Antique Golf Clubs from Scotland: Open Championship

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Open Championship

1905: St Andrews

	Player	Score
1	James Braid	318
2	Rowland Jones	323
	J H Taylor	323
4	James Kinnell	324
5	Ernest Gray	325
	Arnaud Massy	325
7	Robert Thomson	327
8	James Sherlock	328
9	Tom Simpson	329
	Harry Vardon	329

James Braid did his best to make the Championship as exciting as possible. Rowland Jones had a one stroke advantage over him after two rounds but his two main rivals, Taylor and Vardon were well behind. His third round of 78 was steady and gave him a comfortable lead going into the last round. That too, went smoothly until the fourteenth hole when he was, as Darwin wrote, ‘barring accidents, winning by the length of the street’. This was in the days when ‘play it as it lies’ meant exactly that. Braid hit his second shot on the fifteenth on to the railway but played it out from there at the first attempt. However, the ball struck a spectator and ricocheted into a bush. A six was the result.

At the sixteenth he hit a long drive over the Principal’s Nose and the ball pitched into the small Deacon Sime bunker. Braid went for the green and ended up on the railway once again. In his own words, ‘I found it lying in a horrible place, being tucked up against one of the iron chairs in which the rails rest, it was on the left-hand side of the right-hand rail …. I took my niblick and tried to hook it out, but did not succeed, the ball moving only a few yards, and being in much the same position against the rail. With my fourth, however, I got it back on the course but in a very difficult position. It went some thirty yards past the hole, near to the bunker on the left of the second green …. I had only about a yard to come and go on with a run-up shot …. If I wanted to get close to the hole, as I must do if I was to get a 6. It was a bold and very risky shot to play, but I played it and it came off, the ball running dead and thus I got my 6. In all the four rounds of that Championship I think it was the best shot that I played’.