Ask five golfers for the keys to success around St Andrews’ Old Course, host to this week’s 144th Open Championship, and you’re likely to get five different answers.

When in a cool, gray dusk in the shadows of the Old Course Hotel Tiger Woods turned from his practice-putting at the 16th fairway to see that Jordan Spieth was the next player approaching, the philosophical question could have been asked.

Dustin Johnson returns to the major championship arena at St Andrews on Thursday resolved to leave behind his status as golf’s nearly man and in the process stop Jordan Spieth’s bid for Grand Slam glory.

In the surrounds of the richest golf ambiance anywhere and on the threshold of the oldest championship the sport knows, it probably isn’t the proper time to ask if you’ve ever heard of the Greater Milwaukee Open or the Quad City Classic or something called the BC Open, or even the LaCantera Texas Open.