St. Andrews Outdated Course ought to host Girls’s Open each 5 years

The AIG Girls’s Open returns to St. Andrews this week, because the Outdated Course will host this championship for the primary time since 2013, when Stacy Lewis gained by two.

However the return of this iconic event to the ‘House of Golf’ is lengthy overdue. The Open Championship, the oldest main on the boys’s facet, visits St. Andrews as soon as each 5 years, give or take. It has hosted the boys’s Open a file 30 instances, most just lately in 2022, when Cameron Smith gained the Claret Jug. The course has hosted The Open six instances over the previous 30 years.

The DP World Tour’s Alfred Dunhill Hyperlinks Championship can also be held at St. Andrews every October, giving the boys loads of alternative to play these heralded and revered hyperlinks.

The ladies deserve the identical remedy.

This 12 months’s AIG Girls’s Open marks the third occasion St. Andrew’s will host, as Lorena Ochoa gained on the Outdated Course in 2007. However three editions in 17 years shouldn’t be sufficient. Sports activities followers tune into tournaments held at St. Andrews not due to who’s on the leaderboard however as a result of it’s St. Andrews. It has that pedigree to attract in informal golf followers. If {the golfing} world collectively desires to develop the ladies’s recreation, St. Andrews must turn into a extra everlasting fixture inside ladies’s skilled golf.

The United States Golf Affiliation (USGA) has performed so with the U.S. Girls’s Open, scheduling its nationwide championship at iconic U.S. Open venues reminiscent of Pebble Seashore, Pinehurst No. 2, and Shinnecock Hills. It has paid huge dividends to this point. Golf followers acknowledge these names immediately—similar to with St. Andrews—therefore the necessity for the R&A to stage its most outstanding ladies’s main on the Outdated Course extra constantly.

LPGA Tour stars would clearly welcome that, too.

“100%. I feel it might be actually cool,” mentioned Charley Hull when requested if the Outdated Course ought to host extra usually.

Photograph by Ross Parker/R&A through Getty Photographs

“It will be cool if it had been right here each 5 years, or, I don’t know, nonetheless lengthy.”

Hull additionally mentioned that she will get goosebumps whereas enjoying the par-4 seventeenth, the Street Gap, as she makes her approach again into city, the place the 18th inexperienced awaits. However she added that an AIG Girls’s Open win could be “very particular,” saying that it might be one thing she has at all times dreamed about. The Englishwoman completed runner-up to Lilia Vu at Walton Heath a 12 months in the past, so she actually has the potential to contend and win this time round. However a win at St. Andrew’s merely means extra.

“If you’re going to be a participant folks will bear in mind, you need to win The Open at St. Andrews,” mentioned Jack Nicklaus, who gained at The Outdated Course in 1970 and 1978.

Sir Henry Cotton, who gained three Opens however by no means one at St. Andrews, as soon as mentioned that “successful the Open at St. Andrews can flip an incredible participant right into a legend.”

These sentiments ring true. Maybe no golf course boasts a extra spectacular checklist of champions than St. Andrews: Bobby Jones, Bobby Locke, Peter Thomson, Sam Snead, Nicklaus, Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, John Daly, and Tiger Woods, who, like Nicklaus, conquered the Outdated Course twice.

On the ladies’s facet, there isn’t a doubt that each Ochoa and Lewis are legendary gamers, as every gained two majors apiece. However their legacy is elevated considerably as a result of they conquered St. Andrews, maybe the world’s most iconic and legendary course.

So, understanding this, the R&A ought to give one of the best feminine gamers higher alternative by returning to St. Andrews extra usually. It will assist elevate the sport and appeal to extra eyeballs whereas offering younger women and girls with hope and desires—like Hull, who enters this week as one of many favorites.

However irrespective of who wins this week on the Outdated Course, their names will without end be etched in main championship lore. Profitable at St. Andrew’s simply means extra, and hopefully, sooner or later, LPGA stars will tee it up on the Outdated Course extra usually.

Jack Milko is a golf workers author for SB Nation’s Enjoying Via. Make sure you take a look at @_PlayingThrough for extra golf protection. You possibly can observe him on Twitter @jack_milko as effectively.