up again” he said. “I can feel a sense of improvement. We will get through this. We have to.”

DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES | What you need to know about Dubai, a speck of a place in the Middle East where the Tom Cruise film Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol opened last week, is that most of the world’s cranes used to be at work here. Once, if you raised your eyes from lining up a putt on one of its eight golf courses or from marvelling at the skyscrapers thrusting into the azure sky that make it resemble Manhattan, you could look in any direction and see cranes. You could hear them, too, clanking, creaking, squeaking and screeching as they went about their noisy business.

For the past two years, the cranes have been still and silent, as if in a painting. Dubai’s once-booming economy has been hit by the global economic crisis. In a country that was first built on its supplies of oil, the black gold, and then on property, prices slumped. In 2009, the prize fund of The Race to Dubai was reduced by 25 percent from $20 million. At its worst, people were depositing cars with the keys in the ignition at the airport and fleeing the country.

Dubai is the most populous of the seven emirates that make up the United Arab Emirates. It has been spared the actions of the Arab Spring that sent Egypt and then Libya into turmoil and is now splitting nearby Syria, where 4,000 people have been killed since March by troops acting on behalf of president, Bashar Al Assad. Dubai has been spared this unrest because its wealth enables its citizens to enjoy free education and schooling and to pay no income tax. 

Also, they have jobs. In Syria, “… the people want jobs, they want opportunities. And unless Bashar changes and starts making things good for the people, they will carry on like that,” Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the ruler of Dubai as well as vice-president and prime minister of the UAE, said. “In Dubai, we must serve our people. The people must always come first. We must get the education, universities, hospitals, housing right.”

Not a little defensively, he pointed out that even in the economic crisis, some things were done in Dubai. “The metro was completed. The Meydan (a magnificent racetrack that is unquestionably the world’s most luxurious) was completed. So not all the projects stopped.”

There is turmoil in other parts of the Middle East, where the Orient meets the occident, but here, in Dubai, there is now an air of cautious optimism even though the cranes remain largely silent, the houses at the Jumeirah Golf Estates are empty and unfinished and the clubhouse is a shell because, so the story goes, Nakheel, the property company that has developed the project, does not pay its bills.

The European Tour has extended its contract to stage The Race to Dubai for another year. The threat of this huge event moving to Sun City in South Africa or even Abu Dhabi, a few miles down the road, has receded. To their credit, the players, often accused of being self-serving and greedy, have shown themselves aware and understanding of the economic difficulties. “Golf’s been very lucky that the money has not dropped significantly,” Lee Westwood said. “We’ve lost a few tournaments but I think we have been fortunate to hang on to the ones we’ve got. We are all in a fortunate position because we earn a lot of money. In fact, it is an amazing amount of money for doing what you enjoy.”

In 1989, the Dubai Desert Classic, named after the sponsor, Dubai Aluminium, was the first European Tour tournament to be held in this part of the world. It was new. It was exciting. It was unusual. Professionals from Britain had been used to going to South Africa, Kenya, Zambia, Botswana, the Ivory Coast and Nigeria for warm-weather golf. Now, they could go to Dubai. “There was nothing here then,” Greg Norman, who played in some of the early Desert Classics, said. “The Hard Rock Cafe was the tallest building in this part of the world. I stayed at the Jebel Ali hotel and what was that, a three-story hotel?”

As Dubai recovers, it is possible to see what it was and what it hopes it will become again – a sporting playground that offers exceptional facilities and unmatchable weather. It has an average daily temperature of 75 degrees in January and 103 degrees in June. Either as a destination on its own or in conjunction with some of its rich neighbours such as Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Bahrain, where the Volvo Golf Champions was cancelled this year because of the Arab Spring, it Trepresents an ideal place to be in December and January when the weather is bad almost everywhere else.

Nick Tarratt works for the European Tour in Dubai and has lived in the UAE for 20 years. He has been in the eye of the storm. “My property has doubled in price, then halved and is now on the way back up again” he said. “I can feel a sense of improvement. We will get through this. We have to.”

ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND | Question: Which was the greatest performance in east Scotland last week? Simon Dyson and Luke Donald going round the Old Course in 63, equalling the course record? Michael Douglas playing golf after recovering from throat cancer? Or three men from Northern Ireland finishing first, second and third in the Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, a festival of golf for amateurs and professionals.

Michael Hoey, the winner, Rory McIlroy, the runner-up, and Graeme McDowell continued the extraordinary recent run of success by golfers from that part of the United Kingdom. It had begun with McDowell’s success in the 2010 U.S. Open, continued with McIlroy’s runaway win in the U.S. Open last June just before Darren Clarke’s emotional triumph in the Open at Royal St. George’s. And let’s not forget the contributions of Paul Cutler and Alan Dunbar to Great Britain and Ireland’s victory over the U.S. in the Walker Cup last month.

Answer: none of the above. Nothing in the east Neuk of Fife nor at famously fierce Carnoustie across the Firth of Tay came close to matching a virtuoso performance by John Daly singing Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” at the sponsor’s party on Saturday night. Normally, Daly plays the acoustic guitar and sings but he hadn’t brought his instrument with him and so he sang instead. You had to be there to believe the size of the smiles on the faces of men such as Sir Michael Bonallack, Johann Rupert, Michael Douglas and Colin Montgomerie. To say that Daly lit the place up would be an understatement. He’d have got a standing ovation were it not for the fact that everyone was standing anyway, crowding around the stage on which he was singing.

But if you stick to matters on the course rather than adjoining it, then the performance by Hoey, McIlroy and McDowell was remarkable enough. What is it with these Ulstermen?

“It’s unfathomable enough to think that we’ve won three majors in two seasons” McDowell said. “There is nothing special in the water over there. I think the only way to explain it is to say it is the belief. Padraig Harrington’s three major (championships) had a subconscious effect on us all and from there it’s just gone on and on. Having Rory come through and win would have been good enough in itself but this is incredible.”

Winning at the Old Course is not like winning in Abu Dhabi, say, where even though there is enough money for a sheikh to shake a stick at there is little golfing heritage. It is not much like winning at Wentworth either, amidst the pine, birch and larch trees and in front of some of the most expensive houses in England. Win at St. Andrews and you win on fairways and greens that were there at the time of the American Civil War. Many of the bunkers on the Old Course have names such as Strath, Hell, Boase’s and Hill. So do some mounds. Those on the fifth are known as Mrs. Grainger’s Bosoms.

There is heritage in golf and then there is heritage at St. Andrews where the Open has been played on 29 occasions. Heritage at the Auld Grey Toon means not last week, last month or last year but the last century or possibly the one before that. It is the scene of Scotland’s oldest university, and immortalised by an American writer “as a city given over to golf.”

The first tee of the Old Course is where the captain of the R&A has driven in every year since the middle of the 19th century, the moment his clubface hits the ball being marked by the firing of a cannon a few feet away. Tradition requires the new captain to give a gold sovereign to the caddie who recovers his ball. The value of a sovereign, in case you have momentarily forgotten, is about $180. And then that same ball is coated in silver and attached to an old golf club and hung in the clubhouse.

The golf was played last week in beautiful sunshine, which was more than a touch ironic for Montgomerie who was reminded regularly how foul the weather had been exactly one year earlier when he was captaining Europe to victory in the first Ryder Cup to be extended from three days to four.

Monty’s role as senior statesman on the European Tour was underlined by his being given as a playing partner Douglas, perhaps the most famous of the film stars present. It was a partnership of a professional golfer working out his time as captain of the 2010 Ryder Cup and a film star working his way back to golf after an illness.

“I’m a cancer survivor recovering, and just trying to get back, to regain my strength,” Douglas said, looking and sounding happy. “During my recovery from the illness I was able to practise my short game a little bit more than usual as a help to building my strength up.”

Hoey, 32, was one man who matched Douglas for happiness. The 2001 British Amateur champion has been overshadowed by the emergence of first McDowell and then McIlroy. But now, as the latest in the production line of winners from Northern Ireland, he won’t be any longer.

ABERDEEN, SCOTLAND l Captains have been known to downplay their contributions to team events. If you believe that, then pigs can fly and the moon is made of green cheese.
Just as Colin Montgomerie’s attention to minute detail may have been the factor that got Europe over the line in the Ryder Cup last autumn so, arguably, it was Nigel Edwards’s captaincy that did likewise for GB&I in the Walker Cup.
Jim Holtgrieve, 63, looked what he was, an older man with a distinguished golfing history who had been given the captaincy of the U.S. team as a reward by the USGA. Holtgrieve admitted that he had not read the Conditions of the Competition. He also stands charged of ignoring the foursomes partnership of Peter Uihlein and Nathan Smith, which had won both matches at Merion in 2009. Last week Uihlein was paired with Harris English and lost both foursomes matches.
Edwards, 43, a small man with big self-belief and ambition, was made captain because he deserved it after playing in the winning Great Britain and Ireland sides of 2001 and 2003 as well as the losing sides of 2005 and 2007. Although he had stopped playing top-class amateur golf he was still very much in touch with current players. Edwards repaid the selectors’ faith in him. He was Captain Magnificent.
Edwards’ life has been slightly against the odds. He grew up in a small village in south Wales, and started golf by hitting a ball around a field with a half-broken club. At 13, he and his parents joined a local golf club to begin golf together and were told off the first time they played for using one bag and set of clubs between the three of them.
Edwards instilled self-belief into his team at Royal Aberdeen. He refused to consider the Americans favourites, despite six of them ranked in the top 10 in the world. His attention to detail in the preparation was exemplary. He might not have gone so far as Montgomerie who, at the eleventh hour, had bigger beds installed for his players, but he made sure that his men were as well prepared as they could possibly have been.
Edwards prowled Royal Aberdeen ceaselessly, a radio in one ear, a look of complete concentration on his face. He had the same routine for each player when they arrived on the first tee. He would remove his cap, extend his right hand and give them a quiet word of encouragement. He knew when to speak and when to keep quiet. When he addressed his players at lunchtime on Sunday, he knew that though GB&I led 10½-5½ that the U.S. would be highly motivated for the 10 afternoon singles.
“It’s not over yet, boys,” he said in his soft voice, his eyes burning with Welsh fervour. “The Americans are great players. They have a lot of passion. They will come back at us.”
Edwards was a combination of the control freak that was Montgomerie at Celtic Manor and the tactician that was Peter McEvoy, the GB&I captain in the Walker Cup at Nairn in 1999 and Sea Island in 2001. He avoided the mistakes that Nick Faldo made in the Ryder Cup at Valhalla, paying close attention to the length as well as the content of the speeches he had to make. And as a former, recent competitor, he knew what his men went through.
“It’s his passion for the Walker Cup that stands out,” Jack Senior, a team member, said. “He really cares about it.”
When Stiggy Hodgson was in tears at losing to Peter Uihlein in Sunday’s singles, partly after a freak bounce sent his ball into a gorse bush on the 17th, Edwards consoled him by putting a comforting arm around him and walking some distance with his player talking encouragingly all the time.
It was to Edwards’ advantage, and Holtgrieve’s disadvantage, that the weather was so foul, consisting of strong wind interrupted by occasional rain squalls. Holtgrieve got into the shower in his waterproofs to make sure they did not leak as the equipment had for the U.S. team at the Ryder Cup but he could not simulate in the U.S. the kind of strong wind that blew for most of the two-day competition.
It had been like this when the GB&I squad held a training week-end at Royal Aberdeen in May and there has been a lot of bad weather in Britain and Ireland during the summer, too, so members of the home team were used to dealing with it. Furthermore, they were better at putting in strong winds, less often sending approach putts yards past the hole. How else to explain Patrick Cantlay, ranked first in the world, and Chris Williams three-putting the first three greens on Sunday morning’s foursomes when the wind was gusting at 25 mph?
Edwards could not do anything about the weather. It was his good luck that it went his way. But he could and did do what was necessary about almost everything else. He was Captain Magnificent, remember.

The Walker Cup has never gotten the proper attention it deserves, not in recent memory at any rate. It is doubtful if that will change later this month when it is held in northeast Scotland at Royal Aberdeen, the sixth oldest golf club in the world.

Increasingly, it seems that most national newspapers in the British Isles and many in the U.S. are interested only in professional golf.

“Oh, amateurs,” is the sneer. “No Tiger Woods.” That begs the retort that many competitors in the forthcoming biennial match between Great Britain and Ireland and the U.S. are playing better than Woods, who made five double-bogeys and found 20 bunkers and water four times in his first two rounds of last month’s PGA Championship in Atlanta.

Actually, Woods did play in the Walker Cup once. It was in 1995 at Royal Porthcawl, in South Wales. Great Britain and Ireland won. And Woods lost his singles on the first day to Gary Wolstenholme, a man 15 years older than he was who was a comfortable 75 yards shorter off the tee. It was back in the days when Woods could control neither his distance nor his accuracy with short irons.

He reached the 17th with a driver and a wedge in practice (the hole measures well over 500 yards and most members can’t reach it in two shots) and then he hooked a 9-iron well out of bounds on the 18th, the ball clattering against the old wooden clubhouse. Woods may want to forget that performance. Wolstenholme, on the other hand, wants to remember it. He has dined out on it ever since.

“But it’s not professional golf, is it? It is mainly kids, isn’t it?” That’s another often-heard sneer and, while it is true that the home team have in Rhys Pugh a young man who is not 18, it is also true that the U.S. include Nathan Smith, who is 33.

“It’s too one-sided. The Americans always win.” There is no denying that. If the U.S. win again this year, and with one of the strongest teams in recent memory, they are favoured to do so, they will have won the past four Walker Cups and six of the past 10. Fortunes rise and fall, rather like the stock market. If there is concern at the dominance by the U.S. who, in all, have won 36 of the 42 contests, then what about Europe’s record in the Ryder Cup – unbeaten in eight of the past 12 Ryder Cups.

If I had to choose between stroke play and match play then I would be guided by the words of Joe Carr, among others, who said: “Stroke play is a better test of golf but match play is a better test of character.” To me, match play versus stroke play is links golf versus inland golf, red wine versus white, walking versus riding in a buggy, carrying one’s clubs versus using a trolley, the right brain to the left, wooden tees versus plastic ones.

I have knocked around the world of golf for more than 30 years, acquiring a clear idea of what I don’t like: slow play, buggies and long putters. Covering more than 120 major championships and hundreds of other events in that time has also given me an idea of which I like the most. Among these, the Walker Cup reigns supreme. It is the best event in golf.

To me the Walker Cup combines the best of all worlds. It is steeped in history. It began in 1922, before the Ryder Cup. It is a team event in an individual sport, so watching the dynamics of self-centered, idiosyncratic, egotistical men as they play for their country or continent is fascinating. Do you see grown men cry in a Walker Cup? You bet you do.

The memory of Graeme McDowell’s victory over Hunter Mahan that gave Europe a one-point victory in the Ryder Cup at Celtic Manor last autumn will live long. It was exciting but was it any more exciting than Jim Milligan’s halve with Jay Sigel in the second-day’s singles of the 1989 Walker Cup match at Peachtree when Sigel led Milligan by two holes with two to play and Milligan’s brave halve helped GB&I achieve a first victory in the U.S. in this event (and only the third overall)?

The Walker Cup is physically bigger than a Ryder Cup and the event for which it is played is just as exciting, more intimate. There are massive grandstands at a Ryder Cup; not even fairway ropes at a Walker Cup. You can hear the conversation between player and caddie as they select a club. You can hear the sound of club on ball and watch the shape of the shot as it leaves the clubface. You can’t get much nearer to the action than that.

JOHNS CREEK, GEORGIA | Decisions, decisions. Fat free skim milk or Vitamin D milk? Decaffeinated or regular coffee? Raspberry or strawberry yogurt? Then on two steamy days in Georgia, who to watch: Luke Donald or Tiger Woods?

Thousands went for Woods, the world No. 30; hundreds for Donald, the world No. 1. Thousands were wrong, the hundreds were right. Who wants to see a man play 13 holes in 10-over par, and run up five double-bogeys before his inevitable departure from the tournament on Friday night, when you can watch a man play with the skill of a surgeon and the stealth of a cat burglar? Included in Donald’s display was a bunker shot on the swooping 12th of such deftness and skill that it was Woodsian in thought and Ballesteros-like in execution.

Look at Donald and you see a man of medium height, slim, with an open face topped by curly hair, a man who has a jaunty walk, a quiet voice and a swing that is built on a rhythm that repeats as regularly and smoothly as a Swiss watch. Watch him from a distance and you can’t tell which is his practice swing and which the real thing. Have you ever seen Donald not finish on balance, hands raised high? He is the same with a wedge in his hands as he is with a driver.

Donald is pin-neat with his irons, a man who aims at a flagstick and rarely finishes far from his target. But when his driver is in his hands there is a surprising wildness. This was obvious again last week when, often, a drive that went right was followed by one that went left and contributed to the two double-bogeys he had in his first 36 holes.

“My legs get over active and that causes my right hip to get too high at impact and the result of that is I hit it high right or left left,” he explained.

Donald looks, walks, talks and plays with quiet assurance. He doesn’t strut as Woods sometimes did. He doesn’t march as Jack Nicklaus did. Everything Donald does is done with the minimum sound and maximum efficiency. He’d be a wonderful cat burglar. Martin Kaymer was clearly unsettled when he became world No. 1 but Donald wears that title as comfortably as if it were a Savile Row jacket.

Talking of jackets, Donald has a considerable wardrobe thanks to a sponsorship deal with Ralph Lauren. When he checked into a hotel during a tournament he allowed Diane, his wife, only one hanger until she complained. She is now allowed two hangers.

It is easy to see why Donald, 33, has become the success he has. “If you have the game of Luke Donald there is no point in trying to become Tiger Woods,” Thomas Levet, Donald’s teammate in the 2004 Ryder Cup team, said. “Luke has realised where his strengths are and he sticks to them. That is very, very intelligent.”

Intelligence is one reason why Donald is such a good golfer. A rare character combination is another. “Luke has the ability to use both sides of the brain,” Jim Fannin, the performance coach, said. “He is highly creative but there is a discipline about him that most creative people do not have.”

Donald outscored Woods last week but could not escape him on the golf course. On the difficult, downhill 15th, a roar from the Woods group caught Donald on the backswing on Thursday. On Friday, it was sudden applause for a rare Woods birdie on the 15th that wafted up the hill to the 16th green where Donald had to step back from a putt.

Donald had the last word, though. Woods’ erratic play caused him to miss the halfway cut for only the fourth time in a major championship. Donald, meanwhile, wiped his brow and reminded his watchers of how it was that he has won three tournaments and had eight top-10 finishes in the 16 tournaments he has competed in this year.

Ask other players about Donald and the thing they all mention, what they covet most, is his short game. “From 100 yards in he’s the best in the world,” Paul Casey said. It was ironic then that this is what let him down at the end of his third round when he had a chance to join the leaders on 5-under par and dropped three strokes in his last three holes. Thus did a 65, 5 under, became a 68.

Donald didn’t look like the best player in the world when he played his third shot to the 18th, a 9 iron that needed to travel 143 yards to clear the water and actually carried 140.

“I am angry with myself,” Donald said, though from the tone of his voice you would not have known that. “That finish leaves a sour taste in the mouth. I had something really good going and I threw it away. I think I shall go and punish myself in the gym.”

SURREY, ENGLAND | Not the least intriguing thing about Tom Watson is that while he is a great and proud American he is at the same time as British as can be. He is a Yank who is an Anglophile. There is a special warmth in the voices of British spectators when they shout “come on Tom!” as they have done for the past two weeks either in the Open at Sandwich or the Senior Open at Walton Heath.

Not many Americans seem so at home in this country and are so curious to learn its rhythms and rituals, so tolerant of what other Americans regard as Britain’s vicissitudes. Without a hint of a frown passing over his freckled face, Watson copes with driving on the left hand side of the road, does not mind queueing, eats fish and chips and in the days when he drank beer did not mind a pint or two of the best bitter.

Watson has spent at least nine months of his life in Britain between his 34 Opens, Senior Opens or just coming over for fun golf.

“The attraction is the love of the game everybody has here,” Watson said during the Senior Open. “You see people out today and they’re following in the rain and (at Sandwich) last week it was the people who made the stands chock a block full when it was raining and blowing 25 mph and raining sideways. That’s why I like it over here.

“This country still has a marvellous flavour to it. It’s different to the country in which I live. The politics are different. Sport is different. It’s football and cricket and golf here. The education is different here. It is all to the good. I love the kids here because they are so polite and they ask you for things in the right way.”

Watson even has a workmanlike grasp of cricket, which is rare among Americans. “I know that they hit the ball,” Watson said. “I know how they score. There are six pitches to an over. I know how they get out. I know how the batters are put out. It has a little to do with American baseball as far as spinning and making the ball move. They make the ball move off the ground rather than through the air, which is different. But that’s about it. I don’t really understand cricket.”

Then there’s his surname, Watson. Tom Watson bears the surname of one of the great characters in British crime literature. Dr Watson was the amanuensis of Sherlock Holmes, the great British detective.

Arthur Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Conan Doyle maintained a locker at the New Zealand golf club near Woking and the locker still bears his name though as he is dead it has a line drawn through it. One of Holmes’ catch phrases, which he uses when Watson seems a little dim in understanding something, is: “Elementary, my dear Watson.”

At times at Sandwich and at Walton Heath Watson made golf look elementary. That’s his secret. An uncomplicated swing, a rhythm that shows no sign of disappearing, and a curious and shrewd brain. Watson’s length has shriveled now as he approaches his 62nd birthday, but course management enables him to cope with men half his age who can blast their drives 50 yards past his. When he holed in one on the sixth in the first round at Sandwich, he used a 4-iron; Tom Lewis, his amateur partner and a young man one third as old as he, used a 6-iron.

Because Watson is so intelligent and such a good role model, he is paired with promising young men in the Open. He likes to see the sparkle in their eyes and their enthusiasm and to assess how good they are. “They remind me of me at that age,” he said. He should know, after all. He has won the Open five times and finished second in 2009 and 22nd this year. These promising young men relish the chance to learn from one of the greatest in the game, to see him magic his golf ball around difficult courses, sometimes in foul conditions and to observe how he never seems to stop thinking and often eschews the obvious in favour of the unusual.

At Turnberry in 2009, when Watson was 59, it was Matteo Manassero, the Italian prodigy who was then only 16. At Sandwich when Watson was 61, it was Tom Lewis, who is 20. It is not entirely coincidental that when paired with Watson both Manassero and Lewis went on to win the silver medal as the leading amateur.

It is hard to imagine a time when Watson will not visit Britain annually and light up golf on these shores. He is as much a part of golf in these islands as foursomes and kummel, plus-fours and Labradors. Long may it continue. Long may Watson make it all seem so elementary.

SANDWICH, ENGLAND | I grew up in a house adjoining a golf course on one of the last hills in the glorious Cotswolds. The course was a wide open one with blessedly few trees. It was not near the sea. After only a few visits to seaside courses I developed a love for links golf that has not diminished since. In fact, it has increased. To me links golf is not just golf; it’s pure golf. It’s red wine to white wine, Ying to Yang, opera to ballet. It’s the way the game began, golf at its most natural, golf at its most enjoyable.

The feel of springy turf underfoot, a whiff of salt coming off the sea, a seagull squawking 100 feet above, a gentle breeze stirring the various grasses that grow so profusely in the rich soil. All these were present at Sandwich last week and never more so than on Friday, a day when, to quote P.G. Wodehouse, “the entire world shouted fore!”

Best of all was the sight of Darren Clarke bowling along the fairways of Royal St George’s, even better the sight of Clarke winning the major championship of his dreams, the Open. Clarke doesn’t so much walk as bustle, like a man chasing his hat that has just been blown off his head. His back is straight, he often has a smile on his face, and he might be cupping a cigarette in the palm of his hand, wanting the benefit of a drag upon it to calm his nerves yet aware that to be seen smoking in public is not a desirable image.

Clarke plays very good golf on inland courses as he demonstrated at the 2006 Ryder Cup at the K Club near Dublin where he won his three matches. But when I picture him in my mind’s eye, him it is on a links. To me he is the quintessential links golfer, taking a wide stance and using those powerful shoulders of his to pick his ball off the turf without disturbing a blade of grass and sending it low and powerfully towards its target.

His swing is a bit of a roundhouse swing, shorter than Dustin Johnson’s and Miguel Angel Jimenez’s, but there is no wasted movement in it and no loss of energy. It’s the purposeful swing of a man who played a lot of golf when the wind was doing its best to blow him off his feet.

“We have a lot of links courses in Ireland,” Clarke said. “Some of the best in the world, in fact. And I grew up on them. It’s what I do. I love links courses.” And how that showed in that round on Friday, a 68 that took him to 4-under par and a share of the lead that he never relinquished. Watch Clarke on such a day and you admire the speed at which he plays and his friendly demeanour and the sight of him cracking a joke with his playing partners as they wait on a tee. Most of all, you admire his shot-making.

Clarke gave another demonstration of it on this Friday, hitting a cut 7-iron and taking a daring line over the right hand greenside bunker on the 18th, coaxing in a 55-foot putt for an eagle on the seventh, hitting a 60-yard pitch into the 16th green that didn’t rise much above head height, bravely attacking the flagstick on the eighth when peril was all around. This was some golf.

He played rugby and golf as a boy. “He was a good number 8, if a bit slow,” Godfrey Clarke, his father, said. “But he would always let you know he was there.” So he concentrated on his golf and was taken to be given the once over by John Garner, the former Europe Ryder Cup player. Garner took one look at the cheery-faced boy and his swing and said, “Don’t change a thing. You keep going, son.”

And Clarke has done just that ever since, enhancing the game with his skill, making friends wherever he goes and burning the candle at both ends. He has had his sadness, notably when Heather, his wife, died of cancer in 2006 but now he is engaged to be married again, to a former Miss Northern Ireland. He has sold his home in Berkshire, England and returned to live with his two sons in Northern Ireland. Having found renewed personal happiness, he is, at 42, playing some of the best golf of his life.

After Clarke had won the NEC Bridgestone Invitational, a World Golf Championship event, I wrote: “Darren Clarke likes the inside of a Ferrari, the outside of a Cuban cigar and the bottom of a glass of Guinness.” That was in 2003 and there is no reason to alter that assessment now. He remains a wonderful player of links courses and a man’s man.