This year, the Open Championship returns to the ‘home of golf’ where golfers have been willingly frustrating themselves over several miles of grassy terrain for five hundreds years. St. Andrews Golf Links was established in 1552 and held its first Open Championship in 1873. No course in the game has such a rich history. It is also one of those special courses, like Pebble Beach in the US, that tends to produce special winners. Snead, Nicklaus, Woods, Faldo and Ballesteros are among the Champion Golfers of the Year on the Old Course.

Perhaps the player with the most special relationship of all with the Open at St. Andrews is golfing great Bobby Jones. There was a mutual respect between the people of St. Andrews and the American and Jones was honoured with a key to the town of St. Andrews in 1958. “If I had to select one course upon which to play the match of my life, I should have selected the Old Course,” Jones gushed in response. Jones won the Open there in 1927.

Jones is, of course, best known for being the only player to win a single season Grand Slam of major titles. His tally includes amateur titles given the importance of amateur golf in his day and also due to the fact that Jones never turned professional. Jones could not compete in the PGA Championship as he was not a professional. He could not compete in the Masters as he himself had not founded that competition yet. So it remains one of the greatest feats in golf or indeed sporting history that Jones won all four titles in the same year in 1930. Reaching golfing perfection, Jones retired soon afterwards.

This year, Jordan Spieth is chasing a similar type of sporting perfection. He heads to the 144th Open having won the first two professional majors of the season. Since the Masters became a major and the four majors were set in stone, only six players have won the first two majors of the season. Only one of those managed to get past round three of four. That was Ben Hogan in 1953. Unfortunately for Ben, he was a victim of a simpler age as he was unable to get a flight back in time for the PGA Championship and thus never had a crack at the Grand Slam.

The only player to do so in the past forty years was three-time Open Champion Tiger Woods. In 2002, Tiger was going along nicely after two days at Muirfield until a storm brought the field to its knees on Saturday. A career-worst round of 81 to that point for young Tiger took his Grand Slam hopes to a grinding halt. A 66 in calmer conditions on the final day meant that even a 75 on Saturday would have gotten him into a play-off. It reminded everyone how nasty links golf weather can get off the Scottish coastline.

The weather forecast predicts that Spieth will be forced to brave some high winds on Friday evening. Tough conditions on Friday would put Spieth at a disadvantage as McIlroy found out in 2010 when he followed up his 63 on Thursday with seventeen shots more in brutal conditions on the Friday to end his chances. However, most have been predicting that the course will play soft and benign for most of the week. It is clear that St. Andrews is very accessible and is perhaps the easiest course on the Open rota. This is mainly because of the unusual amount of short par 4 holes on the course. Holes 1, 9, 10, 12 and 18 generally play under 400 yards. A number of them are driveable in one shot depending on wind direction.

St. Andrews adds some teeth however on the famous ‘Road Hole’, the 17th, which played a 4.6 average in 2010 for a par 4. At over 500 yards, with an intimating drive around the hotel to a tight fairway followed by a green protected by a wall at the back and a treacherous bunker on the left, it is one of the toughest holes the golfers will play all year. It could decide the tournament on Sunday.

Recent history shows that the Old Course tends to favour longer hitters. Louis Oosthuizen, Tiger Woods (twice) and John Daly are the last three winners of the major in St. Andrews and the common denominator between the three of them is that they are exceptionally long. But really it suits any player that can go low. Spieth will not be deterred by any distance disadvantage. The final leaderboard at Chambers Bay in the US Open was full of bombers yet Spieth’s strategy won the day. Spieth goes into this tournament in red-hot form, having won the John Deere Classic last week with a 61 in the third round there.

He will undoubtedly be encouraged by the absence of world number one Rory McIlroy through injury. McIlroy is a big miss for the tournament and many will have been hoping to see him go head to head with Spieth. The Northern Irishman will be sitting at home ruing his bad luck as he watches a course that would have suited him to a tee. With Rory out of the equation, Rickie Fowler is always a threat on links courses and won last week in the Scottish Open on one. Spieth plays the first two days with Dustin Johnson and it will be interesting to see how DJ recovers from the disaster at Chambers Bay last month. But Spieth will be the overwhelming favourite to add a Claret Jug to the rest of the trophies he has won this year.

Picks:

Spieth, Fowler, Wiesberger, Day, Grace, Koepka