What with business meetings and sailing the new yacht, Greg Norman does not get on the golf course much these days.

This Open Championship is only his third tournament of a year in which the 48-year-old Australian has also been troubled by a back injury. But given the way he played yesterday, it just goes to show that when the rough is as high as an elephant's eye and the wind comes whistling down the plain it is experience rather than quantity that counts. Norman has it in spades.

The Great White Shark rekindled the spirit of the glory day a decade ago when he shot out the lights here and lifted the claret jug in what may have been the best-ever Open.

If golf is like a military campaign - and with beige top, dark forage cap and waterproof trousers bicycle-clipped to his ankles for the first nine holes of his round, he looked every part the modern trooper - then this was a five-star Stormin' Norman.

He could not match the 64 he shot here in the final round in 1993 but this was a bare-knuckle battle on a golf course, throwing all it had to offer on the opening day and sorting the men from the boys.

His 69, a round containing two birdies and a tap-in eagle at the 4th, was marred only by bogeys on the par-five 14th and the last, where he missed from five feet. But both these holes played ferociously hard. It was a magnificent score and one that left him within a shot of the top of the leaderboard.

This was no day for first-time tyros who see only yardages and a club to match. When the wind blows it is the players who know the options and can then make the right decision who come through. Yesterday Norman did not just play exceptional golf, it was exceptional old-fashioned links golf.

Apart from his driver and a mighty four-iron shot to five feet on the par-three 11th that set up his second birdie, he did not hit a single full shot, electing instead to keep the ball under the wind and use the contours of the course to his advantage.

"Every hole I hit a punch shot," he said after his round, a technique that involves setting the ball back in his stance and with a three-quarter swing driving the club through the ball to a low finish.

At the 4th hole such skill produced the shot of the day. This is a short but challenging par five of just under 500 yards, involving a drive over the tallest bunker in championship golf and then a testing second to a severely contoured green with an insidious pin set towards the back on the top level. The distance is no problem. Getting close is.

Norman had driven perfectly - his driving was outstanding all round - opening up the best angle into the green. But what to play in order to cover the remaining 194 yards to the hole?

"It is why I love links golf," he said. "I could hit four different shots to try and get into the same position. So I could hit a five-iron, landing on front of the green, with one bounce before stopping.

"Then again I could have hit a six-iron, played it to the front and hooked it up that way. Or I could have cut a high four-iron, held it against the wind and tried to fly it up to the top."

There was a fourth way, though, as his memory took him back those 10 years to a similar shot he was faced with on that famous occasion.

"I saw the shot as I was walking up even before I knew what the yardage was," he admitted. "And I remember playing it in '93 - a little four-iron bump and run. It worked then and it worked today."

The iron was duly punched low, landing short of the green, running up and over the switchback contours before coming to rest within a foot of the hole. The eagle was a formality.

However, this is a course that gives and then takes away, and holding a round together involves imagination and skill, particularly with the short game, when confidence and commitment are tested in conditions where the putter can oscillate like a teaspoon.

On the 8th, just as Hennie Otto dropped a shot at the final hole to leave Norman the joint leader, his punched approach, in which his follow-through did not get above waist height, turned over to the left and finished in deep rough 20 yards short of the green. A small tree, one bunker and a slope up to a back tier lay between him and the flag.

His wedge floated high, drifted slightly to the left and dropped down to within eight feet. The putt, surveyed from behind then in front, did a grand circuit of the hole before dropping in.

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