WEATHER aside, nothing crushes the spirits in St Andrews quite so brutally as the realisation that the auld grey toon is turning itself into some sort of Golfsludge Theme Park in which the identity and special character of the place become suffocated by its status as the cradle of the sport. St Andrews used to wear its distinction lightly, but the proliferation of new courses and other developments over the past two decades has been about as subtle as the contents of Ian Poulter's wardrobe.
As Donald Trump and his cheerleading chump Alex "Boss Hogg" Salmond haven't yet realised, the key to Scottish golf - and, to be mercenary about it, its unique selling point - is that less is more. And, by implication, that more is less. And nothing chips away at the charm of St Andrews so relentlessly or so damagingly as the rash of golf shops that keep spreading through the town.
The surest sign of the apocalypse happened a couple of years ago, when Quarto, the magical secondhand bookshop that had plied its noble trade for four decades just a stone's throw from the Old Course's 18th green, finally closed its doors. The premises were taken by yet another golf retailer, hawking pretty much the same stuff that can be picked up in about 50 other outlets in the town. A sad end for a great institution.
AS it happens, Margaret Squires, who set up Quarto in 1969, figured out through trial and error that five was the correct number of golf books to display in her shop window. More than five put off the general browsers; fewer meant that golfers would walk on by.
It's Replica DateJust Ladies Rolex Watch just as well she traded in secondhand books, for it would be hard to find five from the sport's more recent catalogue that would tempt anyone across the threshold. "The smaller the ball, the greater the literature," used to be a decent rule of thumb, but golf's current shelf is crammed with schmaltzy travelogues, new-age psychobabbling pap, insight-free Tiger Woods hagio- graphies and palpably useless instruct-ion guides.
Fiction has suffered worst of all. A field once graced by the likes of PG Wodehouse and John Updike has been barren in recent years. Well, not quite. But if there is a worse book - on anything - than The Legend of Bagger Vance then I'll thank you for not sending it on. Depressingly, Steven Pressfield's noxious slice of cod mysticism sold by the cartload and was subsequently turned into an inexplicably successful film.
FAR more staggering, though, is the amnesia shown by Peter Alliss with regard to his 1983 epic "The Duke". Now I defer to no one in my admiration for the doyen of golf comment-ators, but I am mystified by the fact that a man who can recall every stroke of Jack Nicklaus's third round at Muirfield in 1972 appears to have forgotten that he once wrote a novel.
And a steamy bonkbuster of a novel at that. The Duke concerns the desperate efforts of the ageing Duke Denton to recapture his former glories on the fairways and between the sheets, while rising star Johnny Cornell tries to usurp him in both departments. Denton's replica Prada Handbags game is not the only thing that has gone flaccid in his life, but he summons his powers to see off Cornell's challenge at an invitation event in Hawaii, a triumph that has intriguingly restorative effects for him in other areas.
Think Jackie Collins, albeit without the complex subtleties of characteris-ation. Think Dynasty, minus the incisive examination of the human condition. The Duke really does scale those heights.
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