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Until Old Tom Morris began his custodianship in the 1860s, the aptly named Sir Hugh Lyon Playfair may have been the most influential shaper of the links. When he was appointed captain of the R&A in 1856, the course was narrow and long, there were no fairways (in the modern sense), and bunkers were undefined, unraked pits. Golf was hard.
His focus seems to have been repairing the area between the Road Hole green and the beach. The Swilcan Burn was edged, Halket’s Bunker was turfed over, and Playfair set about stabilizing the dunes to the right of the first hole. This was the first attempt to reclaim land from the North Sea, and although these efforts were destroyed by strong tides, they laid the groundwork for George Bruce’s successful seawall construction a generation later. There’s little doubt in my mind that Playfair’s vision is the reason the first and eighteenth holes look the way they do today.
Finally, Playfair’s decision to separate the outward-bound golfers from those heading inward by cutting two holes in each green led to one of the Old Course’s most famous features: its double greens. The task was carried out as an expansion of the existing greens by Allan Robertson in 1857.
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