Duel in the Sun

Turnberry had never hosted an Open before 1977. Ayrshire turned it on regardless: four days of heatwave on a coast that is famous for the opposite. Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson arrived at the weekend tied on 138, shot matching 65s on Saturday, and then walked away from the rest of the field entirely — a two-man championship played in front of a gallery that had stopped pretending to watch anyone else.

Watson took it by a stroke, 268 to 269, both totals under the old Open record. Turnberry later renamed its 18th for the occasion. What the archive remembers is the clothing: lightweight lambswool in colours that had been washed out by salt and sun, cable knit worn over open collars, and the flat, functional wind shirt that Scottish links golf has never improved upon.

This drop leans into the palette of that week — gorse yellow, sea grey, bleached sand. Most of it came out of Virginia estate lots, where Scottish knitwear has been quietly accumulating in club closets for fifty years; the rest arrived by submission from collectors in the UK.