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If you are a golfer and still able to draw breathe, then each year you cannot be anything other than inspired by The Open for it is everything that golf ever was, is now and ever will likely be.

Each Major is special and unique in its own right. The Masters is played each year at Augusta National, perhaps the best golf venue ever found on the face of our planet, and certainly a serious contender for the title of heaven on earth.

The U.S. Open is revered by all those who play this game for it is contested on golf courses that are set up so incredibly difficult that ensures only the strongest survives. The PGA is the tournament for professional golfers, including that oft forgotten and much maligned creature, the club professional. It is also played at that time of year when it is always so impossibly hot, thus adding another special quality.

The Open is the oldest of all the Majors and is played on a roster of links golf courses throughout England and Scotland that will likely make your mouth water.

It is played on land where golf was first played, and requires players to negotiate bumps, hollows and swales that golfers of all shapes and sizes have been battling for centuries. To play links golf well, one must understand the affect the ground and the wind will have on each shot. It requires vision, skill and patience, and perhaps just a little bit of good fortune thrown in for good measure.

If you watched this year's Open, you will not have been disappointed by the drama. Who would have thought that Tiger wouldn't have been around for the weekend? It shows that there is much more to links golf than just technical skill, things such as staying out of the gorse and heather, and not messing around with the pot bunkers.

Oh, and it will help if you know how to play the bump and run shot. In short, to play links golf well, you must think your way around the golf course.

Now, don't get me wrong, Tiger does all of that very well indeed and only missed his fifth cut of all time simply because he wasn't on form. But just look at what happened in the amazing last 20 minutes or so of this year's championship.

Westwood makes bogey at the last because he let his tee shot get just a little too close to the fairway pot bunker. Indeed, as Westwood's tee shot made its way down the fairway, had you turned your TV up just a little bit, you would have heard the pot bunker calling to it, drawing it into its deep den of horror. Westwood may have hit a great shot from that pot bunker but the great shot was still 50 feet from the hole, always a tough two putt, especially under the circumstances.

Watson, the best bump and run links player ever to hold a golf club, made the cardinal sin of allowing his shot at the last to run through the green.

Watson had managed his way around Turnberry for 71 holes as if he personally had had a hand in laying out each and every obstacle there, yet he did not take the necessary precaution with his approach at the last to make sure it found the putting surface.

The golf gods are cruel and they punish mistakes unmercifully.

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