Hear that St. Andrews’s astonishing new Castle Course is the year’s most highly anticipated debut? No? Don’t tell anyone. Good thing you saw this in time. It’s going to be all right.

Six years ago, when golf architect David McLay Kidd vowed to land the contract for The Castle Course — the eagerly awaited seventh layout at the St. Andrews Links — he was hardly alone. This was, after all, the first new championship golf course in 95 years at the hallowed ground of St. Andrews. But like Carl Icahn on a bad hair day, Kidd just wanted it more.

“For me, it was personal as much as professional,” says Kidd, who made his mark in 1995, at the wee age of 27, when he designed the now legendary Bandon Dunes Golf Club on the coast of southern Oregon. A native Scot, he had learned the business at the side of his father, who himself had spent a quarter-century overseeing the golfing grounds at the exquisite Gleneagles resort. For Kidd, the chance to work in Scotland, at the fabled “Home of Golf” no less, was too good to be true — literally.

The budget for the job, you see, turned out to be meager. And the chosen spot for the course was a derelict potato field, smack in the middle of which sat the town’s sewage-treatment plant. “We haven’t got crap,” Kidd lamented to his lieutenant, Paul Kimber, the first time they walked the plot. “Actually,” he corrected himself, “that’s all we’ve got.” Then there was the gorse-like thicket of red tape that threatened to strangle the project. Still, the St. Andrews Links Trust eventually navigated the political potholes. And Kidd, by dint of his passion for the project, ultimately landed the course.

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