The Open Championship’s official slogan for this year – ‘everything has led to this’ – is a bit too ‘live, laugh, love’ to have its intended effect of invoking both the history of St Andrews and a misty-eyed sense of destiny for those out on the Old Course. But as Tiger Woods stood on the 8th tee with those exact words emblazoned on the grandstand behind him, reeling from a double bogey on the 7th, it did feel oddly fitting.
Nobody here balances history and destiny quite like Tiger. What has been before, and what could come again. Three times an Open champion (twice at St Andrews), Woods considers this his “favourite course” and it is the place where the finest golfer of his generation – possibly of all time – played his finest ever tournament, to win in 2000 by eight shots.
