Among the framed memorablia on the walls of a golf resort, I saw a 1993 article that referred to St. Andrews, in Scotland, as "the Mekka of golf".

I'd never seen the spelling Mekka rather than Mecca or mecca. Have you? Was this at one time more common?

Mecca is the original English transliteration of the Arabic name. In the 1980s, the Saudi Arabian government and others began promoting the transliteration Makkah (in full, Makkah al-Mukarramah), which more closely resembles the actual Arabic pronunciation.

The spelling Makkah or Meccah is not new and has always been a common alternative [3]. (In the works and letters of T. E. Lawrence, almost every conceivable variation of the spelling appears.) {EA}

The spelling Makkah is starting to be taken up by many organizations, including the United Nations[4], United States Department of State[5] and the British Foreign Office [6], but the spelling Mecca remains in common use. [wikipedia]