A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  The unfamiliar weight of giving a shit made my golf bag heavier, while Robert roamed unburdened, swinging his last and only club at the world. I couldn’t always decide who was better off, so I just tried to keep moving forward—to stand up straight and find the next flag in front of me.

  Heart

  Duff was a friend who showed. He was a guy who was always up for it—up for moving his family to London, up for running the Paris Marathon with me, up for flying back to the States for twenty-four hours to catch a Notre Dame game, and up for playing four rounds of golf in thirty-two hours in the southeast of England. Our wives had worked together for years; we had bonded over our common alma mater and become friends. When it came to a big trip or a tall ask, Duff was a go-to guy, and I knew his why-not spirit would set the tone for my first days on the ground. I didn’t want to be alone when the fears set in, as they did in the clubhouse in Royal Cinque Ports on day one, fifty-five days of unmitigated golf ahead of me, when I thought, I’m not sure I want to play golf tomorrow.

  I would overcome, just as Duff pushed through on day one. Well over six feet tall, with the girth of an expat who had learned to love the British chipper, Duff had squeezed his feet into fresh golf shoes purchased for his upcoming spree and paid the price. Somewhere on the back nine at Littlestone his heel ruptured and bled through his socks, yet he still worked his way around Royal Cinque Ports that afternoon in the rain. Having not struck a golf ball in many a month, he overcame his name as well, and Duff golfed his ball courageously, finishing the first thirty-six-hole day in the UK at my side without grievance.

  The locals referred to Royal Cinque Ports as Deal for the nearby town, and the course’s rota heritage shone through in its narrow targets and obscured paths to safety, its contours replete with subtle hillocks and omnivorous rough. The Royal part of its proper name was a distinction that dated to 1900, when the Prince of Wales teed it up at the course in Deal. A Royal designation meant a club was judged worthy by a member of the British royal family somewhere along the way, and it’s shared by sixty-some clubs around the world, from Australia to Canada to India to Africa to Ireland, where Royal Dublin in the Republic wears its Royal-ness with some stubborn irony. The sun still never sets on the Royal golf clubs of the world.

  Royal Cinque Ports was heavy on history, and on golf shots; Duff and I flailed away in the rain, heads down, punching at the wind and screaming by way of our silence that we were having no fun at all. It was a round to get through, to survive and cross off and then get dry, and each passing minute in the clubhouse allowed our faulty golf memories to turn misery into fun. I was thankful that the local member who was scheduled to play with us was a no-show, allowing us to play quick and quiet golf. Duff was soldiering through a solid limp by this point, and I had carded a tear-soaked 44 on the front, the outward stretch playing directly down the coastline into needles of rain. If we hadn’t been at the farthest point from the clubhouse as we turned from nine, I wonder whether we might have hung it up and hit the showers. Round number two, with my ass barely out of the starting gate, and I think I wanted to quit—and then here came our member, hiking across the dunes to find us, using his closed umbrella like a cane and smiling as if the sun were shining and he couldn’t wait to teach us the intricacies of his course. And then I knew I wanted to quit.

  My flooded earlobes weren’t interested in hearing that the godfather of golf writers, Bernard Darwin, had been a member at Deal, or that he dubbed the alley on sixteen “a safe haven of insecurity,” or that Harry Vardon, winner of a record six Opens, always laid back and played for the only flat spot on the fairway on seventeen. I wanted to know where the towels were and if the sun ever shined in the southeast of England, and why this member, Mark, didn’t have his umbrella up. It turned out that Mark knew something I had forgotten about golf on a seaside links: Don’t get too accustomed to the weather, because it will change soon. The wind turned to our backs and blew the water from the course; dry skies followed, and it felt as if we had lost half our clubs. Duff and I skipped along the closing holes of Cinque Ports, and Mark proved to be an extraordinary host and club historian; he explained that the thin concrete path along the grassy seawall was built there to allow soldiers to patrol on bicycles during the German threat, and that the course took its name from a medieval confederation of the five nearby port towns.

  “You can see France from here on a clear day,” Mark told us as we looked outward from the fourteenth green into a wall of English gray. “Today is not one of those days.”

  But it was a good day, thanks to Mark, who brought stories and shut off the spigots; yet we were still unsettled as Duff and I sat in the beautiful old clubhouse, a Victorian seaside manor, him trying to walk off his busted ankle and me feeling tired in a way I hadn’t felt since that marathon in Paris. It was only thirty-six holes—I’d done that before—but I hadn’t accounted for the exertion of walking into the wind, slugging through the gales as if tied to the earth. My game had bounced back with a birdie and a 37 on the back nine, but my spirit felt like the 81 on my scorecard—flat and uninspired. I knew these thoughts were coming, just as I knew the rain and wind were waiting for me, but on day one, I didn’t expect to be looking out at a black sea and thinking, I can’t do this.

  It didn’t help when I watched a black sedan drive along the thin road between the clubhouse and the golf course. It pulled into the empty parking lot, and out stepped a pale redhead in short sleeves. He walked across the lot as if it were a sunny day in Savannah, unmoved by his surroundings.

  I hadn’t seen him in years, but his first words were, “You played in this?” He picked my card up off the table and didn’t say anything—just raised his eyebrows—then folded and creased it with his fingers. “Lot of golf ahead of you.”

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s you. How are you?”

  Robert looked out at the wispy dunes in the windows. “Not bad. I got upgraded on the flight,” he said. “The drive down here was eventful. I kept trying to convince the other cars that the right side was better. Nobody seemed to agree.”

  Robert sat down and ordered a Chardonnay in the land of gin and ale. Mark was chatting with other members at the bar, and Duff was still pacing the clubhouse; he pretended to be taking in all the history hanging from its walls, but I knew he was trying to work out the knots above his heels. Duff knew Robert. They had met on a dozen occasions, but as happened with most of the people I introduced Robert to, he would greet them as if they had never met—no matter that they’d spent five hours golfing together last September. There might have been a part of Robert that envied my having other friends, or a part of him that didn’t believe they were real friends—they didn’t really know me, or they didn’t rise to the level of his peer. And in all the years of knowing Robert, I’d never done anything to make him think otherwise. I still let him walk into my life and become its focus whenever he decided to show up; no wonder he had the impression that he was more important. Because to me, for some reason, he was.

  He wasn’t going to play in this cold, and he had driven around Deal and Sandwich and decided to head back to London for the night. “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” he said, quoting Samuel Johnson in a voice that, to me, sounded very tired of life. He had a copy of my itinerary and planned to meet me down in Cornwall, or maybe just jump ahead to Manchester and take in a football match.

  “I can hang around if you need me to,” he said. “Or maybe you’d rather I not.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what I wanted him to do.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “Yeah. I’m just tired. This is a lot, man. This is going to be a lot.”

  “There was never any doubt about that,” he said. “Colder than I thought it was going to be. I should have packed more sweaters.”

  We talked about my impressions of the course, a definitive links, nine out and nine back that didn’t feel forced or overdesigned. It didn’t blow you away with drama, but
in better weather, you could walk Cinque Ports every day without getting bored or abused.

  “Sounds epic,” he said. I don’t think he was listening. “I’m going to roll. You should come back to London with me. You can’t play in this. You get sick, and it’s over.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “You’re welcome,” he said, tipping his empty glass into his mouth. “Shit, nobody’s going to know where you did and didn’t play. Seriously.”

  “I would know,” I said. “I’ve got day one under my belt. One day at a time.”

  Robert grinned. “Indeed.” He picked up my scorecard and placed it on top of his glass. “Make sure you find a driving range. Do they have those over here? They must,” he said, standing up. “You don’t need me to stay?”

  “I’m good,” I told him. “Go to London. Say hi to the queen.”

  “I shall,” Robert said, and after a ten-minute appearance—his first in three years—my best friend was gone.

  Mark ran a top-rated B&B in Deal, where he had rooms waiting for us, transforming him from our host to our hero. We hobbled our way back out through the Cinque Ports lobby, and Mark stopped to show us Charl Schwartzel’s name on the wall in commemoration of his winning the English Amateur Championship at Deal. More interesting was a mahogany board with gold numbers that memorialized the winners of Deal’s annual Prince of Wales Challenge Cup, where in one of his final amateur events before ascending the pro rankings, Lee Westwood fired 83 and 77 to claim the title. An almost unplayable wind was blamed for scores that saw the best amateurs in England flirting with the century mark, and I noticed that the same had happened in 1972, when Walker Cupper P. J. Hedges won with a closing 86. These bloated tallies were the loveliest things I saw at Deal that day. I checked my back pocket for my card with its 81, and no longer felt compelled to toss it into the bin. Golf was hard; on a links, it was harder. And an 82 and an 86 were good enough to paint in gold on the clubhouse walls.

  “One year, 162 wins it; the next, it’s 138,” Mark said as we left. “You can’t conquer this game. You have to take what the course is giving and get on with it.”

  I walked the street along the beach in Deal that evening, still light at nearly ten o’clock, and found a glorious chip shop for my first fish and chips of what I hoped would be many—Throw in one of those fried sausages, too, please. Can’t get those in Philly.

  The town was quiet but charming, with pubs and hotels overlooking the waves. I thought that Robert had missed a true English town as I walked back to the Number One B&B, where I was staying (its street address was 1; serendipitous for Mark when it came to Internet searches), and I felt full and well. My legs were stiff in a hard-earned way, and the box of fried grease seemed to disappear before I even made it back to the Number One door. I slept a deep, thirty-six-hole sleep, knowing that when one has tired of the prospect of golf tomorrow, one has tired of life.

  • • •

  “You can tell people I was a pussy,” were Duff’s first words the next morning. He was not referring to an inability to finish the full English breakfast, as we both dispatched our allotment of eggs and sundry breakfast meats. Experience had taught me that I would eventually grow weary of the morning feasts of the British Isles and come to fear the too-yellow eggs, waking from sweaty nightmares of stubby sausages tangled with bacon the size of surfboards, so I enjoyed the full breakfast while there was joy to be had. Rather, Duff was explaining his decision to skip that morning’s round at Prince’s in Sandwich. He planned on spending the morning shopping for bandages in town, then hoped to rally for Royal St. George’s in the afternoon.

  There was nothing weak about Duff’s decision. I’d watched him battle his golf ball across much of southeastern England the day before, lashing it with the determined frustration of someone who really wished I were writing a book about British bar stools. We figured he’d hit enough shots yesterday to cover a third round without actually playing it, so his pass from Prince’s had been earned.

  Duff had picked me up at Heathrow and driven us down to Deal knowing that, in two days’ time, he would fly back to Philadelphia to visit his terminally ill father for what he suspected was the last time. Duff was no pussy. He had grown-up guts—man guts—that I envied, handling his father’s passing with courage and grace, and without complaint. He was no idiot, either. His heels were chewed up and bloody, though their ability to keep him off the golf course made them look beautiful to me.

  I’d woken that morning with a body that felt as if it had been sewn into my mattress. The idea that I was going to drag these limbs around 105 more courses already had me feeling like a golfing Sisyphus, but I zombied my way down to breakfast and into Duff’s front seat. He dropped me off at Prince’s, where the golden dunes were soaked in sun, and the wind made me wonder whether I might spontaneously take flight behind my golf ball. If I were wearing a slightly larger shirt, I thought, I could coast my way over to France on this gentle morning tornado.

  Prince’s had a wide-open feeling about it, with three nines stretched across a broad swath of dunes that separated a pine forest from the ocean. The trees waved like grain in the wind while I enjoyed blasting a 380-yard drive downwind, then struggled to reach the end of the tee box when turned the other way. The breeze gave the golf a goofy quality, but for the first time during my short stint in the UK, I was finding the center of the clubface consistently, the travel cobwebs giving way to some focus born of my playing alone on an empty golf course. It would be a long two months if I had to play solo often, but a morning to think about nothing but the work I had done with Dynda and Doc made for a lovely walk ’round the home of the 1932 Open Championship, won by fellow countryman Gene Sarazen.

  The breeze brought a steady stream of tears, and when I stopped on the tenth hole to wipe them, I noticed some redness on the fingers of my fresh white glove. I peeled it off and checked my hand—no cuts, just callouses—so I wiped my eyes again and discovered more red ooze. I made a mental note to be sure to clean my contacts every night if I was going to be playing in this sort of wind, and as I finished up at Prince’s with a respectable 78, I took a strange confidence from having played until my eyes bled.

  My expectations for the welcomes I would be receiving at the courses in England were modest. I anticipated a polite indifference bordering on condescension toward an unsophisticated American come to inspect their masterpieces. Deal had proven to be an open-arms club, and the welcome at Prince’s was almost Irish in its warmth and overreaching hospitality. I was offered lunch and conversation and a tour of their small golf museum, where I learned of Prince’s Golf Club’s beloved Laddie Lucas, a future member of Parliament who was born in the Prince’s clubhouse and would become known as the finest left-handed golfer in the world. He was a decorated RAF pilot, and when his Spitfire was hit over France in World War II, he used his knowledge of the Prince’s links to crash-land by the fourth tee, allowing him to sneak in a quick nine before returning to the battlefront.

  I had come to the UK with an idea that, when it came to links golf, the Brits might hold the classics but the Irish owned the welcome. I was finding, however, that club snobbery was a better-practiced art in my home country. Of course, I had yet to visit Muirfield, where exclusivity was the stuff of golf legend, but so far, it seemed that just because a club was old didn’t make it curmudgeonly. Surely I would meet some of the stuffiness I had prepared myself for at Royal St. George’s, host to fourteen Opens, most recently the 2011 installment, won by Darren Clarke. Yet while RSG wasn’t necessarily a club where I would walk around the clubhouse in my pajamas, there was still a welcoming air about the place that I found refreshing, as if the members were happy for a visitor to have traveled so far to see what their piece of the golf map had to offer.

  A friend of a friend of my parents had heard about my trip and emailed me an offer to join me at RSG, where he had been a member for years. Graham was a generous guide who knew every corner of the place and taught me the club’s i
nteresting membership arrangement. There were club members—a distinguished bunch for sure, including lords and prime ministers, as well as the likes of Ian Fleming, who took breaks from writing Bond novels to golf there. But RSG also had permit holders, locals who had purchased a reasonably priced pass to play the course according to a generous schedule. So one did not have to be anointed as a member to enjoy the course; it remained available to area golfers who, as permit holders, had their own tournaments and simple clubhouse next to the members’ gorgeous Tudor mansion. They even challenged the members every year in a tournament, at which, I was told, the permit holders came out on top on a regular basis.

  I expected RSG to be a bit plain from my memories of it on TV. Open courses were not built for television, and their kinks and curves tended to hide from cameras. A little brown, a lot of sand, some humps and some bumps—the old British links lacked the framing foliage that made Augusta’s layout so distinctive, so my expectations of Royal St. George’s were modest. I was sure it would be lovely and would feel as distinguished as its name suggested; well presented, but too subdued and polite for any real fun (my preconceived notion of most things British). Within four holes, I was reminded of how much I actually knew about links golf in the UK, which was hardly enough to fill the back of a scorecard.