Striking that delicate balance

In an island nation full of old buildings and old sporting events, managing the transition to modernity is a particularly acrobatic juggling act.

How to preserve the soul of Wimbledon or Royal Ascot or Henley Regatta and still give the digital generations what has come to feel essential?

At the British Open, the answer is coursewide Wi-Fi and a new app. It is miles of underground, fiber-optic cable and LED-display scoreboards at 17 holes, up from the four that had their debut in 2013, on which fans’ Twitter messages share space with trivia questions and player data.

It has been a striking transition: a surprisingly enthusiastic embrace of the new by the world’s oldest golf major, begun at lovely, quirky Prestwick in 1860.

Only three years ago at Royal St George’s, cellphones were still banned from the Open grounds. Now they are an essential part of the experience, which might make it harder to strike up a conversation about the weather with your English neighbour in the grandstand but definitely makes it easier to have a clue about what is happening on other holes and in others’ lives.

“If they have been behind, they’ve made a huge leap forward,” said Tom Atkins, of Charlotte, North Carolina, who is attending his first British Open. “I’ve been to the other three majors, but I think they’ve surpassed everyone with this. I’ve never been at a golf tournament that had Wi-Fi. They usually don’t even let you bring the phone in.”

There have, however, been a few bumps on the cart path to a wired Open. Smartphones, however welcome, can still be used as cameras, and photography is prohibited. The R&A, which runs the Open, felt compelled to issue a reminder to fans this week about the restrictions.

Then there was the course worker who, digging a hole to position a sign to the media room, damaged the cable that supplied Internet and video access to the room. Luckily, that was on Wednesday, before the first round. Still, it perhaps offered an argument for keeping the 60-foot, manually operated scoreboard still being used in the media room. The plan, for now, is to replace it.

“It’s a question of what we replace it with,” Malcolm Booth, a spokesman for the R&A, said. “Do you go all digital? Do you go part analog, part digital, which I think is probably where my preference is? If the power goes down like it did the other day, your scores are gone. Over and above that, it’s very difficult on a digital board to put that much information on there without losing resolution.”

Perhaps no place at Royal Liverpool better represents the tussle between tradition and technology than a small concession area next to the seventh fairway, where a manually operated scoreboard stands next to a big video screen and well within pitching range of the new LED scoreboard next to the seventh green.
“Doesn’t this just sum it up?” Paul Vickers asked.

Vickers, a former tech executive, was running the manual scoreboard on Friday with two other men who were updating it with the help of a sliding ladder.

The board - known as the nine-hole board because it updates only after a player completes the front or back nine - is large and labour intensive. It uses small plastic cards that slide into slots that have served the purpose for decades.

Although the work is artisanal, the information behind it is entirely digital. Vickers gets the updated scores through a hand-held computer, even though the signal is sometimes blocked by the large metal board. Perhaps that is a form of silent, inanimate protest.

Vickers first worked an Open scoreboard in 1979 at Royal Lytham & St Annes. He was 18 years old and a member of the University of Oxford golf team, bedazzled by the victory of Spanish swashbuckler Seve Ballesteros, who, at 22, was young enough that he could have been one of Vickers’ teammates.

The friendships that were formed and deepened that week have enriched Vickers’ life, but as a tech-savvy man, even if he and his colleagues remain hopeful, he knows which way the wind is blowing. Asked if they discussed the increasingly anachronistic nature of their work, Vickers smiled and said, “Our discussions are more focused around the fact that we don’t want this job to go away because we’d like to do it next year.”

With a return to St Andrews looming in 2015, who can blame them?
Still, there are also certain inescapable realities. Staring at the digital scoreboard on the seventh hole for five minutes, you learned that American golfer Erik Compton, about to arrive on the green, was playing in his first Open championship, that he had hit two of five fairways and one of six greens in regulation. There were plenty of other Compton facts, although not the most interesting one (he has had two heart transplants).

The nine-hole scoreboard showed that Compton had shot a first-round 71.

Standing nearby was Fred Birtall, 84, who was taking a break from his role as a course marshal. “I’m lost,” he said of the technology. "I have a tablet, but I can’t figure out how to work it.

“But I like that,” he said, pointing to the new scoreboard. “It’s quite interesting to learn all that information. It’s helpful to me. I honestly can’t understand why they are doing any of it manually still. They don’t even need to be here.”

But the R&A, which has been behind the times in other areas (like female membership), seems to have read the mood just right in this domain, even better than Wimbledon, which has ripped up too many of its old courts. Discard too many of the old signposts too fast and you risk leaving your longtime client base disoriented.