The Line Is Gone, but the Wait Remains

This is part I in a two-part series on how technology is reshaping the rules of access in golf.

St. Andrews is golf’s holy land.

Consider the Old Course at St. Andrews—the most famous, and the oldest, golf course in the world. Six hundred years ago, people gathered on this land, striking balls across the windblown dunes, shaping a game that would become what it is today.

For centuries, its fairways have been walked by kings and champions alike. King Edward VIII once fought its bunkers, Tiger Woods dominated it like no one before him, and Jack Nicklaus made his final exit at the Swilcan Bridge, the ancient stone footbridge connecting the first and eighteenth fairways. The Bridge is a monument to the game itself—a stage where champions pause, tip their cap, and let the golf world know: I was here. I made it.

A few hundred yards away, near the R&A headquarters—the governing body of golf outside the U.S. and Mexico—sits the 18th green, where Old Tom Morris, a man without whom the game would look very different today, rests eternally beneath the very turf where he revolutionized the sport.

The last part isn’t true: Old Tom Morris and his son, Young Tom Morris, are buried down the road at St. Andrews Cathedral. But here, you want to believe anything anyone tells you.

Unlike Old Tom and Young Tom, though, not all legends here are carved in stone. Some are whispered from golfer to golfer, passed down like scripture, growing more embellished with each retelling.

Among the whispered legends, none felt more enduring, or ridiculous, than the Old Course queue. To the uninitiated, it was just another absurdity of the game, one of those things golfers do that makes sense to no one but them. To those who did it, though, it was a rite of passage.

For three decades, wannabe golfers at the Old Course queued outside the Old Pavilion, near the first tee, in the dead of night, hoping to claim an unfilled slot. In 2016, a golfer visiting from Connecticut thought he had it figured out and set his alarm for 3:20 AM, convinced he’d be one of the first in line. When he arrived, there were 14 people ahead of him. Still, by morning, he’d secured a tee time, and by noon, he’d finished his round at Old Course.

“If you’re a golfer in St. Andrews with a day on your hands and don’t try to play the Old Course,” he wrote, “you should see a shrink.”

Some might argue that waking up in the middle of the night to stand in line is proof you already need one. But that’s golf—proof that irrationality isn’t just tolerated, it’s tradition.

Nostalgia only lasts as long as the people who can tolerate it.

In recent years, the queue had spiraled into an arms race of endurance—single golfers camping out for upwards of 12 hours, braving wind, rain, and exhaustion for a shot at playing golf’s most historic fairways. What was once a test of devotion had become a spectacle.

“The most we ever had queuing was over 80 people waiting outside,” said Gavin Fairweather, a longtime staff member at St. Andrews who works through the chaos of the singles daily draw. “We’d open up at 5:30 a.m., and it was madness—taking names, checking handicaps, and filling spots.

“People were bringing hammocks and pillows and duvets from hotels,” Fairweather added. “It wasn’t the image you wanted for the first tee at the Old Course.”

Last spring, St. Andrews Links Trust, which oversees the Old Course, replaced the queue with the singles daily draw, a “modern and equitable digital solution to its in-person singles queuing system,” the organization said in a statement. 

No more huddled masses in the cold. No more strategic napping in the rain. No more bleary-eyed golfers watching the sun rise over the Swilcan Bridge, wondering if they were hallucinating.

Single golfers—who had once relied on endurance—now had to physically enter the Old Pavilion or the St. Andrews Links Clubhouse between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. the day before they wanted to play and submit an electronic application from a tablet. At day’s end, a randomized draw determined which single golfers would fill open spots in the next day’s tee sheet.

Chance, not endurance, would now decide who got to play the Old Course.

Before this technological transition, I had imagined the ritual of securing a tee time at St. Andrews as textbook sanctimony: a test of devotion, a moment of blind faith.

Maybe a Scottish starter with a clipboard, a worn leather book filled with names, a knowing nod as he scribbled me into history. A whispered story from the golfer ahead of me, recounting the tales of his last time here, the best round he ever played, the friend who once got on as the very last name called. The reverence of watching the world wake up around you, the feeling that only exists when you’ve been awake long enough to see black fade to blue, when silence breaks into voices, when the dewed fairways catch their first morning footprints.

Instead, fresh off an hour-and-a-half rental car from Edinburgh, bleary-eyed from exhaustion and pure relief to have touched the pearly white gates of this version of heaven, I stood face-to-face with a greeter whose smile etched into wind-blown cheeks. Not unlike the starter I had dreamed.