by Tom Coyne
It was time to make that strange and reluctant step from planning into living. Should I proclaim something? Raise a fist? Shed a few tears? I had plotted my golfing rebirth and now here I was, a new and braver and wiser golfing soul, alive and emboldened and committed to my cause. Yet there were no trumpets, no cannons, no rainbows—just rain. It all should have felt different here, but it was all too familiar as I watched my opening drive slide right off the wind and scurry into rumpled grass.
Stroke one of many happened on the links of Littlestone. Lesser-known than its neighboring Open venues in England’s southeast corner, Littlestone held its own for history—both James Braid and Alister MacKenzie (the latter of Augusta National and Cypress Point fame) had their fingerprints on course updates after its inception in 1888, when it was laid out by Royal St. George’s designer, William Laidlaw Purves. Charles Blair Macdonald, considered the father of American golf and one of the founders of the USGA, credited Littlestone as one of his design inspirations. And in a gesture of uncommon golfing bipartisanship, Littlestone once boasted the British prime minister as its club captain (H. H. Asquith, Liberals), while the leader of the opposition (Arthur Balfour, Conservatives) was its club president. Littlestone was no small player in the history of golf in England, and it greeted me on a Sunday morning with the wet breezes I had been missing. The old brick clubhouse had a British cottage feeling that told me I had arrived somewhere authentic, and a nearby water tower built to look like a castle turret seemed to follow me around the course as a target. The layout’s undulations were subdued, a shortish but classic seaside track with sneaky sandpits dotting the holes to remind me I wasn’t Stateside anymore.
Littlestone was a quick links refresher squeezed between marshlands and the English Channel, a morning that reeducated me on the basics of links golf—that is to say, the fundamentals of what I considered real golf, a game in which one’s ball is meant to be played along and across a golf course, not just over it.
I had grown up learning to loft the golf ball, playing shots that avoided the course, hoisting irons over all that scary stuff to a benign island of short grass. But links wind forces you to observe and ponder and engage the ground ahead of you. You can’t hide from the golf course when the wind is up, as it always seems to be on a seaside layout. For me, wind was a nuisance, a bad-luck impediment that denied me the golf to which I felt entitled, while the game’s originators would have considered the breeze to be as essential to a course as the fairway and rough. It forced one to golf their ball, not just launch it.
By the end of my opening round, I had remembered: putt firmly, with a shorter stroke and a condensed follow-through. These were hearty greens—not glass but grass—and just because a ball was holding the ground didn’t mean the wind would let it alone. Putts didn’t drip into the hole over here; rather, they dove down to safety as if burrowing for cover.
I remembered to play approaches short of the greens—sometimes absurdly short—and think about roll and bounce and trajectory. True links are laid upon sandy soil—dunes, essentially—so that even in a downpour they drain like colanders, allowing players to runway their balls from all over. I gave myself license to putt from anywhere within fifty yards, and remembered that the flags are shorter over here, to keep them from snapping or dislodging in the wind. The diminutive pins play games with American golfers’ eyes and add thirty perceived yards to each shot. My eyes would adjust and I would learn to punch shots and pop putts, I told myself, and forgave my pencil as it filled in an uninspiring 80, with a slightly more hopeful 36 on the back nine.
As a former Open qualifying venue, Littlestone was a good initial gauge of my game. I bogeyed the first hole but birdied the last; if the entire trip had that arc to it, I would finish in fine standing. Having left all my excuses back in the States, I felt bare in the breeze as I tucked my card into my bag. It was coming with me; that thin folded paper had a weight to it, its grams turned to pounds of new pressure. The shots all counted now.
Following my bogey-packed run at professional golf in 2004, the question I’ve heard more than any other is, “What was the difference between them and you?” Innate talent was an obvious delineator, but it wasn’t the whole answer. I typically replied with something about tournament preparedness or their wedge game or their putting from inside ten feet, and that was all true. But I rarely shared the primary difference, because it’s too weighty for grill-room banter. The real difference was fear. I let it play my golf ball, while they somehow kept it in the bag.
My itinerary was built to outlast and exhaust fear, to drain its muscles by way of repetition and render it limp. I’d read somewhere that the key to grappling with fear, to feeling real peace and security, was knowing who you were. I believed it, because on a golf course in a competition, I too often guessed at the player I was: Was I a good putter? Did I hit fairways? Was the sand really my strength? When I played well, I could stamp a yes on all the questions. When I played great, I didn’t hear the questions at all. So maybe that was the secret: figuring out who I was. That seemed easy enough—a piece of shepherd’s pie. I was a dad. A golfer. A writer, a teacher, a husband. I was a pretty good guy. But actually believing any of that? Not just saying it but knowing it? I suspected it would be easier to play 107 golf courses in fifty-six days.
In the meantime, it was one shot at a time, and the next one was at Royal Cinque Ports, host of the Open in 1909 and 1920. I drove with purpose and with pace; game on, round number one tallied and recorded. Round number one in the UK, that is—for the calendar year, it was round 132.
• • •
Not long after my Scotland conversation with Robert, I went googling for Open qualification procedures. I had donated an entry fee to the US Open a few times and knew the deal—you needed a 1.4 handicap and a check. The British Open’s requirements seemed hidden on the Internet, as if their Open were actually a little less so, and I eventually found that to be the case. The handicap cutoff for entrants was 0, so if I was to embark on this quest for the secret to golf and test said secret in an Open tryout, it would take a large lump of faith to believe I could even qualify for the qualifier and get my handicap down to goose egg.
Not since 2005 had my handicap approached such a hollow sum. I did not belong to any club or course, and guessed my theoretical handicap hovered around 10. I played Chutes and Ladders more often than I played golf anymore, so before I bought any maps or pins or guidebooks, I spent a year gorging on golf improvement while trying to balance school and kids and the Golf Handicap and Information Network. Before the crazy kicked off in Littlestone, I had already been golf crazy for some time.
A swing coach was never part of the plan. My path to scratch was going to be built upon my new adult outlook—I had matured and earned perspective since I’d last given a damn about golf, and surely a mind now enlightened by a new family and some vague modicum of faith was worth a dozen strokes. I had been a drinking prodigy, an all-star handpicked from the crowd of aspiring drunks. Sober now, if I put the effort into chasing golf that I had put into chasing my next drink, the Grand Slam would not be out of the question. But no lessons or video work; no more launch monitors for me. I sought holistic and organic golf improvement based on healthy thinking and the lessons I had learned from Paper Tiger: beating balls is not playing golf, and there is no substitute for tournament experience.
I played eighteen holes each morning while the girls were home with a sitter, and I entered every tournament that would take my credit card. My daily scores crept downward, but my tournament results remained bloated: eighty-ish, oceans away from scratch. It was in the parking lot following a qualifier for the Pennsylvania Mid-Am during which I had blasted three balls out of bounds and finished DFL for the first time in my golfing career—I had played terribly the world over, but never before had I seen my name in that last box, just above the WDs and the DQs—that I decided to heed the new grown-up perspective of which I was so proud and ask for help.
We had lo
st touch over the years, but when I opened Philadelphia magazine to find that an old friend had been named Best of Philly Golf Instructor, it seemed to be another nudge from that cosmic caddie who had put Gramma Billy in my path, pushing me to give Dynda a call.
I had known Mike Dynda since I was a caddie and he was working his first assistant-pro job in the early 1990s, back when Dynda had a head of curly locks and could bash a 1-iron like a beefed-up Ben Hogan. Dynda had helped me through a case of the shanks when I was a teenager, and taught me firsthand the true heartbreak of the game when I was seventeen and carrying his bag, watching him three-putt the final green of a US Open qualifier and miss the cut by one stroke. He threw me his car keys and joined a case of beer in the backseat, where for the whole ride home to Philadelphia he hid his bottle inside a head cover and told me of the pain of giving one’s life to something as fickle as a wobbly white ball. Twenty years later, it was me who sought to numb the golf angst when I called him to see if he could make me play like a teenager again.
The hair was gone, and he was now better known as a teacher than as a player, but Dynda had continued to be driven a bit barmy by the game as the years had passed—a fast talker, his insights moved at warp speed, but there was genius at work as we bounced from idea to idea, settling on a handful of swing flaws and remedies. In the warm months, we hit balls and played holes together, and he showed me how to read greens by feeling the slope with my feet and taught me the importance of a mental soundtrack: “I’ve got a little Foreigner in my head today so I can rock birdies. I had Michael Jackson last week, and I couldn’t make a putt.” In the winter, we hit balls in his studio with cardboard boxes leaning against my ass to help me hold my posture, and when we got bored on a rainy day, we watched Dynda’s greatest hits on YouTube. He was the Weird Al Yankovic of golf, if Weird Al wore a Cobra Golf hat and spit into an empty water bottle behind the piano while he sang
Caddie, help me read this putt,
’Cause I can’t read putts anymore.
It’s getting hard, too hard to see.
Feel like I’m knockin’ on Dynda’s door . . .
He was the mad professor who seemed the ideal prefect for my eccentric ambitions, and with his texts and voice mails pushing me along, I was on the putting green before the kids were awake, playing eighteen and hitting a barrel of balls before it was time to pick Maggie up from camp.
Over the course of my year of handicap deflation, I fled the cold and visited Florida nine times, a feat for a golfing dad—even more impressive, I saw Mickey Mouse on only one of the trips. My in-laws’ condo near Clearwater became a regular retreat where, at Belleair Country Club, the pro at Florida’s oldest golf club allowed me to practice. On five such getaways, as my students wondered what kind of research their professor was doing that kept bringing him back to class with a sunburn, I made the drive from Clearwater to Naples, passing meekly through the gates to TwinEagles. I was always made bashful by the sprawling luxury of the place, until I felt at home on the back of the range in the studio of one of the great gentlemen of golf. Scotland had so many names that conjured golf distinction—Morris, Braid, Park, Robertson. Florida had one such name, too—Dr. Jim Suttie, or, as his friends called him, Doc. I felt fortunate that after a number of years out of touch, I could still shoot him an email asking for some of his time and begin it, Hey, Doc . . .
Tall, with an unsteady hip, Doc wore a wide-brim hat to protect the fair complexion of someone who, like myself, looked a little foreign in Florida. Doc was one of the first modern coaches in golf, a pioneer in utilizing technology and video at a time when you still needed a suitcase to lug the equipment around. I didn’t expect that he would have changed much in ten years, and I was right. He greeted me with a hello and a handshake as if I had just been in to visit him last week. “Ready to go?” he said, the tripod that never seemed to leave his side in hand, a shepherd and his staff. His studio had changed a bit—more gadgets, from a TrackMan system to balance plates, with monitors embedded in the floor so students could watch their swings from any angle without having to look away from the ball. A new putting platform in the corner had more wires coming out of it than a polygraph, and everywhere on the walls hung photos of Doc with his Tour pros and his awards—top ten teacher in the US, best teacher in the state, PGA Teacher of the Year. Yet they hung in no particular order and were just crooked enough to suggest that Doc was not all that impressed, as if they all had to go somewhere, so, well, here they were.
During my last visit before leaving for Scotland, I had to wait for Doc to finish working with one of his students. When there was a spouse or a family waiting in the lawn chairs outside Doc’s bunker, milling about like loved ones waiting for the jury to return, you knew a serious golfer was inside, someone who traveled with an entourage and on whose golf others depended. I could tell this was one of those players—his wife was walking laps around the range at an exercise pace, a routine that looked honed by years of waiting for her husband on a golf course. When Doc and his student walked out, he introduced us without an ounce of showboating or self-importance, simply saying, “Tom Coyne, meet Larry Mize.” He had come to see Doc for a tune-up before the Masters. We shook hands and talked for a few minutes, two guys happy to be at one of the really good places in golf.
Both Doc and Dynda’s cameras found the same bugs in my swing: an early release of my hands led to my standing up ever so slightly at impact, which sent my clubface outside the target line, causing me to wipe across the ball and sap pounds of power in the process. I couldn’t help but feel useless as I sat in front of Doc’s bank of monitors, watching him draw lines on my swing; I’d sat in this same chair and looked at these same lines ten years before. I recalled how an angry golfer once told me that our swings don’t change, not under pressure. Our flaws are born into our golf. They will always make a comeback, especially when the golf matters—those anxious rounds when we most have to rely on our golfing DNA.
I had played hundreds of thousands of golf shots since I’d been here last, yet Doc might as well have been playing the tapes from 2004. So our golf swing was as unchangeable as our personality, as fixed as our lifetime habits and attitudes. That was fine. It was great, actually, because in the last three years, there was nothing about my habits and attitudes that had not changed. If my outlook on life could turn over and around, surely I could rejigger a golf swing.
After mornings on the range, Doc would take me out on the course with some of his minitour players, following us around in his golf cart with his Labrador, Bunker, by his side. I held my own with twentysomethings who were playing for their car payments. Our good shots were about the same, but their misses and subsequent recoveries were far fancier than mine, confirming what Dynda had been preaching over my yearlong race to scratch—that better scores weren’t necessarily about better shots but better misses.
Doc and I never quite figured out whether it was my early release that caused me to stand up at impact or the other way around; but whether it was the chicken or the egg, he was sure I needed to loosen my hips and strengthen my core if I wanted any shot at a solid posture that would cover the ball at impact. Dynda had pointed to the same physical shortcomings, so with YouTube as my personal trainer, I spent much of the winter being that forty-year-old professor looking perfectly unnatural and potentially a bit creepy among the undergrads at the campus gym. I took cheap solace from remembering that none of the water-jug-toting teenagers were scratch golfers. Neither was I, but with each crunch and curl, I felt zero inching closer.
For eighteen months, I bombarded the clubhouse computer with scores. By sheer mass of golf played, I turned my misses from card-wrecking disasters into manageable quirks. On the final day of the season, the last day on which I could post a score in time for the Open application—October 31—I wore a Jordan Spieth Halloween costume on the course, not missing a putt inside ten feet and posting a score of four under par. With two hours of daylight to spare, I watched my handicap finally sink belo
w the equator by .3 strokes.
I was scratch, a thing I never thought I would say again. I knew that for the players with a real shot at making it through Open qualifying in June, scratch was shit, but no matter; at least now I was shit enough to get started.
Robert would get to scratch without much effort. A disciplined regimen of pumping bogus scores into the handicap system would likely get him there, but the truth was, even though he only played on a semiannual basis, he could still fire 70 without so much as waving at the driving range. As hard as I knew his life had become, he still made it look painless and carefree, and the possibility that it might actually be that way for him at our age was flatly unfair. I suspected that he might go to Scotland and spend most of the trip in a pub in Glasgow while I hiked the Highlands in search of my one nugget of golf truth, only to find that Robert had it all along—care less, play better. And when it came to caring less, Robert was a downright ace.
No kids, no wife; his world was small, and he walked it untethered, a thin existence in which nothing mattered enough to qualify as a worry. It was tough to maintain such an unreality as your reality, unless you were mildly drunk most of the time; luckily for Robert, he was mostly drunk all of the time. You had to know Robert well to know if he was tight. It was probably a curse; if he had been a more pathetic load, he might have had to do something about it. But he was popular at his watering hole in the city, and when I visited him there (and that was the only place he ever suggested we meet), free drinks came his way from every corner of the bar. Everyone paid quick homage to Robert in his seat by the window, from the carpenters to the teachers to the bar backs, and he greeted each supplicant hello with a sincere smile and a question about a child or a mother or a new job on Market Street. He was still charming, and they could all see the same flawed contentedness in him that I saw—and envied, for some reason. I didn’t crave drinks anymore, but I did covet one thing he had, the thing booze had given me more than anything else: a break from having to care. It gave me freedom from having to wonder about my life: Am I doing it right? Is this enough? Still, I wouldn’t trade places with him for a shelf of Claret Jugs—the shakes, the panic, the hospitals, the self-hatred aren’t worth it—but there were moments, quick but persuasive pangs, when I wanted what Robert had as badly as I had once wanted a crisp pint of Chardonnay: the dumb, numb, lovely smile of someone who doesn’t give a damn.