A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  Royal St. George’s was a party. It was a hoot and a romp, as boring as a bullfight. Number four pointed me directly toward some sort of golf volcano, a massive dune with a bunker gashed into its side that hid the fairway from the tee box. The course seemed to toy with us, with blind shots over cresting dunes onto unlikely landing areas, but nothing about the knotty layout felt indulgent or unfair. There was plenty of safety behind or past the scary bits, as long as I listened to Graham; it was definitely a course to be enjoyed with a guide. You could feel the age and the time in the mounds, a rumpled topography that took generations of weather to sculpt. Sunshine only added to the joy of RSG, as Duff and I arrived at the last hole light-headed from the walk. He hadn’t complained once about his foot or the drive back to London that was facing him, and I was unconcerned about the 42 I shot on the front nine. On the elevated eighteenth tee of this home to so many Opens, Graham turned to me and said, “Last hole. Let’s say you need a par for the championship. A four for the Open.”

  Four for the Open. It would be—should be—my swing thought on every hole I played from here on out. Four for the Open. I cut a drive off the faraway bunkers that Graham had pointed out as my target, dropping the ball on the left side of the fairway. My links lessons were coming back quickly—just like riding a bike (into a fifty-mile-per-hour wind)—and I took two extra clubs and hit a punchy 6-iron, landing it twenty yards short of the green and rolling it up to fifteen feet. Four for the Open, and I watched my putt turn left in the breeze and drop for three. Never mind that they all added up to 80—I had bested a challenge at RSG, and I felt a tiny slice of what Darren Clarke and Greg Norman and Walter Hagen felt as they walked off this green having made their number and grabbed the Jug.

  Duff won himself a par that day on the third hole. His total didn’t break into double digits as we’d hoped, but he left Royal St. George’s with enough souvenirs to remind him that it was well worth the Band-Aids. As we packed up our bags and lifted them into his car, I found a golf ball hiding in the pocket with my rain gloves—the one ball I had brought from home specifically for this round at Royal St. George’s.

  It was a Penfold golf ball, a brand dating to the 1920s, with a red heart above the name. It was the brand of ball James Bond used to defeat his cheating nemesis in Goldfinger, and the ball whose sales ballooned after Bond/Sean Connery declared, “Here’s my Penfold Hearts.” Though he renamed the course Royal St. Mark’s in his novel, Ian Fleming’s hole descriptions revealed that Bond was battling Auric Goldfinger across the links of St. George’s.

  The Penfold Heart had been rereleased in recent years, and a thoughtful reader, seeing on my blog that I was headed to RSG, sent me a sleeve. Trusting in the providence of such a gesture, I was careful to pack a Penfold for this round, a ball that had to be stuffed with birdies and the secret to my conquering the dunes of Sandwich with the cunning skill of a secret agent. And then I forgot the ball was in my bag.

  I dropped the Penfold beside our car in the grass where we had parked and pulled a 7-iron out of the trunk. I watched the clean white ball with the small red mark soar from the parking lot out into the RSG practice grounds. It was my most effortless swing and best contact of the day, the heart springing off the meat of the clubface. Tempo and Target were my preferred swing thoughts when I remembered to think them, but swishing at that ball without a target—hitting it just to say I hit it at RSG—reminded me to swing easy, and that targets made that tougher. In finding a target, I found questions about my ability to hit it. Precision was everything in golf, but I had to find a focus that came without any fear: aim, and then accept. And I had to be more Bond: play fearless and hit away, because here’s my Penfold Heart.

  Lengths

  The bear in the train station wore a blue coat and a red hat. I snapped pictures of it for my children and texted my wife back home—Tell the kids I’m in the real Paddington Station! I dragged my suitcase and my golf bag to a spot on a bench next to the short sculpture and sat. It was 10:00 p.m. London time, though my body clock was still back in Philadelphia, and, with a ham-and-cheese baguette in my hand that I couldn’t quite bring to my mouth, I caught my breath, feeling the sort of tired that makes one acutely aware of the weight of his head. On our drive back to London, I had seen the cliffs of Dover in the southeast corner of Britain (yup, they’re white), and I was now headed to the southwest town of Penzance, three tee times awaiting me tomorrow on the opposite edge of England.

  I was the only one hauling a golf travel case onto the sleeper train that evening. I shouldered it through the door and into my cabin, then looked at my golf bag as it took up every inch of space that wasn’t bed, the tall black trunk mocking me: This one’s full, buddy. I climbed over my clubs and hit my miniature pillow hard. Suddenly, there was a knock at my door—“Good morning, Mr. Coyne”—and a kind English gentleman passed me my breakfast tea over my luggage. I sipped it as the train rocked us through morning farmland, rushing by a blurry vignette of wire fences and moist green fields. I had to shake off the sleep to remember why I was there: I was headed to Cornwall to visit some of Gramma Billy’s picks. I was there because I put a pin in a map. I sipped tea in golf shoes with my legs propped on a golf bag, with one solitary shred of knowledge to sustain me: I had no idea where the hell I was.

  The lone rental car agency at the station in Penzance mercifully had one automatic car left in the lot, a purple hatchback of unknown brand that looked like a beefed-up Skittle. My clubs actually fit in the trunk, so I felt myself fortunate as I set my GPS for a place called Perranporth and pulled out of the lot into the wrong lane of traffic. I piloted the Skittle through the streets of Penzance like an old pirate, recalling that it isn’t the driving on the left side that’s tough; rather, it’s the turning. I owe apologies to at least three drivers who were forced to examine the totality of their lives, reliving every regret and triumph, as they watched their end approach in a blur of purple. After each turn into the wrong lane, I embraced my ignorance: “Sorry! American!” I yelled at their closed windows, as if they didn’t already know. It took me twenty minutes to get out of the small Cornish town, but once I did, I forgave myself for my novice piloting and wondered if, thanks to my morning jolt, someone would live their life just a little more fully that day.

  The drive up to the north coast of Cornwall took an hour at my careful pace, and I hopped out of the car in Perranporth with a minute to spare before my 9:00 a.m. tee time. A quick glance from the parking lot revealed that I had a hike ahead of me; the simple clubhouse had the feeling of a lodge built halfway up a ski slope, with golf holes both cascading downward from it and stretching above it toward the clouds. The course looked like wild fun, and I hurried to check in at the pro shop, my travel fog finally blown clear by the promise and possibility of good golf.

  The head pro met me with a warm welcome as I launched into what would become a well-practiced routine of introduction: “Hi, I’m Tom Coyne, an American golf writer here playing the links of the UK . . .”

  “Mr. Coyne! Yes, we were expecting you today,” he said as he looked at his tee sheet. “We’ve got you teeing off at 14:00.” He read the confusion in my face and translated the time into American: “You’re off at 2:00 p.m.”

  I understood twenty-four-hour time and appreciated its efficacy. It proved handy in keeping my itinerary clean, as the long days on this northern isle allowed for both 6:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. tee times. Being able to use 6:00 and 18:00 avoided confusion and landed the twenty-four-hour clock on the list I was compiling of things we should borrow from here and introduce back home. We had taken their language, so why not their clocks? Add to the list their ability to pay the dinner check instantly with tableside credit-card scanners (why must we see the bill first, awkwardly attesting to its existence?), their traffic lights that flashed yellow before changing to both red and green, and even their roadway roundabouts. They begin as the bane of any Brit-driving newbie, but after some white-knuckled practice, one finds there is nothi
ng better than roundabouts for eschewing the brake pedal and getting there fast, particularly when one has to haul ass across Cornwall to the opposite coast for the first of three tee times I had somehow snafued.

  I never did learn how the morning and afternoon rounds got flip-flopped on my ironclad, quadruple-checked, laminated-and-three-hole-punched-into-a-binder itinerary, but the folks down at Mullion were kind enough to allow me onto their course well past my allotted slot. So at roughly 10:30 on either clock, I set out on a coastal golfing binge I would forever recall as Cornwall Day.

  This date had been circled on my now-suspect itinerary for months. Three rounds after an overnight journey on a sleeper train, on my first day driving a rental car on the opposite side of the road, with four hours of commuting among courses, seemed a recipe for foiling this Scottish journey before I even got to Scotland. Cornwall Day would require the help of a whole host of deities. I would need help on the weather, and I prayed for the courses to be friendly, flattish walks. The powers that be cooperated nicely on the forecast; the weather was windy but clear, cold but dry. As for the second prayer, the powers had a good laugh, tossed my ball off a cliff, and said, Go get it.

  Mullion Golf Club had an angry glacier quality to it. It wasn’t a very long course, but there were a handful of heart-stopping hikes on holes you wouldn’t find on a golf course in my litigious homeland. The par 4 sixth dropped off a mountainside that I had to descend in a crisscrossing fashion like a child on skis, thinking to myself, Holy shit, my car is up there—how do I get back? That’s what numbers eight and nine were for, I learned, as both played up a wall of green, the latter being a par 5 that Mullion’s website refers to as “Cardiac Hill.” I would have thought its layout an unreasonable anomaly if I didn’t find even taller hikes along Perranporth in the afternoon. I scaled and scraped and wished I had gotten in better shape that winter. And from time to time, I stopped to enjoy the views at both courses that were not necessarily true links—they were more cliffside tracks—but each was full of deep-blue backdrops and quirks I cherished. Cornwall was known as England’s cool corner, where folks were a little more open-minded and laid-back, and Perranporth and Mullion took on that character, two unfussy and funky vertical golf courses that made Cornwall Day a joyful calorie burn.

  Somewhere between courses I stopped for a pasty (pronounced pas-tee) at a gas station (pronounced petrol station). I had failed to eat a sandwich in Sandwich, so I committed to sampling Cornwall’s great culinary export, the Cornish pasty (forget a hen—there was no time). Awaiting me in a tinfoil robe beneath a heat lamp was a crusty boat of nonspecific beef bathed in onion and rosemary gravy. Edible with one non-steering hand, it was a tasty fix on a trip whose meals had been left off the itinerary. I would subsist on Snickers bars and gas-station sandwiches, which were quite nice in the UK if you fancied butter and bacon, which I did. The pasty was also a bite into the region’s history, when the wives of Cornwall’s miners invented for them a lunch they could eat with sooty hands. They packed pastry with stewed meat and vegetables, then folded up the dough into a sort of pouch with a thick crust along one edge that served as a handle. Miners could eat the good stuff and toss the dirty crust away, and the concoction also seemed an ideal snack for golfers at the turn. How many hot dogs had I gobbled with fingers glowing a pesticide blue? I didn’t dispose of my pasty crust; I savored every crumb and calorie as I arrived at my third and final course of the day, the Trevose Golf & Country Club, where the view from the clubhouse made my full stomach leap.

  I first checked to see if they would still be serving dinner at 22:00. They wouldn’t, but they would send a burger to my room before the kitchen closed. My travels had taught me to always ask when meal service stopped; I had seen enough tourists enjoying peanuts from the bar for their suppers. Then I headed out into one of the loveliest clubhouse views of my golfing life. Beyond the leather couches pointed at a wide picture window was a fire pit softly glowing in the evening, and beyond the patio, a long first fairway reached out toward the ocean, tall cliffs and sea rocks sheltering a small harbor around the golf holes at Trevose. But more beautiful than the white spray on the black rocks or the warm orange flames was the path leading to the first tee: a gentle descent to what looked like a layout pimpled with mounds and gentle inclines, but still relatively compact and gloriously level.

  Trevose was the most championship-caliber of the Cornwall Day courses. Designed by the legendary Harry Colt—who left his stamp on the likes of Royal County Down, Pine Valley, Royal Portrush, and Muirfield—Trevose had hosted the British Amateur, and at 7,112 yards wasn’t the quick stroll I was hoping for at 6:00 p.m. But it was a meaty, pure links—not as eccentric as its partners that day, but true quality, with an opening nine that hugged the ocean and a back half that headed gently upward to the clubhouse. I played through in under three hours on an empty course and was pleased with a card that added up to 76. I had finally figured out how to avoid adding up my score as I played: become too brain-tired for simple addition. Along with a 74 at Mullion and a 75 at Perranporth, my scores were perking up, while my swing felt tired in a useful way. I made easy passes, with soft arms that let the clubhead lag like a bowling ball somewhere behind me. The contact, through much of Cornwall Day, was as good as I would need it to be at the end of this path I had laid out. Now to make some putts.

  My legs had a wobbly jiggle to them as if I had hopped off a daylong treadmill, and I sank into the couch in my suite at Trevose, the ocean view in front of me faded to black. I chewed my burger like a cow mushing cud, and the stillness around me had a magical peace to it. The rush of the day settled into a keen sense of presence, and I felt a full awareness of where I was and the lengths I had traversed and how astonishing life was and how large and beautiful this world could be and how I was going to golf the UK and it was going to be the experience of a lifetime. I felt so much gratitude, and it tasted as easy as a well-done cheeseburger.

  The golf today had been gorgeous, and my play was encouraging, but the real lesson of Cornwall was expectation. My assumption of what could be done in a day was far more modest than the reality; for all the time I had spent fretting over Cornwall Day, it just went ahead and happened, as all Tuesdays tend to do. My playing fifty-four holes was insignificant in the grand scheme around me, and I decided that my responsibilities henceforth would be simply showing up and getting on with it. Effort was mine; results belonged to somebody else. As for who that might be, I wasn’t terribly concerned that I had no idea.

  I’m not one for blending up God and golf. I don’t think it does either of them much good. The idea that God ever really cared about a touchdown or a putt, as if the deity were some replay official in the sky, doling out victories and losses like Santa Claus, is a portrait of the Divine that I find unsatisfying. The truth is, I don’t know enough about God to confidently offer Him or Her the capitalization, so I’m going to drop the tall G here, because to make god a proper noun means that I’m referring to a specific organization, place, or person, and god is as unspecific an idea as I can fathom. It doesn’t say anything in my grammar guide about capitalizing mysteries, and the notion that there’s a force behind all existence . . . for me, that needs to be the grand mystery, one that transcends our chases in the fields. So I’ll stick to golf—unless golf gives me a glimpse of something unknown at work in my life, which it did in the southeastern corner of England. I don’t think it was god I was feeling in my room at Trevose, but something about Cornwall Day had me wondering about the S-word, and if I now knew what it meant.

  Spirituality always sounded to me like the stuff of oily gurus and self-help pulp and slow-talking converts desperate for a life of depth. It sounded like something lapsed Catholics used to cover their asses and stake some claim to salvation—I’m not religious, but I am deeply spiritual. I resented the term for its lofty aspirations, its vague promises, its application as an emotional panacea. It sounded like bullshit that I didn’t have or want, which was what I called
most things I didn’t have but did actually want. And I don’t think I have it, but I do have an idea of what it is now, and it isn’t reserved for desert retreats or morning meditations. To me, it’s the awareness of myself as part of something bigger. That’s it; and it seems to fit with the flow and foibles of a game of golf. Few diversions will give you a better chance to see yourself as a small part of something vast than golf beside the ocean at sunset. Mountain climbing probably works, but I’m not that crazy.

  So I don’t know to whom or what I was grateful in Cornwall. I just know it wasn’t me. There was some grace in my day, and that was enough. Not everyone would get it, and I wasn’t sure I even did, but one person I knew for sure would not understand the peace I was feeling sent me a message, as if he were here specifically to interrupt it.

  RND. Old Tom. First in England. Westward Ho!

  I assumed that meant I would see Robert tomorrow.

  Partner

  There were certain things Robert did not do before 10:00 a.m. Wake up was one of them, so I wasn’t surprised that I teed off at St. Enodoc alone. A friend had called Enodoc the Ballybunion of England—high praise, comparing Enodoc to the jewel of Ireland’s golfing crown. To me, Enodoc ended up being all that—and a bag of crisps.

  Perhaps my affection for Enodoc was born of never having heard of it before Gramma Billy stuck it on my map, though I should have; the James Braid design has popped up on world top one hundred lists. Braid, born in Fife, Scotland, in 1870, surely lived to an age of 150—it had to have taken two lifetimes to design as many courses as are credited to his name, and to win five Opens along the way. Legendary golf scribe Bernard Darwin once called Royal County Down “the kind of golf that people play in their most ecstatic dreams,” but for me, he was describing Enodoc. It was a golf dream from which one would wake in tears for its having to come to an end, a course stretched along a coastline that had literally been blessed by golf.