Hoylake Awaits the World’s Best
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Asked, earlier this year, if he knew much about Hoylake, Tiger Woods remarked he’d never been there or even seen a photograph.
“All I do know is it’s in Liverpool,” he said. Actually it isn’t. The Royal Liverpool Golf Club is headquartered 20 minutes west of the city on the Wirral Peninsula, closer to Wales than Penny Lane.
Originally laid out in 1869 by Robert Chambers and George Morris, Old Tom’s brother, Hoylake is England’s second oldest course and started its life as a nine-holer, sharing the land with the Liverpool Hunt Club. Nine more holes were added in 1871. The club hosted the first Amateur Championship (British Amateur) in 1885 and the first international match between Great Britain and America in 1921.
England’s greatest designer, Harry Colt, modified the course in the 1920s but it was altered again in 2001 by Donald Steel to make it more challenging for modern-day professionals and relieve some of the anticipated gallery traffic around the closing holes. The numbering of the holes was also changed, making the dramatic par-5 16th that plays over a corner of the internal Out of Bounds the new 18th.
With par-4s and par-5s bending sharply to the right and left, it doesn’t favor one type of player in particular and, as many of the players have stated, will demand top quality shot making.
“Overall it’s going to be a fantastic challenge,” Woods said. “We don’t get a chance to play a course like this very often, but when we do, it sure brings back some creativity into the game.”
For the first part of this week, the agreeable weather meant the course played as easy as it possibly can. Given one or two of the eight winds Phil Mickelson says he has experienced since his preparation began, however, the scores will skyrocket.
As a former member of the Liverpool University golf team that called Hoylake home, I can assure you that low scoring will only happen if the wind stays below 5 mph.
If a squall moves in off the Irish Sea, Hoylake will quickly become a bleak and foreboding place and an absolute brute of a course where bogies will surely outnumber pars.
