Brian Viner: Bonallack extols Muirfield's subtle greatness

'You can see all the trouble. The bunkering is superb. And the lay-out is interesting'

Sir Michael Bonallack OBE was for 16 years the secretary of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, the governing body of golf everywhere but North America and Mexico. He was also perhaps the finest amateur player Britain has ever produced, winner of five British Amateur and five English Amateur championships, and nine times a Walker Cup player.

He won the amateur medal in the Open Championship twice, and played in the US Masters three times, in 1966 alongside the legendary Ben Hogan, whom he described to me as "the finest ball-striker I ever saw. In a way he was a bit like Sergio Garcia. He took the club up then dropped it inside before he came down, but he always hit the ball absolutely flush. From tee to green he could do with it anything he wanted, yet by then his putting was atrocious. He would stand over the ball and get fixed, couldn't take it back."

Bonallack's wife, Angela, is a similar treasure trove of golfing memories. She was a Curtis Cup player from 1956 to 1966, and twice won the English Ladies' championship. They are, indeed, the Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf of amateur golf, give or take – OK, give – a few years. They even contrived to produce their four children in Walker Cup years. So you will doubtless understand my slight anxiety on teeing off with them recently on the Duke's Course, St Andrews (where, needless to add, they are respectively captain and ladies' captain).

The Duke's Course is owned by the Old Course Hotel, that startling monolith beside the celebrated Road Hole. The course was designed by Peter Thomson, five-times Open champion (I am getting slightly fed up with listing other people's golfing achievements; it is time for you to know that I myself am one-time winner of the Hampstead Golf Club Men's Winter Fourball competition), and is magnificent, albeit with too many trees for my liking, into which the Bonallacks patiently accompanied me on several occasions.

After our round, I sat down in the bar with the great man, and discussed Muirfield, where the 131st Open commences this week, and where he entered the final round of the 88th Open, in 1959, in second place, two shots off the lead.

"It was and still is a great course," he says. "The rough will be pretty penal at this Open, but it is the same rough that Muirfield members always have. They couldn't understand what all the fuss was about Carnoustie in 1999 (although Bonallack concedes to me that, as R&A secretary, he was "embarrassed" by the punitive condition of the Carnoustie rough that year, which had been heaped with fertiliser by a head greenkeeper determined that nobody would make a mockery of "his" course. Ironically, he did that himself).

"Muirfield is eminently fair; you can see all the trouble. The bunkering is superb. And the lay-out is interesting. It goes in two loops, one inside the other, so the wind is always slightly changing direction."

In 1959, Bonallack started with rounds of 72, 70 and 72, at which point he was two shots ahead of the eventual winner, Gary Player. Had he finished with another 70, rather than a 76, he would have taken Player into an 18-hole play-off.

But the measure of a course lies in the champions it produces, which is why Lee Westwood is talking through his beanie when he sneers that St Andrews is not even one of the best 200 courses in Fife.

The most recent Open champions at St Andrews are Tiger Woods, John Daly, Nick Faldo, Seve Ballesteros, Jack Nicklaus, and Nicklaus again. At Muirfield the list goes Faldo, Faldo, Tom Watson, Lee Trevino, Nicklaus, Player, Henry Cotton.

Bonallack first played the venerable course, which staged its first Open 110 years ago, two months before that 1959 Open, in the Walker Cup.

"That was the year that our chairman of selectors, Raymond Oppenheimer, thought he'd have a look at the unknown young American players on the practice ground, and came back shaking his head. 'I've just seen three of the finest young players I've ever seen in my life,' he said, 'and unfortunately they're all on the American team'. They were Ward Wetlaufer, Deane Beman, and Jack Nicklaus."

Nicklaus, adds Bonallack, was to become no less dominant over the subsequent 15 years than Tiger Woods is now. "Arnold Palmer and Gary Player were tremendous players, yet he almost swept them aside."

Nothing, I venture, is new under the sun. "No," he says, "and it's the same with equipment. Right through the history of the game, the same debates have been going on over improvements, from the feathery ball to the gutty ball to the wound ball, when steel shafts replaced hickory, when graphite shafts came in. Every time people said it was ruining the game, and it hasn't. More people are playing than ever. Having said that, I would like there to be a limit on the distance the ball goes, although scientists tell us the laws of physics dictate that there is only another 10 yards to be found."

Darn! If I hadn't got an E in my physics O-level, I might know where to find them.

b.viner@independent.co.uk