A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  The club took its name from the eleventh-century St. Enodoc church, whose sturdy medieval steeple called me down the tenth fairway on what felt like the golf hole to which all other holes aspired, a long par 4 winding through a green valley, water snaking down its left side and spilling toward a blue sea on the horizon. I almost forgot that I’d made par as I hustled over to inspect the church set in the nucleus of the course, a sort of consecrated halfway house, curious about whether it might just be dressed-up ruins on display for visiting cameras. It turned out that St. Enodoc was a functioning parish, and mass was held there one Sunday every month. Time your round right and you could pop in at the turn and avoid skipping church again for golf.

  Enodoc had cliffs and hulking dunes and bunkers with names like Himalaya (which makes an unofficial claim to being the largest bunker in Europe), with holes that played off launching pads and out to the water and then back along hillsides, protected by creeks and by the sea, and not an ounce of it felt designed: a gorgeous, immaculate, and, when I played it, empty slice of hallowed ground.

  The place had a golfing poetry to it, so it was fitting to find that longtime Enodoc member and former UK poet laureate Sir John Betjeman lay buried in the church’s small graveyard. The grave and chapel had me thinking of another English poet and his Tintern Abbey, and the inspiration he found in such bucolic surroundings. St. Enodoc was Wordsworthian in quality, and by playing it, I understood what Wordsworth meant when he said nature let him “see into the life of things.” A round at St. Enodoc was life abundant.

  I wouldn’t tell any of this to Robert. For him, golf wasn’t poetry; it was a means of producing a tally as evidence that he was still okay, and still worth one’s envy. I made the two-hour drive up to Royal North Devon and found him sitting in his car in the parking lot, door open, sunglasses on, listening to country music just loud enough to give the impression that he did not give a damn that it was too loud. His bluster began before he even reached the clubhouse, his unimpressed attitude meant to impart an air of rare golfing skill. Robert’s being unbothered by pretty much any setting was strangely intimidating, unless you knew him, in which case you suspected he was moving so slowly not out of arrogance but because he probably needed to throw up. Still, he could make a hangover look cool, or even admirable for the adventurous evening it suggested.

  I had driven past the clubhouse before I knew I was there. It was tucked back behind a small agricultural or industrial park, a large sign on a building of metal siding announcing that Royal North Devon was around the corner and that it was England’s oldest golf course. The busy farming machinery in the parking lot soon made sense as we were greeted by our first on-course livestock of the trip—a few bored sheep milling about the burn (a stream) in front of the first tee box. I was happy to find that RND showcased this marker of genuine links land, that it was shared with grazing animals the way golf’s original layouts had split their space with farmers. Grazing land was too valuable to fence off from livestock, and golf began on such parcels for the same reason they were good for sheep. Because the sandy soil couldn’t be farmed for crops, it was left to hunters, shepherds, and men in wool chasing leather balls as part of some strange new game. The sheep were more valuable than the ball-chasers, and I would guess that the farmers who shared Royal North Devon still felt that way.

  Royal North Devon was a late addition to the itinerary, a course Robert insisted on after discovering it in Kevin Cook’s Tommy’s Honor. Cook’s history recounts Old Tom Morris traveling from his post as designer/greenskeeper/head pro at Prestwick to lay out the links at North Devon in 1864, bringing Scotland’s game to England like a great golf missionary. (Accounts tell of English golf having been played near London at Blackheath prior to Morris’s trip, but his Royal North Devon design remains England’s oldest established course.) Born and raised in St. Andrews, Morris relocated west to Prestwick when a gutta-percha golf ball got him fired from his hometown gig as a club maker. His boss, Allan Robertson, golf’s first pro and a manufacturer of the old-school featherie ball, caught Morris playing the new ball and canned him for fraternizing with the competition. Off to Prestwick Morris went, where the Open Championship was born as an invitational to showcase their new and invincible pro’s talents. A controversy over ball technology thus gave birth to golf’s greatest championship.

  In that first Open Championship, the fix was supposed to be in for Old Tom on a course he designed and looked after; it was a chance for Prestwick members to thumb their noses at the golf bullies up around Edinburgh and prove that they had the horse right here. But that didn’t happen. Old Tom lost the first Open. Golf’s will supplants the golfer’s will—even Old Tom’s—every time.

  The Morris pedigree, combined with the fact that Royal North Devon was the home track of John Henry Taylor, winner of five Open Championships and a member of golf’s great turn-of-the-century triumvirate alongside Braid and Harry Vardon—the three of them pretty much won everything for a while—made RND a must-play, yet I found it curious that the history section on its website made no mention of the Scotsman Tom Morris, giving the entire Royal North Devon spotlight to local boy Taylor. Was England’s oldest golf course shading its Scottish debt? But even more interesting than the names in its archives was the name of the town in which it was located. Westward Ho! was named after Charles Kingsley’s bestselling novel of 1855 as a strategy for drumming up tourism. A town named after a novel was irresistible to the writer in me, and to the grammarian in me, a town with an exclamation point in its name—the only such town in the UK—seemed a curiosity worth crossing off the list.

  We threw our first drives into a vengeful wind, managing to miss the sheep munching grass beside the tee box. I thumped my second shot low along the par 5, while Robert ripped a towering hybrid that dropped out of the air like a shot goose. He slammed his clubhead into the hard fairway and muttered something angry that I couldn’t hear through the breeze. We were both high-ball hitters—as Doc Suttie once told me, “You don’t hit your ball under the wind, you hit your ball over it”—and Robert had yet to surrender to his surroundings. For all the golf we’d played together in Ireland, he had never worked to alter his trajectory there, either. If the air was still, he owned the course. If the wind was up, then he had 84 or so excuses to share in the clubhouse. He stubbornly lobbed two more wedges into the breeze and made an opening six to my simple five, and his love affair with RND came to a swift-blown conclusion.

  The course required the lens of history to appreciate it. It was a forthright and authentic links of a minimalist flavor; its simplicity revealed its fine vintage, but it was not a postcard course for a golf thrill-seeker. The only standout design moment was on the fourth hole, where we teed off toward a wall of railroad ties that hoisted up the fairway like a dam. Railroad ties (or sleepers, as they were called here) on a golf course recalled modern tracks and Pete Dye, and I never liked them for the feeling that they brought something manufactured, something minigolf, into the game. But they were actually an Old Tom Morris innovation, and I would have to readjust my thoughts on so many Florida golf courses that made unintentional homages to golf’s founding father.

  We discovered other firsts at RND: A golfer playing with his terrier on a long leash was my first sighting of golf and dogs brought together in a way that made such undeniable sense, and that could certainly sell more tee times at home. Why do we leave our outdoor-loving friends at home when we go outdoors for five hours? If you find their unclaimed droppings a nonstarter, consider what the original golfers contended with on fairways shared with herds of livestock. Another first at RND was slow play. While the scorecard was stamped with the admonishment SLOW PLAY IS UNACCEPTABLE, on the eighth hole we found a foursome embroiled in a match for somebody’s farm. We came upon them on the tee box, only to get a casual nod. They hit their shots and pulled their trolleys ahead without inviting us through to play an otherwise empty golf course. Such was certainly their prerogative, but I felt a worry in my gu
t as I watched each pause, chop, and missed gimme up ahead.

  My playing pace so far had been below four hours, closer to three in most cases. Waiting to swing felt foreign, and on this day, it seemed a tad foreboding. I had already played eighteen, and there was no time for leaning on our clubs this afternoon, not with a six-hour drive up into Wales facing me at round’s end. So I did something I normally tried to avoid: I followed Robert’s impatient lead and hopped across the course to an open hole, skipping around and eventually filling up most of the scorecard. I hated to rush RND, but it was either that or listen to Robert complain, and when his mood went sour, it got dark, morphing from groaning about golf to doubting the worth of waking up at all. So we went fast and exited the RND property before the groups behind us could report the two golfers who were playing the course backward. I conceded myself two pars on holes we never quite found for a total of 74, while Robert refused to add his up because we hadn’t played properly. I likely beat him by a dozen strokes that day. He said he would meet me in Wales, but as he pulled away I knew he was headed for a dark pub or hotel bar for an evening of conversation and crushed grapes, a setting where Robert was always scratch.

  • • •

  I gained an education in the English man as I motored north that afternoon, rolling the window down every few miles to blow the sleep out of my eyes. Walking thirty-six holes (well, thirty-four) was not the most prudent preparation for a cross-kingdom drive, but the promise of new country and more Open venues and another day closer to Scotland pulled me onward, even while my GPS confessed so many more miles to go.

  The hours were put to use investigating something I had never encountered in Philadelphia—polite sports talk radio—as I learned that Liverpool had been a severe disappointment that season. There were Liverpool fans in every corner of the country, and they were all distraught. Chelsea was less popular, it seemed, even though they had just won the league, and when their fans called in, they struck me as Yankees and Cowboys types—smug front-runners. I learned that there were people who not only understood cricket but wanted to talk about it; England’s best player had just been left off the national team for some sort of rules infraction. Cricket apparently had its own Allen Iverson, and outrage at his mistreatment was voiced in what I thought was anger, though I couldn’t quite tell from its well-mannered delivery. A host called a guest a fool, then spent the next twenty minutes regretting his impertinence. The English man was angry, it seemed, and was ready to apologize for it.

  I rode into the town of Conwy on the north coast of Wales in darkness, a castle at the town’s entrance looming large and vigilant above a bank of yellow spotlights. Its ramparts and towers announced that I had arrived somewhere worth the drive. I took three unintended tours of the town before finding the Castle Hotel, where I stepped out of the car as if I were trying stilts for the first time. I attempted to stretch in the parking lot, but really just wiggled my arms at the air and then shuffled to the hotel entrance to find a room where I don’t recall taking off my shoes, able to grasp only three simple ideas as I plunged into sleep: I was in Conwy, in Wales. I was playing fifty-four holes tomorrow. And Steven Gerrard was the greatest footballer in Liverpool history. He would never walk alone.

  • • •

  I had always thought of Wales as the Maine of the UK: sounds quaint, and I hear the scenery is lovely; if only I ever had a reason to visit. As part of the United Kingdom, it was overshadowed by mighty England and massive Scotland, and it lacked the cachet of Northern Ireland’s contentiousness. It seemed like the cousin you forgot to invite to family dinner, and was probably best known for the title given to the heir to the Crown: Edward I was supposedly the first to call his scion the Prince of Wales in 1301, fulfilling a promise to the recently conquered Welsh that his son would be born in Wales and would be Welsh-speaking. Wales and golf had some history, but it was more of a rugby country; Ian Woosnam and the 2010 Ryder Cup weren’t exactly Tom Morris and St. Andrews. But it was Gramma Billy who preordained my left turn into Wales to visit one of her and Gene’s picks in Holyhead, and as with all things Gramma Billy, it made me smile.

  I did not expect to see them for a few hours, but as I pulled up the slope into the parking lot at Holyhead and noted the short palm trees (I never got used to this botanical anomaly in Ireland, where the Gulf Stream pushed a temperate climate all the way from Mexico to the British Isles, allowing you to stand there shivering in three sweaters and wonder how the hell you were looking at Hawaii), but there was my tall friend from Manchester, the one who had played no small part in my being in Wales right now. Next to him was a newer, shorter friend on the putting green, both wearing stocking caps on a sunny Welsh morning.

  At the age of fifty-five, Tom took his first golf trip to the southwest of Ireland and came home knowing what he wanted to do with his life. He hung up his corporate duds and decided to become an Irish and Scottish golf tour operator. Tom called his new company Old Sod Travel, and he contacted me for advice on navigating said sod. There began a friendship that would take us to golf clubs around America promoting golf in Ireland, all the way to a morning in Wales when he had been kind enough to pick up my friend Julian in Manchester and drive him out to the farthest edge of the UK. Julian had just arrived from Germany, and after a month’s worth of email between two strangers about the precise location of Julian’s mum’s home and its distance from the Holyhead golf course, the two new travelmates had beat me to the first tee.

  Holyhead was a special course, another James Braid brainchild built upon slopes that were filthy with gorse. The terrain was linksy if not true links, a windy seaside track where you seemed to be playing over, across, or around a treacherous mass of flowering yellow hillside. At Holyhead, the gorse bloomed along with our scores, as we were distracted by old stories and new news. Julian was now living in a sleepy suburb of Munich, where his German-language lessons were not going well—thus his eagerness for this trip back to his homeland. He was adjusting to full-time fatherhood, which had allowed zero time for golf. He confessed that his last round of real golf might have been with me in Ireland some eight years ago, so we let the gorse have the balls that morning (it’s gorse if it has thorns; otherwise, the gold stuff is called broom—and this was gorse) and made it over to our second round of the day at Bull Bay, up across the Isle of Anglesey to its northern coast, with the pep of new company in our steps.

  As one might have expected in a country that had been conquered and outshone by its noisier neighbor, Wales possessed a strong current of nationalism and pride in its Celtic roots, as evidenced by its use of the Welsh language on all its road signs. I’d never heard Welsh spoken aloud until we met the captain at Bull Bay, who was kind enough to join us for our round. In his fifties and of a sturdy, wind-resistant build, Trevor laughed when I asked him if he knew the secret to golf. Then he said something in Welsh. I think. It sounded like English spoken in reverse, and I wondered if he was transmitting the secret to me in code, like a backward message on a Led Zeppelin album. Golf’s answer—at least, the Welsh version—would remain a mystery for now.

  Trevor walked us around to the first tee, where two golf carts were awaiting our foursome. I eyed the two beautiful buggies with their soft vinyl seats. The temptation was mighty, but I declined, informing our host that my intention was to walk all my golf. Tom wisely acknowledged the futility of such a policy and opted to ride along with Trevor, leaving one lonely buggy beside the tee as my aching soles hit the turf, legs already seizing up from the thirty-minute drive to the course.

  “You’re not going to ride, Nigel?” Tom said from his cart, and Julian and I turned around to look for a fifth member of our party. There was nobody there.

  “Nigel, you don’t have to walk. Let Coyne do it.”

  While their two hours together in the car that morning had succeeded in bringing them to this remote corner of Wales, it had failed in acquainting Tom with Julian’s actual name. Worse, Tom had slapped some generic Anglican label up
on this Englishman—Oh, they all look like Nigels—and left Julian and me to cringe over who was going to correct him, and how. The fact that they had spent all morning together meant that we were well past any cordial window of name correction, and I lacked the energy for awkwardness. Besides, it was funny.

  “You want to walk or ride, Nigel?” I said.

  A wide smile spread across Julian-Nigel’s face. “I think I’ll walk.”

  Bull Bay offered a lumpy layout of long views and generous fairways, a course similar to Holyhead in its modest distances and cliffside setting, but with holes where the gorse was more of a backdrop than a participant. We didn’t find a single sleepy hole as we golfed our way along the dark-blue bay. Two birdies and a handful of sloppy chips carded me a polite 76 that we didn’t have a chance to toast in what looked like the top nineteenth hole in Wales, a second-floor bar where the glass doors slid open onto a wraparound patio, and where the members raised their pints to us on our way down eighteen. I was thankful Robert had disappeared for a few days. We would have been in that room for a week, and never would have made it to our third tee time around the corner from the Castle Hotel upon the links of Conwy.

  Our other-side driving shortcomings multiplied when partnered in a caravan. Still wearing our spikes as we drove, we raced back toward town, the sun already low in the sky, forcing Tom to blow a red light behind me and take three extra spins around a Welsh roundabout. But we finally arrived at Conwy and hustled over to the pro shop, all of us limping from our hips, but Tom and Julian-Nigel excited by the prospect of completing fifty-four holes in one day. With rare resolve, we set our chins and hoisted our bags and pulled on the pro shop door, only to find it bolted shut.