The Old Course at St Andrews is the most famous golf course on earth, and the public owns it. No members, no initiation, just a free daily ballot and one green fee.
The golf course superintendent, or greenkeeper in the British term, who maintains the Old Course answers to a public trust, not a boardroom. When local government in Scotland was reshaped in 1974, an Act of Parliament, the St Andrews Links Order Confirmation Act, put the Old Course and the links around it into the hands of the St Andrews Links Trust, a statutory public body bound to keep the ground open to all. There are no members bankrolling St Andrews and no initiation cheque in the six figures. The courses pay for themselves out of green fees. A peak round on the Old Course ran about £340 in the 2025 season, and in recent seasons the Trust has handed Scottish residents rounds for as little as £42.50, close to a ninety percent discount, because the mandate was never profit. It was access.
Then there’s the part almost no one expects: the most revered surface in the sport is also one of the cheapest of its class to keep alive. Links is a soil type, not a marketing word. Sandy linksland drains itself, so the crew never fights the waterlogged clay an inland parkland course spends fortunes piping and pumping. The turf is fine-leaved fescue, a deep-rooted survivor that thrives lean, dry and unfed, which means far less water, far less nitrogen and far less fungicide than a soft, forced bentgrass green demands to stay emerald. The Old Course also shares its greens: seven vast double greens serve fourteen of the eighteen holes, two flags apiece, leaving only four holes with a green to themselves. Fewer, larger surfaces, kept firm and brown on purpose, watered by hand where a dry patch actually needs it. Old Tom Morris, Keeper of the Green here from 1865 to 1904, worked most of this out first, and was among the first to top-dress greens with sand, a practice every course on earth still runs today.