Golf: A top grown bigger than the game: For some the golf is not the essential part of the Open. Guy Hodgson samples stalls in Muirfield's tented village

'THE attraction of East Lothian as a manufacturing base has already been appreciated by international companies.' The vowels, the accent and the lilt were familiar. It was the strangeness of the subject that made the passer-by stop. Which was precisely the idea.

Bill McLaren, the voice of rugby union, was at the 121st Open Championship this week, orally if not physically, pushing the locality. A video in another tent was extolling the joys of golf shoes. The pitches on the course might not always have been accurate but you could be sure the sales patter off it was going exactly where it was intended.

The definition of attending Muirfield this week has been a loose one. Thousands have lined the fairways, hundreds more lined the pockets of the traders in the tented village. Some never left the hospitality tents, content to watch Nick Faldo in his pomp via television. They were there of course, but by degrees as contrasting as the angles on a putter and a sand wedge.

The exhibitors' tented village, or in their case a village within a tent, filled a third of the area by the side of the first hole (par four, 447 yards). The marquee, a canvas colossus of around 6,000 square yards, could probably accommodate every Boy Scout on camp in Scotland. But instead it is bursting at the seams with just about every accessory a game that began as just the simple notion of hitting a pebble with a stick could contrive. Golf was the attraction at Muirfield this week, but in a place where the recession seemed to be just a Labour Party rumour it was not essential.

A tramp trading places with the many well-heeled here - Lord Whitelaw was in the clubhouse on Friday - could have left the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers with a complete set of clothes and with everything from 20 colours of glove to a Muirfield teddy bear. He could have collected a set of clubs - pounds 150 to well over pounds 1,000 - and given them a test drive in specially constructed nets. He could also have got behind the wheel of a Rover.

Yet to do that he would face a broadside of advertising slogans as bland as the products are bright and not necessarily as all- encompassing. 'For those who want to play their best' was aimed at those who have not cottoned on to the obvious, but who other than blacksmiths or dictators would want to 'feel the forged difference' and 'more power than you've ever experienced'?

It would have been an A-to-Z of golf merchandise if Zebra putters had a stand of their own. Instead, the index of exhibitors stops short at Y: Auro Golf to Yonex.

There are 120 stalls paying anything from pounds 10,000 to pounds 30,000 for the privilege of being here. 'A lot of merchandise has to be sold to cover that sort of expense,' David Huish, the pro at the nearby North Berwick club, who has a stand at Muirfield, said. 'It's difficult to monitor sales but I can't say we've noticed any drop. Anything with a Muirfield logo on it is going well. The recession does not seem to have affected us.' Huish, in case the sport had slipped some by, is notable not only for what he sells but also for leading the Open after two rounds at Carnoustie in 1975.

In the hospitality area, some 100 firms a day entertain their guests at a rate of pounds 25,500 per private marquee - 50 guests a day for the four days of the tournament. No matter the quality of play, every rattle in the cup will be more than matched by a sip from the glass. Again there is not a notable falling off of demand from the last Opens in Scotland, at St Andrews and Troon.

'It's a circus,' Brian Barnes complains annually. He has the backing of Arnold Palmer, twice an Open champion, who once said: 'The tented village and the attendant sideshows detract from the oldest and greatest championship in the game. I'm concerned the R and A might be losing sight of the importance of the game.' That was said 12 years ago. The circus needs a much bigger top than in 1980.

But is it an intrusion? The huge cost of running an Open is financed by the baubles off it, the profit the R and A ploughs back into the sport coming purely from television rights and the paying spectator. Love them or leave them, the tented village and the corporate hospitality areas were as essential to Muirfield's success this week as Faldo or the flags on the green.

And very few did leave without at least one trip past the merchandise.

(Photograph omitted)