A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  When you golfed Ireland, if you wanted to fill your trip with top-rated tracks, there was no way to get around long hauls to links scattered around the island. The scenery comfortably consumed the time, but as I passed a blue sign advertising this stretch of Scotland as EAST LOTHIAN—SCOTLAND’S GOLF COAST, it became clear that this country promised the ease of multiple links jammed within a tidy circumference. You could drop your anchor in a dozen different Scottish towns and, within thirty minutes’ drive, play a full itinerary without repacking your suitcase. Advantage Scotland, it seemed, though you would need two months to play all the courses, while with ten days and a bus driver in Ireland, you could cover the country’s greatest hits. There was no way to do Scotland’s surplus of links that way—not unless you had a rental car for fifty days and happened to be married to my wife.

  The East Lothian loop of courses was anchored by North Berwick, a course I had heard more about than any other during my preparations. St. Andrews, Muirfield, and Carnoustie were courses folks sounded like they were happy to have played, but North Berwick was the course that emailers recalled with the giddiness of prospectors who had unearthed a gold streak. I would be there in a few days’ time, but first I was headed farther down Scotland’s Golf Coast to a place called Eyemouth. It was not a Gramma Billy pick, nor had I met any golfer who was familiar with it, but in the direction I would be traveling around Scotland (counterclockwise), it was the first coastal course on that path. It was the lone round on my calendar that afternoon, but what a round it would be—eighteen holes that would introduce me not just to golf in Scotland but, more important, to golf with Gramma Billy.

  I had been too busy to think much about who was actually waiting for me in Eyemouth. After a year’s worth of steady correspondence in which a woman named Phyllis (who called herself Gramma Billy) shared with me her love of golf and her uncommon joie de vivre, it finally hit me as I sat in my car beside a clubhouse overlooking the ocean: Who the hell was I about to meet? I had never partaken of Internet dating, but suddenly I knew the angst of John Doe standing outside a restaurant, wondering if the woman inside had cats, talked to them, and had possibly brought one with her.

  We had built a nice little friendship via email server, and I wondered whether GB and I should have kept it that way. Meeting up was a chance worth taking, I told myself. I wanted to trust that the universe was putting the right people in my path, but as I walked into the Eyemouth clubhouse and headed up the stairs to where the pro told me a lady and a gentleman were waiting for me, not quite ready to meet a stranger who sent me chocolates and called me Sir Tom, I thought for a moment that the universe was out of its mind.

  There was very little that was Gramma-like about Gramma Billy, who met me with big hugs and gifts: a white caddie bib with COYNE on the back for my looper in the Open, and teddy bears for my girls. She was thin, with bright-red hair and pink rain gear, sporting careful makeup and a coiffure that suggested she was here to golf, but not at the expense of looking her best. Gene was a tan and healthy-looking man in his sixties—nothing grandparently about his appearance, either—in a golf sweater from Carne, my favorite course in the world, that I immodestly assumed had been worn for our meeting. Our introduction held some of the awkwardness of meeting a complete stranger and an old friend at the same time, but any oddness was put to rest by the task at hand—golf. My itinerary was like having little kids; it could get me out of any awkward spot or save me from having to do anything I didn’t want to do. Sorry, can’t make it—kids. Sorry, have to run—golf.

  Email Gramma Billy was a devil-may-care, carpe diem persona who feasted on life’s marrow. Incarnate Gramma Billy was exuberant as well, but I sensed some anxiety about our afternoon. We had talked golf for a year, and now she had to go out and show her game to me, the big golf writer, so I felt her pain as the flops and flubs came along. I had been on her side of the twosome many times before and knew the feeling well—that sensation that you’re playing through cement while the whole of the golfing world collectively judges, personally convinced you’re holding up everybody’s round and ruining their day, if not their lives. I kept telling GB that it was no bother, that we were out here for fun, but she continued to apologize for her misses. She had come to Scotland to help me on my Open quest and seemed quickly convinced she was interrupting it. Truth was, as I made par after birdie after par, Gramma Billy and Gene had brought some golf magic with them.

  As we walked off the eighteenth hole that evening, it was clear that this quest had changed. The course was an adventurous surprise, and a track to be added to a Golf Coast itinerary for its sixth hole alone. After a snoozy opening stretch, I was sympathizing with the North Berwick golfers who skipped Eyemouth, until I arrived at a tee box that felt like a punch on the chin. I expected the drama to pick up as the holes worked their way down to the sea, but when I surveyed number six—167 yards over waves and into the face of a hulking cliff with a flagstick hoisted above the rocks like a candle perched atop a wedding cake—I was shocked, and I wondered if on day one I had found the best par 3 in Scotland. I was careful to abbreviate my follow-through to avoid tossing myself to a rocky death, pushing a 6-iron up beside the green and gladly accepting a four. It was one of only two bogeys I would make that afternoon, and alongside four birdies, I had finally broken the par barrier with a score of 70. The switch had been flipped, I told myself. No more begging for pars and settling for 78—in Scotland, the years and miles were going to converge in joyful destiny. No more hoping; it was time to get to the doing. And I had my good friend Gramma Billy to thank for coming along and turning my golfing tide.

  Maybe it was the lightness I felt in my step for having to play only eighteen that day; maybe it was the forgiving rough or the short distances at Eyemouth (6,404 yards in total). But I think it was Gramma Billy being there to remind me of some things I’d forgotten in the hotel-golf-food-golf-hotel shuffle. Her presence recalled what I was after and how much it mattered, not just to me but to people like her and Gene; their caring made me care more, and I could feel that focus as I played. It seemed impossible to be the golfer I wanted to be, but when I saw myself through their eyes, I could play the part, the role of a guy who made two under look easy. I believed in my game at Eyemouth because I knew Gramma Billy and Gene did. Their presence reminded me that there was something more important than just getting on—and that was getting on well.

  No more would I wake to mornings of traveler’s doubt and bogey dread. The next dawn, I hurried out of the flat I’d rented by the sea in North Berwick and hustled off to the Dunbar links, where I was given a welcome as warm as Gramma Billy’s. A Dunbar member named Graham had been following my blog, so he arranged for me to meet the club secretary and the pro in the shop, where I was given a book of course history and a Dunbar club tie. (Most Scottish golf clubs have an official necktie that’s worn by members, and if you can buy one in the pro shop, it’s a far cooler souvenir than another hat.)

  Dunbar was a mainstay on the Golf Coast, where the game had been played since 1617. The course has been an Open qualifying venue, and its holes were engineered by both Tom Morris and James Braid, and if it were set any closer to the sea, you would have to play it in waders. The quaint white clubhouse seemed ready to fall into the ocean in a bad storm, and the holes hugged the water in a classic nine-out, nine-in routing. They were so tightly packed between the dunes and the sea that a few holes bottlenecked and crisscrossed as you worked your way out to the end of the property, careful to dodge oncoming shots as you hunted for your drive. It was a good course for a guide to tell you where to pause, and I had two excellent ones in Graham and Eleanor, a married couple in their late forties, both with single-digit handicaps. I couldn’t help but watch them and wonder if that would ever be me and Allyson someday. And then as I watched Eleanor beat her husband on most of the holes, I found myself pleased that my wife was a golf agnostic.

  Along with steering me around the historic and exacting links of Dunbar (home t
o the first PGA Championship on the European Tour in 1968), Eleanor and Graham shared with me translations for Scottish lingo I was bound to soon encounter. I already understood that wee was the most versatile word in Scottish English—it could modify any noun in the dictionary, and might be invoked up to nineteen times in one sentence: Take a wee left up at the wee shop where you can have a wee stop for a wee cup of tea and a wee bacon roll . . . Less obvious were the expressions Eleanor decoded for me: You’re a long time deid (Take it easy, you’ll have plenty of time to worry when you’re dead); Lang may yer lum reek (Long may your chimney smoke, or, I wish you well). The idioms only grew more complex as they turned regional, and Graham explained that up in Aberdeen, I might be greeted with Foos your Doos? (How are your pigeons?), to which I should reply Still peckin! I could have used their help in the Highlands, where I would hear It’s a sair ficht for half a loaf (It’s a sore fight for half a loaf, or, Life is hard), along with my favorite etymological enigma, Is the cat deid? (Your pants are short; they’re at half-mast, for the dead cat).

  My 76 wouldn’t have gotten me into the Open, but with death to the left or right on every hole, I wouldn’t have shot myself out of the tournament, either. Leaving Dunbar with some dialect and a decent scorecard, I stopped Eleanor in the parking lot to ask a question. She was one of the best players I had partnered with on my travels thus far, a powerful straight hitter who pushed around a Tour bag bejeweled with tags from courses in Florida and the Carolinas. Eleanor played as if she might know the secret to golf, so before I said good-bye, I asked her what it was.

  “Keep smiling,” she told me. And she was smiling when she said it.

  • • •

  On the east end of the town of North Berwick (pronounced Bear-ick, or just Beark), the Glen Golf Club was overshadowed by the celebrated North Berwick West Links down the street, but as Gramma Billy, Gene, and I hiked our way up to the first green after having launched hopeful approaches toward a hilltop, a thrill ride of cliffside golf came into view. Past the green of the golf course, I saw the dark-blue waters of the Firth of Forth, across which I could make out the coastline I would soon be golfing on my way around to St. Andrews. As we walked along greens planted atop rocky outcroppings and tees hanging over the ocean, it was hard to believe that such a small town harbored two such golf courses. Pundits said the West Links was the flagship of the pair, but it would take some real drama to prove that this Braid design was the lesser (for the record, the Glen claims golf was first played in North Berwick on their links land). As we played our way up and around the hills, out in the firth the Bass Rock seemed to rise out of the water like a giant granite soufflé. The volcanic plug was once home to a castle-turned-prison and was now a sanctuary for a million white seabirds and a lone lighthouse that we could see from most of the holes at Glen. The course had me thinking that golf upon sand might be its truest form, but as I’d found in places like Perranporth and Holyhead and Ardglass in Northern Ireland, golf upon rocks might be its most boisterous.

  My assessment of golf courses and how I rank them for quality is an unscientific and emotional process in which I forgo all objective barometers and ignore any design diagnostics and instead rely on the flight factor: If you told me I could come back and play this course tomorrow, how willing would I be to change a flight and return? Would I feel a fervor and a zing in my bones? Would I pay the change fees and abandon my calendar? Was it worth alienating a spouse? Canceling a class? Or would the invitation be met with a passing jolt of excitement, or a fake smile, or a polite no-thank-you? I let my gut tell me how good a course is, and at Glen, it was telling me we had found something superb. The emotional ingredient of the flight factor meant that my estimation of a golf course was swayed by non-golf dynamics, ranging from the reception in the pro shop to the exaggeration of local history by the starter to the clubhouse views and the quality of the accompanying soup. But nothing did more to heighten my appraisal of a golf day than the people with which I spent it, so no wonder I thought Glen was extraordinary after an afternoon with Alan McPherson.

  I should have known who Alan was before the fifth hole, but it took me that long to put all the pieces from the previous year’s emails and tee bookings together. He met me and Gramma Billy outside the pro shop and passed along a small goodie bag with brochures and Glen tees and golf balls. I was especially grateful for the tees—make sure to pack plenty, because in Scotland, you won’t find any spares scattered around the tee boxes. Golfing Scots are a prudent lot. The locals I played with rarely abandoned a lost ball—you would expect the gorse to be ripe with Titleists, but I found strays only on tracks frequented by Americans—and they never surrendered their tees, chasing after the colored plastic sticks as if they were old family heirlooms. At one point, I was informed that the cure for seasickness in Scotland was to stand the vomiting bloke by the boat rail and put a 10p coin between his teeth. I didn’t share this joke with Alan, who had a sturdy frame built for Scottish gales and spoke with a deep Lothian throat. With a white beard and rosy cheeks, he looked like a younger, fitter St. Nick, if Santa were only as friendly as Alan.

  I neglected to read the business card he put in the goodie bag, or else I might have foreseen the revelation that was to come out on the links (the card advertised his blog: http://scottishgolfcourses-allofthem.blogspot.com). Alan was a longtime caddie who was currently looping over at a new, upmarket Tom Doak course called Renaissance. I loved that caddies over here could not only make a living but also afford membership at their local clubs, yearly dues at most courses hovering around a few hundred pounds. As Alan offered his impressions of the links on my itinerary—it seemed as though he had played all of them—I was surprised when he asked me, “So you’re at it again?”

  The fact that Alan was familiar with my last book was enough to push Glen to the top of my world rankings, but I could have never guessed that this generous soul waiting for me by the clubhouse would turn out to be my kindred golfing spirit. He not only knew of my Irish trek but had read the book. More important, he owned the book, and had paid for it in hardcover. I loved him like my own father. Alan explained that if I had a chance to go back and read the first of his hundreds of blog posts, I would find mention of my book as an inspiration behind his life’s own gonzo golf adventure. In A Course Called Ireland, he found a like-minded enabler for his own golf fantasy, and soon the walls of Alan’s basement would be covered with over six hundred Scottish ball markers, one for each of the courses he’d played on his quest to play every single golf course in Scotland—nine-holers, island tracks, both links and parkland—and tell the tale of each one. When we met at the Glen, he had only twenty-some spaces left to fill.

  Alan’s whole persona seemed to glow as I watched his thick wrists muscle his ball across the Glen fairways, stringing together birdies and pars with a game that wasn’t flashy but was well-seasoned. Forget Bagger Vance or Shivas Irons, I thought—here was my guide. Since the moment I first scratched A Course Called Scotland? into a journal, I had wondered whom I would ask to caddie for me in my Open qualifier. I expected to maybe find this imaginary wise man in a cave up in the Highlands, or falling out of a pub in Glasgow, or by a peat fire in a cottage on a remote Scottish isle. I didn’t know how I would know who the right person was, but I would know. And I did.

  I played most of the front nine under par, making the case for the request I planned to present to Alan at round’s end. And Gramma Billy’s game came into order as she knocked steady fairway woods toward the green and then hurried to putt out. She hit the ball often, but she played quickly—too quickly, I feared, and wished she wouldn’t be so accommodating to her partners. As she made her way around the course, I noticed how Gene was often there to scoop the ball out of the hole for her, and how on most holes, he would toss her light bag over his shoulder and carry for the both of them, sometimes reaching over and holding her hand as they walked. It warmed my heart to see such chivalry and affection from my golfing grandparents, the sort of p
artners one looked at and thought, Now, that there is the point.

  The fun of the Glen could not be diminished by our shockingly slow pace of play. Locals played quickly, ever racing the weather, but we were stuck behind two groups of visiting Scandinavians who finally stopped to smoke and let us through. I would run into Swedish golfers all over Scotland; as it was explained to me, the Swedes were golf crazy, but the game was prohibitively expensive over there. It was cheaper to fly to Scotland and play for the weekend than to book a Swedish tee time or join one of their pricey clubs. That was living, I thought—two weekends a month in North Berwick, traveling to Scotland’s Golf Coast as though it were a trip down the shore.

  Alan’s caddie lexicon was well-primed with the encouragement and guidance one wanted from a pro jock. When I caught a drive on the seventh, he noted, “I don’t go that far on my holidays”; and when it was time to it let it all hang out on a par 5, he exhorted me to “Let it rip. Don’t spare the horses.” He was a font of course history, explaining that Glen took its name from a small collection of trees near the first tee that Robert Louis Stevenson, a regular visitor from Edinburgh, walked and celebrated in his poetry. Tiny Fidra Island out in North Berwick’s harbor was said to be Stevenson’s inspiration for Treasure Island, its outline appearing in early editions of the novel. Alan explained how Fidra and Bass Rock and the lofted Glen fairways were the product of the curious green mountain behind us, its frozen black lava flows still visible beneath tee boxes at the water’s edge.