by Tom Coyne
Approach
The 120th-tallest freestanding tower in the world was everything I dreamed it would be. Rising high above the shore promenade, the dim Blackpool Tower stood like a beacon calling pale Englishmen to its beaches for sausages and a sunburn. The structure, inspired by the Eiffel Tower, opened to visitors in 1894, back in the days when summering in Blackpool was a Manchester ritual.
As we drove along Blackpool’s long avenue of arcades and hotels and nightclubs, mermaid lampposts waving to us as we passed, Julian-Nigel recalled his childhood days in the back of an unair-conditioned car, face burnt beach red and covered in chip grease, as his family sat for hours on the one-lane road out of town. Listening to my English friend, I remembered my own day trips to Wildwood, New Jersey, a beach destination of tchotchkes and buzzy rides and free beaches, its boardwalk crowded with tank-topped man-bellies and moms sucking on cigarettes. It was a place draped in a thin film of joyless amusement, but time lends nostalgia to the sandy ice cream cones, and I liked something about Blackpool despite the half hour I spent in its soggy traffic. I liked that it wasn’t hiding what it was, that it embraced its overt cheesiness and its rank as a second-choice destination, because people needed a second choice. Blackpool was charming more than it was sad, even in the downpour that morning. And its golf course was delightful.
The rainy commute had us well behind schedule as we hurried out of the parking lot for our tee time in the Saturday open at Blackpool North Shore. Saturdays were the hardest days to find tee times, as most clubs reserved them for member play, so in order to fit in a Saturday thirty-six, I had to either beg my way into a member’s foursome or get invited to play in a competition. Fortunately, Saturday opens were abundant around the UK. Open fixtures were days when membership clubs invited outside golfers to play their courses at a reduced rate and vie for golf shirts in a tournament, and it seemed a practice worth imitating back home. Golfers got to play new courses and enjoy some competition, and clubs filled their tee sheets with paying players. Traveling Americans mostly overlooked open days, and that was a shame—opens were a great value, and getting mixed into a foursome of locals was a lot more fun than another round with three dudes you got sick of two days ago.
We held a handful of proper tournaments at my course back home, but in Great Britain, club calendars were crowded with trophy events. It made UK handicaps legitimate—their system only allowed for the posting of competition scores, and if you shot better or worse than your handicap, your index moved a whopping 0.1. Weekly no-gimme golf also made them better players. All over Britain, I witnessed golfers with antique bags and eBay clubs and covers on their irons, and with homemade swings that seemed a blend of cricket and karate, post admirable numbers. They knew how to golf their ball, and left golf vanity to Yanks like me.
It was dodgy enough that we were showing up to a tournament late, but it was downright embarrassing when we found that we were teamed with the club captain, Brian, a stocky man of middle age who was antsy to go and eyed us with disappointment as we approached, three limping Americans who probably just poured themselves out of a pub. I endeavored to make it up to him by unleashing my game upon this short and seemingly bare seaside track.
What I unleashed had Brian checking and re-checking my handicap—Zero? What math are they doing in America? Julian-Nigel hit every fairway on the front nine aside from the ones we were playing, and the stinging rain saw Tom retreating into a sad and contemplative space of quiet. It was a place I knew well, where you were surrounded by people but lost in your own head, realizing that your life as a golfer had been built upon a lie. We all felt a little bit of the golfers’ blues on the front nine as we shot Brian out of contention in his home club’s open.
Then, just like that, from the depths of golf depression, came one swing—a hybrid fired into a hillside, precisely where Brian pointed me, an approach that curled and hopped and rolled its way sideways to what seemed an inaccessible pin but magically yielded an eagle—and golf wasn’t just a great game but my breath and my purpose. It was a lesson I had learned more than any other in golf, to stick around until the good happened. It wouldn’t always be as dramatic as an ace or an eagle, but golf loves a grinder.
Two more birdies coming in had me under par for the back nine, and I was sure we would have to move the luggage around to make room for the trophy. Then we checked the scoresheets in the clubhouse and were reminded that this was a country of seasoned golf mudders. We wouldn’t have to find space for anything but our egos, now reduced to travel-friendly sizes.
The clubhouse sat perched above Blackpool, overlooking the town and the coast and the fairways that ran up, down, and across a hillside. It lacked the subtle ripples of a links; rather, its drama was in its vast, thigh-burning slopes. Our footprints confirmed that we were playing a seaside course instead of a links. If water comes up around your shoes, you aren’t playing on sand, and Brian explained that the grass was thin in spots because we were on clay atop rock, and clay took more time to warm and sprout grass after the winter. Blackpool North Shore looked plenty green to us, and it added a missing ingredient to my British mix—a genuine members’ club off the beaten tourist track, where the gentlemen made a fuss over foreign visitors.
I had been giving a print of my journey to each of the courses I visited, a smart-looking dark-blue map designed by Ballpark Blueprints, on which all the participating clubs were noted and numbered, and Brian was the first recipient to get excited about his course making the list. The four of us stepped out of the rain to pose for a picture with the map, then made the hard decision to forgo the hot soup offered to us as we hurried off for lunch at Lytham.
• • •
I drove to Royal Lytham & St. Annes beneath clouds of shame. I approached its clubhouse, a bright-bricked Tudor manor in which I was sure a bell was ringing for a butler, with the regret of a phony. I had set off to do one thing above all others—complete the Open rota—and here I was at one of the mainstays of that rotation, where champions like Bobby Jones, Gary Player, Ernie Els, and Seve Ballesteros were crowned, knowing I had failed at arranging an itinerary that included it. I left my clubs in the car, and my dripping waterproofs, too. My search for the secret to golf would have to pause at Royal Lytham, where today’s first tee was firmly off-limits.
The club was busy hosting the Lytham Trophy, a big-time amateur event with a global field, and a tournament at which Rory had finished third twice. My delicate Jenga of a schedule did not allow me to be in this part of the world on any other week, so I had to accept that my Open résumé would remain unfinished. The reservations folks at Lytham had graciously invited me to visit nonetheless and join them for lunch. I figured a poke around the clubhouse might soften the blow of rota failure, so Julian-Nigel, Tom, and I tiptoed into the locker room. The building was intimidating in its aged perfection, and in its dark-paneled changing room, the smoke of old ghosts seemed to linger, the specters of Victorians detaching their collars and checking their pocket watches all around us. The porter stopped us, and I prepared for a reprimand for having stepped into a restricted space. But instead we met an ebullient smile and a hearty handshake.
“You’ve made it!” he said, as if the Lytham Trophy were a mere sideshow to our lunch reservation. “Welcome. This way, right upstairs. Settle in and get yourselves something warm to eat.”
We did. On our way to the stairs, we took a quick look at the flatscreens in the locker room where that morning’s scores were posted. A field from around the world was struggling in the wind and water, their numbers ballooning well into the 80s. Blackpool North Shore was no Royal Lytham, but my morning’s 77 would have fit into the list quite nicely. I took some small encouragement from this, phony as it was.
The lunchroom was crowded with red-faced youngsters, wide-shouldered British teens with hair mussed from their battles on the course, and we each served ourselves a shepherd’s pie and sat down among the elite. There were kids with TEAM ENGLAND jumpers (sweaters) on, lots
of white belts and flat bellies on these Walker Cup hopefuls. You could tell their talent by their comfort, how they sat here in this temple of a clubhouse where nearly every golf great had sat before and could not seem less impressed. In all my chasing of golf at their level, this was the quality I lacked. On the course, we looked similar enough, but it was in the lunchroom where I felt the difference. They were comfortable among the best. It was their unbothered and regular game, their staid milieu. I felt my fakeness at Lytham, and also my age. I was sure some of these players needed their parents to drive them here.
We sat quietly, the pace of the last few days catching up with us in the soft leather chairs of the lunchroom, and I looked around at all the talent and the tiny-waisted bashers and thought to myself, Who cares. It struck me firmly, a revelation to knock me off my horse: Who the hell cares? Who cares what they shot or what their sweaters say? Who cares what they think of this threesome of sleepy-looking tourists over here? They didn’t know me. They didn’t know where I had been, and could never guess where I was headed. And the truth was, they weren’t thinking about me at all. I had to stop playing the game in my head in which I not only knew what people were thinking about me but also thought that it mattered.
There was a time when I would have beaten Julian to the bar and figured out a way to feel peaceful here, but on this trip, I had to actually learn to get more comfortable in my own skin. They played golf. So did I. Sometimes they carded better than me, and sometimes they didn’t. I didn’t have to win their approval; I just had to put a ball into a hole. So I headed out to the putting green to do so.
Julian snapped a couple of pictures of me putting on the practice green with the Lytham clubhouse in the background. I went around, putting to eighteen holes and keeping score on the card (all 2s and a 1; I exploded Lytham’s course record). It was as close as I was going to get to playing Royal Lytham that day, and that was fine. I had gathered what Royal Lytham & St. Annes had to offer.
• • •
As we pulled into Royal Birkdale after five o’clock on a rainy Wednesday, I could see it in Tom’s eyes: he was golf-angry. Tom was as agreeable a gentleman as I had met in my travels; polite and positive, he had fallen in love with links golf later in life, so he had brought to the trip a sort of born-again enthusiasm for golf over here. He and Julian-Nigel (we had yet to correct Tom, and both silently accepted that Nigel—sometimes shortened to just Nige now—was sticking around) had hit it off as travelmates, but Tom had been scoping out British courses for his clients for two weeks before he met up with me, and at Birkdale he finally hit the wall. It was a mood I understood. Golf-angry was easy to spot—the bitterness, the regret, the childlike tantrum that, in adults, manifested itself as a silent face on a once un-silent man.
He was leaving tomorrow, so he was finding the wall at the right time. I wasn’t entitled to surrender yet—far from it—so I had to nod and smile as he told us he wasn’t playing Birkdale, not in this downpour. Judging by the parking lot, we all might be in for a surrender, I thought. There were two cars in the lot at Royal Birkdale, and they both belonged to us.
The young assistant pro behind the desk looked like the last shopkeeper in an abandoned town. He bolted upright at the sight of us: Golfers? Today? Have you been outside? The first tee was certainly open, he informed us, and as I hurried down a hallway to the bathroom before a round that I knew we would have to play in record time—a long drive to the airport awaited Tom and Julian—I took a moment to study the pictures of Birkdale’s Open winners. It was easy to forget what had happened on a course when you were out there battling it, lost in your own numbers, but each Open clubhouse celebrated its champions with portraits and paintings, and it was at Birkdale where it hit me: By visiting the whole rota, I was sharing ground with every soul who ever meant anything to the game. It seemed an obvious epiphany, but I didn’t realize the magnitude of such a gift until the pictures of Watson and Palmer caught my attention at Birkdale. I snapped a few pictures of Palmer’s photograph, then thanked the pro again for still being there when we arrived and headed off into another land of legend.
You wouldn’t know Birkdale’s age and significance from its clubhouse. The modern white building looked like an ocean liner docked above the course, a clock stuck to the side of the vessel’s lone smokestack. I was glad for that pause in the clubhouse, because outside, Birkdale was a watery blur. So many great golfers had stood here on this opening dogleg, studying its every blade of grass and envisioning their tack into golf’s greatest stage. I just stepped up and whacked it. I think it went straight, but I wasn’t really looking. I wiped the water from my eyes and lifted my bag onto my shoulder, its weight settling into a raw cradle beside my neck. It had been a long few days.
As I mustered the resolve to splash forth, I heard footprints behind us and turned to see a Boston Red Sox cap headed to the tee.
“Screw it. I’m playing,” Tom said, and in doing so he put into words the abstract motivations that had guided most of my life. Why am I here? Where am I going? Screw it, and play on.
Even when played at a trot, Royal Birkdale easily topped the other Open venues I had visited, at least for challenge and intrigue. Very unlike Hoylake, each hole seemed to hide something from us—a green tucked around a corner, a bunker that seemed out of reach but wasn’t, an elevated approach that required two extra clubs, not one. The variety of crafty holes energized us and lifted us out of our collective suck. There might be Open courses with more bunkers, but I doubt they’re as hungry as the ones at Birkdale. Shot after shot, what looked like safe balls rolled their way into wet beds of sandy bogey.
The empty course seemed eager to punish us for waking it up on its day off, stealing balls and pushing putts away from the hole. Julian-Nigel got busy lightening his load for the upcoming flight. He emphatically fired balls into the gorse, hard and low rockets that none of us were tempted to look for. His swing hadn’t progressed much during this trip, but he had mastered a new move where he was able to reach into the bottom of his bag and lob a ball twenty yards ahead of him in one fluid motion, back in play without breaking stride. His resolve was inspiring. He wasn’t golf crazy like me, yet here he was, plodding his way through his ninth round in three days, suffering and spending his beer money on golf balls, with no reason to be out here other than to support a friend.
Julian-Nigel didn’t know it, but his many strokes at Birkdale were an inspiration, as was the perseverance of Tom. In his late fifties, Tom had warned me that he wasn’t going to join me for every round on my schedule, but as we hustled around Birkdale and all tapped in on the last, it turned out he had.
In the upcoming weeks, if I needed reason to carry on and keep searching, I would recall the time and the aches that my friends had given to my quest, and my complaints would quiet. Selfish twit that I was, I wondered whether I would have done the same for them. I aspired to be that sort of friend, to be like Julian-Nigel, who had gone so far as to write to the corporate office of William Hill, a British bookmaker, to prove his investment in my crusade. He sent me a picture of his special-order betting slip: TOM COYNE TO MAKE THE CUT AT THE OPEN—£10 @ 1,000-1.
It was hugs instead of handshakes as we said our good-byes and headed for the parking lot, where a truck with its lights on was parked beside the exit. A lone greenskeeper had stayed behind to make sure we made it around okay. With a wave good-bye as my car passed his, he closed up behind us, and my search through the southern half of the UK came to an end.
England and Wales had done their part. I had grasped the logistics of golf travel at full throttle and was hardening to the weather. My itinerary seemed like less of a question and more of a plan, and fear was giving way to process. The scores had declined slightly over the week, but upper 70s was a habit I would need to halt up north. My ball flight was somehow lowering; give me a year on the range and I don’t think I could learn a knockdown, but point me into wind for a week and my body could figure it out. Links golf was changing my
game without my thinking too much about it, and if this trend continued, if these great courses continued to lift my quality up to theirs, then my dream that golf’s home could teach me how to play might actually play out.
And if it didn’t? Screw it. I’m playing.
Home
I landed in Scotland with plenty more baggage than my sticks and suitcase: I brought with me needs and nerves and assumptions. For someone who had hitched his life to golf, taking my first adult trip to its home was emotional and triumphant, and a wee bit worrisome. What if the place didn’t live up? If Scotland wasn’t my golf miracle, it wasn’t as though I could hop over to Iceland to find my answers. This was golf’s Mesopotamia, its Jerusalem, and its Cooperstown—either I found golf’s soul here, or I was a fool for looking.
A rental snafu saw me handing over a royal flush of credit cards for the lone automatic transmission left in Edinburgh—a least, the only one they didn’t need back for fifty days—and exiting the airport in the accidental luxury of a BMW station wagon. I forgave myself for the splurge and embraced the opulence as I zoomed down the A1. For a guy who had schlepped around Ireland in one pair of soggy shoes, I felt as if I were cruising into the big leagues, my backside toasty from the seat warmer. This was how the Tour players arrived at their golfing destinations—in style—and maybe I could pretend my way into their company.
I knew that learning Scotland’s links after having sampled all of Ireland’s would peg me as an arbiter in the Scottish-versus-Irish golf-trip debate. I wasn’t ready to rank them yet, and surely would, over time, concoct a polite rejoinder that would not offend friends on either side of the Irish Sea. I told myself not to play at comparing them, but as I rode out to the first Scottish golf course on my list, passing signs for Gullane, North Berwick, Archerfield, and Dunbar, I already sensed a difference between an Irish and a Scottish golf vacation.