by Tom Coyne
We sniffed around the empty clubhouse, then came back out and knocked on the pro shop windows. The golf pro emerged from a back office, putting on his jacket to leave for the day. He let us in, and when we told him who we were, he explained that they were closing up and had expected us hours ago.
“We’ve had a busy day. We already played Holyhead and Bull Bay.”
He looked at us for a moment. “Today?”
“Today.”
“And you want to go out now?” There was doubt in his voice.
“We’ll play fast and get in as many holes as we can before dark. If that’s okay.”
Apparently, our excuse amused him—I doubted that any other latecoming golfers had tried the Holyhead–Bull Bay defense before—and he smiled. “Of course it is,” he said, handing us scorecards. “It’s all yours. Shouldn’t have anyone holding you up,” he added, laughing. The pro locked the door behind us, and we were off to tee thirty-seven.
Built upon dunes where it was said the first golf ball in Wales was teed up, the Conwy links dated to 1875 and were laid out by Old Tom’s nephew, Jack Morris. In my heretofore brief experience with Morris courses, I would have to give the nephew the nod as course designer. There was plenty of Old Tom’s handiwork left on the itinerary to sway my opinion, but Jack had done fine work in Wales. Founded by a handful of Royal Liverpool members, Conwy nestled into a corner of land between the Irish Sea and the River Conwy, and was an old gentleman of a track. The only Welsh course to ever hold an Open finals qualifier, its holes were confidently straightforward, and its drama was reserved and refined. It appeared an easy eighteen from afar, until you ventured forth and found its grabby bunkers and forced carries. We loved the distant Welsh hills and cliffs that framed our targets and provided an illusion of being on wild terrain without actually having to hike it.
The sun was setting over Wales as Julian-Nigel noted on the seventeenth hole that Conwy possessed a feature unique in golf. As he bent over to retrieve his ball from the cup, his groan drowned out the crack and pop of his back. He looked like a giraffe trying to play marbles, and as he lifted his head back up he explained that the cups in Conwy must be a good yard deeper than any golf holes he had encountered before. The crick in my back had me imagining the same anomaly. My spine had ceased bending somewhere around the turn, and after tapping in on the last, I had to squat like a sumo wrestler to lower my fingers into the hole, dropping my ball back into my pocket for the fifty-fourth and final time that day.
It was dark again as we passed shadows of the Conwy Castle and squeezed our rental cars through the one-lane archway in its wall. The Castle was a World Heritage site that I would have to visit again. The golf would bring me back, certainly, and then I would be sure to leave time for this unexpected fortress that was in handsome shape for its age of eight hundred years, a hideout for the likes of Richard II and the followers of everybody’s favorite holdout king, Charles I. Like the ruins I knew well from Ireland, the castle recalled the role that neighboring lands played in the tide-turning moments of the British monarchy. London got all the tourists, but it was in far-off corners like Conwy with its castle where the dustups went down and history was written. And the same could be said for golf in Wales—in my twenty-four-hour sampling, I found courses far from the links epicenters of St. Andrews, Inverness, Glasgow, and Liverpool that deserved their own Welsh golf vacation. Gramma Billy had sent me to a place that reminded me of something very simple about the game—that it was joyful. My morning started with fifty-four-hole panic and my evening ended with peace, so it was joy that I felt as I fell into bed and soaked in a hard-earned stillness of body and mind. I think I even prayed, if praying meant asking the powers that be to let the joy still be there come morning.
• • •
Folks who fret over the well-being of the game will tell you that today’s golf faces three foes: It’s too expensive. It takes too long to play. And it’s too hard. Solving the third problem might serve as a tonic for the other two; if the game wasn’t so difficult, we might be less inclined to regret the money we spend on it. And if we found the game less punitive, surely we would get around the course at a healthier clip.
Standing beside the door to the clubhouse at Wallasey Golf Club in the northwest of England, I learned how far golf hasn’t come. A hundred years ago, golfers faced the same frustration over the severity of the game, and a doctor at Wallasey prescribed a cure. “The thought ran through my mind that many players in competitions got very little fun since they tore up their cards after playing only a few holes and I wondered if anything could be done about it,” said the good doctor. We found these words on a plaque that commemorated one of Wallasey’s members, a Dr. Frank Stableford, whose scoring innovation changed the game.
In the States, we prefer the hard math of tallying all our strokes, but club competitions in the British Isles are often played by Stableford format, in which you count points rather than swings. Ask a Scot or an Irishman what he shot in a tournament and he is apt to tell you 32 or 36, or “Ah, twenty-seven; didn’t have it today.” Stableford accounting can differ, but you receive points for birdies and pars and bogeys, and no points for double bogey or worse. The system is meant to reward you for good holes and to not irredeemably punish you for bad ones, and on links courses—places like Wallasey, where Stableford observed people abandoning their scorecards—the wind and weeds can turn average golf shots into round-killers. “I doubt whether any single man did more to increase the pleasure of the more humble club golfer,” claimed British golf writer Henry Longhurst. Golf owed the doctor a huge debt as a man who grew the game, and in today’s era of declining play, one wonders where Dr. Stableford is when we need him.
As Julian-Nigel, Tom, and I stood on the first tee at Wallasey and leaned into the breeze for balance, I wished for the care of a doctor, be it Stableford or Quinn or Jekyll. I was not actually sore, as I couldn’t feel much below my waist and had to trust that my legs were there. We gazed out over a golf course that looked like morning delight. To our left, the eighteenth avalanched its way down to the clubhouse, its slope a mogul course landing at the green. Wallasey looked like another wild dune ride through the humps and bumps, though I wondered at our collective capacity to enjoy it as we grunted through our morning stretches, the three of us twisting on the tee box like great-grandparents dancing at a wedding.
I stepped up to the markers and bent over to jab my tee into the ground, and felt my head’s ballast pulling me toward the earth. I caught myself. I’d watched Robert fall over on a first tee before, puke behind a golf cart, and then rip a driver down the middle, but I wasn’t hungover—at least, not from pints. I was golf hungover. This was what I had been battling each morning—overconsumption that leads to physical and emotional distress. But as I had learned from Robert on so many golf trips, the hair of the dog that bit you was the only true hangover cure. Robert liked to recount the origin of the phrase as he enjoyed a morning cocktail, explaining that in medieval times, the cure for a dog bite was a potion concocted from the fur of the guilty canine. He thought such knowledge helped class up his cracking a Coors Light at the breakfast table. More of the offending substance was the only answer, so I steadied myself, leaned down again, and inserted my tee into the ground, letting out a moan as I stood back up.
“There’s a lot of grunting when I bend over,” I said, almost to myself.
“I’ll try to be more quiet,” said Julian-Nigel.
The best thing I could say about my opening drive was that it didn’t suffer. Its time was ended with a decisive rightward bash, far and sure, deep off the property toward the morning traffic of Wallasey. Julian-Nigel’s drive was not as resolute in its surrender. The bottom of his driver nicked a thin slice of his ball. The contact sounded like a jingle bell, followed by a wisp from the weeds directly in front of the tee box that swallowed his Pinnacle. We looked for his ball for a few minutes before we both lobbed one out onto the fairway and decided, as if there were ever any
doubt that morning, that we were playing Stableford.
The hair of the dog gently worked its powers, and with each passing hole our heavy heads grew lighter as the thrill of Wallasey woke us, and we played a stunning links that lived up to its heritage. The course was originally laid out by Old Tom in 1891, then updated by the likes of James Braid, John Henry Taylor, and, recently, Donald Steel, a sort of gluttonous mix of first-team British course designers. Wallasey even added American Bobby Jones to its roll. It was a regular qualifying spot for the Open when held at Royal Liverpool (Hoylake), and Jones qualified for the Open at Wallasey in 1930 en route to golf’s only Grand Slam. Jones was made an honorary Wallasey member and given a portrait painted by Wallasey member J. A. A. Berrie. Jones liked the picture so much that he asked for a second one, and today it hangs in the clubhouse at Augusta National.
We knew none of this history as we stepped up to the par 3 ninth tee and read a plaque commemorating Bobby Jones’s connection to the club, on a hole named after him on the scorecard. This homage to a fellow countryman here in a corner of England caught me unawares and had me feeling oddly nostalgic, as if I hung out with Mr. Jones back home and would have to tell him when I returned—Hey, they have a plaque for you on this really cool course in England. Wallasey became an epiphany: Here I was, traveling far to find my way into Open qualifying, playing the course Bobby Jones had traveled to (in those days, his trip would have been a proper odyssey of steam liners and trains) to do the same. I was at Wallasey for a reason, brought here by providence to follow in the bold footsteps of an American hero. I wondered whether I had been carried to this rumpled path of sand and grass, 147 yards into the breeze, for my first ace abroad. Or I would settle for a birdie—a 2 here would be a bright-enough sign. Or a hard-earned par, a testament to Jones’s steadiness. Or maybe just finding my ball after toe-knocking a 9-iron into the knee-high perdition, short and right of the green, would be a happy omen. I did find it, and I hacked it out for a four. A bogey still earned me a Stableford point, and I avoided the dreaded blob (what the Brits call an X—a hole unfinished or with no points scored). A point was proof enough that I was following Jones’s path. Maybe he bogeyed this hole, too, though I doubt they would have named it after him if he had nearly blobbed the thing himself. I don’t think Bobby Jones made a lot of blobs. Blobby Jones—probably not.
Wallasey snuck up on me, from its Stableford history to its golf-destination quality. As we ascended to the water views on the par 5 fourth (called Seaway, and site of one of my three-point birdies that morning), with the coast of Wales in the distance and a valley of turbulent fairway in the foreground, Wallasey earned certification as a “diamond in the dunes,” as it had been described by a visiting writer prior to last year’s Open down the coast. I knew there was great golf ahead at Hoylake in the afternoon, but on this trip, there would be nothing more uplifting than unexpectedly great golf, and that’s what we found in the kinks and quirks of Wallasey. We left reinvigorated, remembering that no matter how much we planned and prepared, the charm of golf was that it would always surprise us. I too often took golf’s capriciousness as its most maddening vice, but if I adjusted my stance and looked from another angle, its fickleness was the game’s greatest gift.
• • •
Robert boycotted Wallasey and Royal Liverpool. He was silently protesting the fact that I’d told him I couldn’t get him on Hoylake (as with Royal St. George’s being called Sandwich, Royal Liverpool was known by the name of its town, Hoylake). My next rota course, and home to the previous year’s Open Championship—atta boy, Rory—Hoylake was the only club of the 107 I planned to visit that wouldn’t offer me a tee time. I hadn’t even asked for a freebie, but their terse reply via an intermediary was that they “don’t see any value in your playing the course.”
My outrage quickly turned to agreement: What the hell would my playing there do for Hoylake? I dropped my resentment and turned to a friend of a friend who’d been a member at Hoylake for decades. Let’s call my host Charles. Since Charles would have to play with us, and with Julian-Nigel and Tom along, there was no room for Robert. So he said he was going up to Royal Lytham & St. Annes (two names but one course), to hell with us, and would talk his way onto the course. I knew there was a tournament at Royal Lytham that week, but I didn’t bother telling him. I didn’t want to rob him of the dignity of his grudge.
Charles was an elderly gentleman and an enthusiastic host, and his welcome to Hoylake, as if it were his backyard playground that he was eager to share with visitors, dispelled our fears of Royal Liverpool stuffiness. He showed us around the clubhouse, each mahogany room chockablock with another chapter in the history of golf, with portraits of all the past Open winners at Hoylake—Tiger, Rory, Hagen, and Jones—hanging on dark walls. He explained to us that Hoylake, like so many of the great old courses in the British Isles, owed its start to the railroad. Where the railroads paused for itinerant Victorians, up went hotels and golf courses. Hoylake was built upon the grounds of the old Liverpool Hunt Club’s racetrack, and Charles claimed it to be the oldest links in England. I took some silent satisfaction in having become enough of a UK links connoisseur to know he was wrong by a few years (see Royal North Devon). We stopped behind the famous clubhouse for a picture that Charles was kind enough to take, and for his age, he navigated our three iPhones well. As he eyed the screen and lined up his shot, Charles proclaimed, “Just trying to fit the big cock in!”
I turned to Julian-Nigel, and his wide eyeballs kicked off a fit of stifled giggles. Suddenly it was 1984 and I was an altar boy choking back laughs after Father Klinge farted during the Consecration. Did he just say that? Hoylake wasn’t so stuffy after all! I would later learn as I perused the photos on my phone that Charles was referring to the timepiece on the clubhouse. The large clock was something of a Hoylake icon, its hands visible from much of the links.
My television memory of Hoylake was of a course long and relatively flat, a tidy, straightforward track unlike the jaw-droppers I expected up in the Highlands. Some of Hoylake fit that prejudice. Take away its name and history and you had an honest, hearty golf course in tremendous condition, a links you would enjoy but have a hard time recalling specific holes of that evening. It seemed a course built for an Open: roomy, long, and a challenge for pros who wanted to be tested but not tricked. Come and get me, the course seemed to suggest, with an unbothered, almost aristocratic air about it as if it well knew its own importance and didn’t have to try too hard to impress.
Our bright day of Open golf was overshadowed by the quality of our accommodation. The Number Fifteen B&B took a few passes to locate, given that it lacked a sign (15 was the house number). Knowing that it was next to the fifteenth fairway only confused us, as the Open had swapped Hoylake’s fifteenth and seventeenth holes for a more dramatic finish. It was worth a few roundabouts when we got there. My room was spacious and clean, but its finest feature was the wall of glass between my soft chair and the fairways of Hoylake, just a short chip over the fence. I imagined having booked this room a year earlier, watching Rory rumble down the stretch from my window. As I watched the thick, grassy mounds turn from green to black, I chopped away at my email in my warm room, and a text dinged in from Robert: How was Hoylake?
Top notch, I replied. I didn’t bring up Wallasey, or the fact that I knew he didn’t get onto Lytham that afternoon. Where are you?
It took a few minutes for Robert to respond. I imagined him mentally composing an answer that would suggest he was somewhere great that I didn’t know about. Either that or he was searching Google images for a Liverpool strip club. I stared at my phone and waited for his reply—textpectation, I heard it called once—and thought about how much I missed my friend. The recent years had been distant and frustrating, watching Robert stand still as the world trotted past, unable to lift his eyes to see it.
It was not that long ago that Robert was out of college and trying to write a screenplay, living down the shore during the off-seaso
n with a beautiful girlfriend who visited him on the weekends and loved every flawed ounce of him. He was confident and always excited about the next project, the next trip, the next time we would be getting together for golf and wagers neither of us ever bothered collecting. He was everybody’s best friend; if Robert was going to be there, a party or a foursome or a road trip filled up in a flash. He was kind to everyone; it made him feel valuable, the way he could glimpse someone and know their story, and then know how to make them feel good about it. There was a time when this made him the guy you wanted to be around—a hopeful face, empathetic in a genuine way. And in a few years, it had somehow turned and just made him sort of sad, as if the world was transparent to him, and what he had seen of it he found wanting.
I missed the time we spent in Ireland, Robert talking up the locals as though he had been born in their town, effortlessly adopting the tone of a place and showing me the joys of long conversation. When we checked out of B&Bs, it was Robert whom the lady of the house hugged. It was Robert whom the lads in the pub locked inside after closing, who sang songs he didn’t know with a voice that turned the room silent. As I sat in my room in Hoylake, I realized that I had planned this trip for him, an adventure of such possibility that it couldn’t help but bring back the hope in my friend’s eyes. But so far I had seen very little of them.
I was half-asleep in my chair when my phone buzzed as Robert finally wrote back: Chasing.
Robert’s awareness of his decline made it all the more pathetic. You could sympathize with someone who couldn’t see his own condition, but Robert was lost and he knew it. I didn’t know whether he meant he was chasing a woman or a buzz or the secret to golf, but as I went to sleep that night, I knew we wouldn’t see him tomorrow. And that was probably for the best. The forecast was calling for something nasty.
British weather reports were about as useful as ashtrays on motorbikes—Chance of sun with intermittent showers; chance of rain with clear spells—but I begged tomorrow’s to be wrong. Our upcoming day was crowded on my spreadsheet, and the clouds on the news seemed as if they had settled down over the town for which we were headed, ominous blobs of a hue appropriate for a place called Blackpool.