​I was nursing a coffee, waiting behind the first tee at St. Andrews for a local to arrive for an interview, myself in the middle of a summer spent bouncing between the links. The promise of the Old Course never gets old, and perhaps that’s why I forgot to hit record on my phone. The word-for-word transcript of that interview vanished into the North Sea winds. Still, I recall one moment clearly: the wonder that you can’t shoot baskets at Madison Square Garden or take batting practice at Wrigley Field, yet anyone with some sticks and a golf soul is welcome to play St. Andrews. I remember his face—the confusion of a man who watched a stranger marvel at something he’d never had reason to notice.
“Allowed? No one has to be given permission,” he told me, in essence. “Golf is for everyone.”
That’s the nuance that trips up many Americans the first time they try links golf. The best courses are open, and that includes those on the Open rota. Royal Birkdale will host its eleventh claret jug competition next week, then, for the rest of the season, sell tee times to whoever shows up and asks. Not as a mere courtesy or a quaint local custom to charm tourists; it’s their policy, and perhaps even more, their identity.
To understand why a links course opens its gates, you have to understand that it was never really gated to begin with. Golf began on the links—rumpled, sandy ground between farmland and sea, too salt-stunted for crops and too wind-whipped for much else. In an age before real estate developers, it belonged to everyone and to no one. And while golf in the United Kingdom is more than links—in fact, most courses are parkland—the sentiment persists. Municipal courses dot Scotland and England the way corner pubs line main streets, integrated into daily life rather than set apart. Of roughly 3,000 golf courses in the United Kingdom, the vast majority welcome outside play in some form. Ask around the top 100 courses, and only a half dozen resist—most notably Wisley, Loch Lomond, and Queenwood. These are clubs built through an American lens of private retreats with corporate memberships and waiting lists, the lone exceptions because they imported a foreign notion of what a golf club should be.
Because, while American dynamics are evolving, about a quarter of U.S. golf facilities remain private. A glance at Golf Digest’s ranking of America’s Top 100 reveals the ceiling only drops as you climb: among the top 10, only Pebble Beach is public, and Bethpage Black is the sole municipal course inside the top 40. And “public” has become its own euphemism in American golf. When you run the numbers for the best public courses, the average green fee among the top 10 often tops $570. Here, access tends to come with a price tag that acts as a barrier.
Over there, the gate is a concept, not a constraint.