A safe bet is that no one will match Jones' genius

It is 75 years since Bobby Jones won the Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St Annes, and 15 years since I went to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia – where the great man studied law – on a Bobby Jones Memorial Scholarship.

It is 75 years since Bobby Jones won the Open Championship at Royal Lytham & St Annes, and 15 years since I went to Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia – where the great man studied law – on a Bobby Jones Memorial Scholarship. I have written before of my extraordinary year as a Jones scholar, of being a guest at the 1986 US Masters conveniently won by one of the trustees of the scholarship, Jack Nicklaus, and of being introduced at a function as a Bobby Sands scholar (a slip of the tongue made all the more regrettable by the fact that we were about to tuck into a six-course banquet).

So, this time, I want to write about Jones and Lytham, where a plaque to the left of the 17th fairway marks his wondrous shot with a hickory-shafted mashie, of which more in a moment. Back then, the final 36 holes of the championship were played in one day, and after the third round Jones trailed his fellow American Al Watrous by two. Since they were paired together, Jones suggested that they slip away from the well-wishers and have a quiet lunch in his room at the Majestic Hotel. They ate toast and ham, in much the same way as Colin Montgomerie, two behind Tiger Woods, might next Sunday say 'come on Tiger, old bean, let's have a ham toastie in my room before we play'. Or might not.

Still, times have not changed for the better or worse, they've just changed.

For example, when Jones and Watrous returned to the course after their lunch, Jones found that he had left his competitor's badge at the hotel, and neither he nor Watrous was able to convince the jobsworth at the players' entrance that he was indeed a player. In the end he had to go round the corner and pay the public admission fee of seven shillings, which is surely the only time an Open champion has had to pay on the gate.

Not that he seemed likely, for much of the final round, to become Open champion. By the 17th tee he had finally obliterated Watrous's lead, but Watrous then hit a fine drive while Jones pulled his into sandy scrub.

Watrous duly nailed his second shot on to the green, leaving Jones with 175 yards to carry, to a green he couldn't see, from a dreadful lie. The hickory-shafted mashie with which he hit that shot today hangs in the clubhouse at Lytham. Somehow, he not only found the green but got inside Watrous, who was so shaken that he took three putts, finished with a 78 and lost by two.

According to the spread betting firm Sporting Index, the 17th, now lengthened to 467 yards, will be the hole where the 130th Open is won and lost, just as it was in the 61st Open. An intriguing offer named "Lytham 'n' Blues" suggests that the double-bogeys or worse recorded on the 17th will add up to between 200 and 220 strokes. If the wind howls and the rain lashes down – which they undoubtedly will if all the holidays I have had on the Fylde coast are anything to go by – that could be worth buying.

The other bet that intrigues me is called "The Car Park Champion". Sporting Index reckon that Seve Ballesteros will amass between 260 and 280 points, on the basis of five points scored for every player he finishes ahead of, and 10 points scored for every fairway he hits. If you think Seve will do better than that, you should buy. My own advice – offered with a melancholy heart, for few golfing feats have thrilled me more than Seve's two wins at Lytham – is sell, sell, sell.

As for the man who will raise the claret jug next Sunday, I have had a modest wager at 33-1 on Monty, back in winning form and with some solid hitting at the Scottish Open behind him. As always, it is tempting to look no further than Tiger, but a price of 7-4, in a field of 156, makes him nigh on unbackable. If you think lightning might strike twice (always possible on the Fylde coast) and that the Open might yield a champion as unexpected as the man who won the last great sporting marathon this summer, then consider the following: Mark O'Meara, Steve Elkington, Mark McNulty, Aaron Baddeley and Pierre Fulke are all priced at 125-1, as was Goran Ivanisevic.

But to bang on about betting is slightly to sully the world's greatest golf tournament. My main hope is that whoever wins will be a champion as worthy as Bobby Jones, who on being complimented for calling a penalty stroke on himself when deep in the rough unobserved by anyone else, said simply: "You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank."