It's no fun waiting for a pin to hatch

Stealing through the "Auld Grey Toon" at 4.45 a.m. on a Thursday is not the isolated spiritual experience that you would expect in St Andrews at such an ungodly hour. There are the heavily beer-stained footpaths and the odd "chunder" to contend with along the way tends to break the dream of being somewhere reverential for a golfer.

I was heading down to the Old Course to observe the links in its morning glory. I also wanted to see where the pins were being cut for the first day's play of the 129th Open Championship. The usual security guard busting ensued before myself and Duncan, caddying for the Burmese golfer Kyi Hla Han, strode out on the course. We were in search of Peter Coleman (Bernhard Langer's caddie) who was officially documenting the pin positions for each hole. This is a recent tradition and it came about following complaints from players and caddies that the pin sheet provided by the R and A was misleading and not up to modern-day requirements.

Their response, sensibly, was to appoint a caddie to accurately mark the pin positions. So now if there is a mistake you can't blame the blue blazers. This is the case in every Open these days. The caddies are presented with a pin sheet on the first tee.

At the Old Course it is even more important to get the pin positions right. With the size and undulations of the sprawling double greens, knowing the hole's exact location in relation to traps and slopes is vital. That is why early-morning observers will notice many caddies checking the pin positions before play each day. Errors can prove very costly.

The R and A with their "Pins Committee" spend three days before the event choosing the four pin placements for each hole for the tournament. Effectively Peter Coleman's job at five in the morning along with the greenkeeper's should be quite simple. But the old quote of "a committee being a cul de sac down which ideas are lured and quietly strangled" sprang to mind when I stood shivering beside the seventh and 11th greens watching the R and A posse debate hole locations that had supposedly been decided on earlier in the week by an even larger committee.

There are strict guidelines for pace of play in the modern professional game and judging by what I saw last Thursday morning the R and A should introduce a time limit for the pins committee in which to set their pins on each hole.

After much deliberation on the seventh and 11th greens (I counted seven minutes before the hole position was finally agreed upon and then another couple of minutes before it was cut), the group was expanded with the arrival of Hugh Campbell and Peter Dawson at the eighth green.

Rodney James and Robert Burns, the chief R and A pin placers, were moving around the slopes of the undulating back left part of the green, as the greenkeeper was trying to stamp some authority on the confused bunch by taking his equipment to a more central location towards the back of the green.

An understudy of the chief pin placers was busy putting towards some sort of knitting needle that James had stuck in a precarious position on the edge of a ridge. Meanwhile, Coleman was looking at his watch, tapping his fingers on his yardage wheel muttering that these guys would make the notoriously deliberate "German" (Bernhard Langer) look quick.

Eventually an idea was set free from the R and A cul-de-sac and a pin was hatched at 31 yards from the front and eight yards from its left edge.