There was an amateur event over the Old Course at St Andrews and, since this was in the days before mobile phones and email, I needed a quiet telephone booth from which to ring through an article. The phone at the reception desk at the R&A had been declared in bounds for the day but, since that was busy – a member was going through his round to his long-suffering wife – I found another in a handsome booth down a corridor. And started to dictate.
After 10 minutes, a heavily-tweeded gentleman, whisky glass in hand, appeared at the door. Since he was just about sober enough to consider that he might be seeing things, he rang for the stewardess for a second opinion. “Is this a woman in the phone-box?” he demanded.
When she replied in the affirmative, he asked that something be done about it. When I explained to the stewardess that my sports’ editor was every bit as scary as the tweeded-one, she let me be.
Having braced myself to face the music at the end, it came as a bit of a let-down when the old gentleman was nowhere to be seen. Presumably, he had gone up in a puff of smoke.
Yet when it comes to the R&A becoming a mixed club – if and when they decide that they cannot hold out any longer – it will not be just the men who have their doubts. You have to worry if, amid the changes, this magnificent establishment might lose a touch of its magic and mystique.
For the moment, there is nothing quite like the feeling of sneaking a look through the windows of the Big Room on a winter’s evening and getting a glimpse of the past: old men, some more alive than others, sitting in their leather chairs around the fire and discussing who knows what.
Maybe, just maybe, the atmosphere will stay the same, but there is only one way to find out.
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