A Course Called Scotland
Page 11
On eight, when I went looking for the bell that a sign instructed us to ring as notice to other golfers that we had cleared, Alan laughed and said, “They’re still looking for a replacement. The greenskeeper thought he had ordered a real beauty of a bell on eBay until it showed up and was about four inches tall. Makes a lovely Christmas ornament.” The greenskeeper was otherwise on top of his game at Glen, where it seemed a lava base grew the greenest of grasses.
When I asked Alan a dumb question about the course down the road—“So if they call North Berwick the West Links, which is the East?”—he had a quick answer: “You’re standing on it.” Alan had played the Bruntsfield Links where I would be attempting to qualify at trip’s end, cementing the far more important question I had for him. We had to rush the back nine and didn’t finish the final four holes, a blasphemy I would not have allowed were it not for Gramma Billy’s plans for dinner, at which I had been told the elixir for Open qualifying was on the menu. But before we hurried off, I asked Alan if he might be willing to carry for me in six weeks’ time at Bruntsfield.
“Of course I will,” he said.
The qualifier had been looming like a judgment day, a cloud of dark insecurity for which I could only pretend to be prepared. But as I drove to dinner that evening, it no longer felt like a nemesis; it was a chance. I imagined Alan slapping my putter into my palm on eighteen, ahead of us a long walk to a green ringed with quiet faces. It felt real, and I felt ready. I wished we were in Bruntsfield in the morning. Still weeks away, but I was ready to change my flight and remain a little longer.
Standards
They were magical meat, these lamb chops of legend. Back in 2013, Australian journeyman pro John Wade was staying at the Milleur House in North Berwick, hoping to qualify at Dunbar for the upcoming Open at Muirfield. The night before the tournament, the lady of the house, Moira, served John a plate of her secret-recipe lamb chops, and the next day, John went on to set the Dunbar course record, firing a 63 and earning himself a spot in the Open field. He credited his play to Moira’s cooking, so it was with great hunger that I arrived at her home that evening, hoping that the secret to golf would be served with a side salad. Whether they were enchanted chops or not, the prospect of a home-cooked meal in lieu of another fried dinner set on a bath-towel tablecloth and eaten in bed seemed magical enough.
Leave it to Gramma Billy to find a B&B that had hosted and fed an Open qualifier. She and Gene had booked a room at the top-rated guesthouse, and through emailing with its magnanimous owners, Moira and Drew, discovered its qualifier legacy and arranged a special dinner where I could shovel golf redemption into my mouth. The house was immaculate and the hospitality humbling; dinner was served on fine china with the family silver, and each course arrived like a work of prosciutto and avocado art. The lamb chops lived up to their billing. I had wondered what my perfect pre-qualifier meal would be, and though that round was weeks away, I would recall this dinner and feel ready.
A golfing neighbor named Martin joined me and Gramma Billy and Gene, and along with Drew, he shared stories of the area’s uncommon golf history, nearby Muirfield taking center stage. It seemed that most golfers in this part of the country had a story attesting to Muirfield’s snobbery, and to its status as a bastion of expert imbibing. It was said a day at Muirfield meant a two-hour round of golf followed by a four-hour lunch. My hosts confirmed the mystique with their own tales of Muirfield haughtiness. Martin had been berated for entering the men’s lavatory through the wrong door (the visitors’ entrance was five paces away), and his elderly father-in-law once strolled down the long drive that leads to its famous black gate, emblazoned in gold with The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, where he stopped for a moment to gaze at the course beyond the gateway.
“What are you doing, sir?” asked an approaching member of the staff.
“Just having a look for two minutes,” the old man replied.
“Make it one,” he was told.
Even Ben Crenshaw and Tom Watson had been kicked off the course after sneaking out to play it with hickory-shafted clubs. Maybe they should have checked in at the pro shop, or maybe Watson was simply feeling entitled that Sunday—after all, he had just hoisted the Claret Jug on the eighteenth green a few hours before.
The stories of Muirfield’s prickliness included Jack Nicklaus himself being turned down for a round of golf, and Tiger having to wait twenty minutes before being allowed to strike a ball during a practice round (golf before 7:00 a.m. is strictly forbidden). Tales of its men-only ethos are well documented. When the club made headlines for voting to remain a boys’ club in 2016, the R&A revoked its rota card—no more Opens for Muirfield. An emergency re-vote the next year saw female membership winning the necessary two-thirds needed to pass, though 123 members still voted to keep women out, Open Championships be damned. Forbes called it “Scotland’s snobbiest old-boy club” and told of a former Muirfield gatekeeper who enjoyed breaking the hearts of visiting Americans by picking up a pair of binoculars and surveying an empty golf course, only to tell them, “Sorry, the course is too busy to accommodate you today.”
In a country where even private clubs warmly welcomed visitors with tee times and free run of the clubhouse, Muirfield remained a stalwart of traditionalism and exclusivity, at least in legend. And you almost couldn’t blame them. Its Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers wrote the rules—literally. Golf’s rules were first codified in Edinburgh by the Honourable Company (then called the Gentlemen Golfers of Edinburgh, and the oldest or second-oldest club in existence, depending on whose history you read) in 1744 for the world’s first organized golf competition at the Leith Links, now a public park in the heart of the city. The winner was awarded a silver golf club and named “Captain of the Golf,” giving birth to the position of club captain, an executive role still in use at every golf club in the British Isles. The Gentlemen Golfers wrote thirteen rules for that first competition, in stark contrast to the thousands of rules, subrules, sub-subrules, and decisions we lament today. Some of their regulations are still relevant; some decidedly less so. While I love a short walk from green to tee, I can’t imagine following rule 1. And rule 4 conjures an eerie nostalgia for golf’s feral past, when bones and broken clubs were notable obstructions:
Articles & Laws in Playing at Golf.
1. You must Tee your Ball within a Club’s length of the Hole.
2. Your Tee must be upon the Ground.
3. You are not to change the Ball which you Strike off the Tee.
4. You are not to remove Stones, Bones or any Break Club, for the sake of playing your Ball, Except upon the fair Green and that only within a Club’s length of your Ball.
5. If your Ball comes among watter, or any wattery filth, you are at liberty to take out your Ball & bringing it behind the hazard and Teeing it, you may play it with any Club and allow your Adversary a Stroke for so getting out your Ball.
6. If your Balls be found any where touching one another, You are to lift the first Ball, till you play the last.
7. At Holling, you are to play your Ball honestly for the Hole, and not to play upon your Adversary’s Ball, not lying in your way to the Hole.
8. If you should lose your Ball, by its being taken up, or any other way, you are to go back to the Spot, where you struck last, & drop another Ball, And allow your adversary a Stroke for the misfortune.
9. No man at Holling his Ball, is to be allowed, to mark his way to the Hole with his Club, or anything else.
10. If a Ball be stopp’d by any Person, Horse, Dog or anything else, The Ball so stopp’d must be play’d where it lyes.
11. If you draw your Club in Order to Strike, & proceed so far in the Stroke as to be Accounted a Stroke.
12. He whose Ball lyes farthest from the Hole is obliged to play first.
13. Neither Trench, Ditch or Dyke, made for the preservation of the Links, nor the Scholar’s Holes, or the Soldier’s Lines, Shall be accounted a Hazard; But the Ball is to be taken ou
t teed and play’d with any Iron Club.
So they enjoyed their traditions at Muirfield. I loathed golf snobbery, but I liked the idea of at least one place clinging to yesterday so snugly, almost like a sort of museum to golf’s former pretensions. In fairness to the Honourable Company, they still allowed visitors two days every week—imagine that at Augusta or Pine Valley—and if they didn’t want tourists jamming up their course, that preference was not necessarily born of golf isolationism. It was partly due to pace. Members at Muirfield exclusively played foursomes (alternate-shot in American). Drew explained that I would find tracks in the rough from where members pulled their trolleys down the sides of the fairways while their partners teed off behind them, a sort of rapid relay around the course that allowed for Muirfield rounds to be played in under three hours. It also meant that players had to have handicaps calculated from other golf clubs, as many longtime members would tell you they had never played their own ball at Muirfield. It was said that when you asked a member how they played that day, they wouldn’t give you a score but rather would tell you, “Pretty well. Two and a half”—as in hours. The golf was something of a race to get back into the famed Muirfield lunch, which visitors could enjoy, but only if they brought a jacket and tie.
Muirfield was different, Drew explained, as I sopped up the last of my lamb-onion gravy with Moira’s homemade bread. It was a gentlemen’s club that happened to have a golf course, albeit a damn good one. Even referring to it as Muirfield was something of a misnomer. Muirfield was just the name of the course they were currently using; the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers had called other tracks home during its history—courses at Leith and Musselburgh, the latter routed within a horse-racing course, as was the Muirfield property when it was first designed by Old Tom Morris. Club first, golf second; complementary, but distinct. They did not even have a pro shop in the clubhouse at Muirfield. Drew advised me to buy my souvenirs at nearby Gullane.
I appreciated the idea of this place continuing to do it in an old way that, from my perspective, was all new. That didn’t mean I wanted to hang out there or experience its propensity for doling out golf shame. If I hadn’t been wary enough about playing Muirfield already, my dinner in North Berwick persuaded me that I was going to be led off the property in seventeenth-century manacles, banned for my two-week stubble, or berated over the condition of the jacket and tie that were currently rolled up in my suitcase.
As if the meal Moira offered had not been benevolent enough, our conversation somehow took a providential turn toward the state of my laundry. My suitcase, stuffed with sock balls and twisted-up shirts, looked like a basket of old fruit, and was beginning to smell like one. Laundromats, or the hours required to visit one, had been elusive so far, but Moira bestowed tender sympathy upon me, insisting that I come back to the Milleur House with all my laundry. I had a brief moment of hesitation about turning over my stiff and ripened skivvies to this kind hostess I hardly knew. But the possibility of soft, perfumed underwear? John Wade had found his magic here, and as it turned out, so had I.
We ended our dinner with a toast by Martin that he attributed to Scotland’s bard, the mighty Rabbie Burns:
Here’s tae us.
Wha’s like us?
Damn few,
And they’re a’deid.
The flat I had rented in town was a hub of accidental luxury. North Berwick Holiday Homes had an owner who’d left on a last-minute holiday, so I was upgraded to the upper half of an old gray townhome overlooking the eighteenth fairway of the North Berwick links. For three evenings, I watched golfers finish in the ten o’clock twilight from my room, strolling down a wide final fairway to a stone clubhouse in the heart of town that looked like a smaller version of the Royal & Ancient’s digs at St. Andrews. They were dry and happy as they finished, and I could hardly wait for the morning when I would step out my door, cross the thin street, and join them on what I had heard described as the most copied golf course in the world.
There is debate among golf-heads as to whether we have any true links courses back in the States. We have plenty of links-style courses (treeless and pot-bunkered), and we have courses set upon the sea. A genuine links demands a sandy bottom and a dune-lined top, and I choose to believe it requires links land born of the geographical phenomena of receding tides and sliding glaciers specific to the topographical record of Ireland and the UK; a flawed theory, surely, but I will contend that nowhere in the States will you find the magical intertwining of golf and town that you witness on the links of Scotland and Ireland, where in places like St. Andrews, Dornoch, Lahinch, and Newcastle, golf holes flow into the heart of bustling old villages, clubhouses reside next to pubs and B&Bs, and the course is public green space for the town’s denizens, more of a people’s park than a golf reserve.
Scots are deeply proud of their ancient “right to roam,” which was formally set into law in 2003. In Scotland, you’re entitled to stroll almost anywhere, private land or not, in the name of exercise and the conviction that Scottish land belongs to all Scots. So on a sunny day, you’ll find dog walkers and bird watchers—called twitchers in Scotland—on most courses. Imagine that at Cypress Point: Morning gents, don’t mind me, just stalking the stealthy brown pelican. Pedestrians are respectful and mindful of the game going on around them, with the exception of St. Andrews, where caddies are accustomed to waving confused tourists off the opening fairway. So whether we have links courses or not, we do not have places like North Berwick, where the town hugs a golf course the way Chicago envelops Wrigley Field, and it gives golfers a feeling that these towns were built by and for the game they loved. The blond stone of the North Berwick clubhouse sat snugly up against the end of the Westgate Road (if you were looking for beach parking, you might run right into it), and for three days it had been calling me as I walked to the coffee shop or the chipper. Finally the day arrived when I would not walk past the clubhouse but head inside, and I did so quickly, because on this North Berwick morning, the wind was blowing as though the rapture was in town, propelling rain that felt like icy buckshot, and it had me saying my too-regular Scottish prayer: Oh god, not today.
Inside I found Gene and Gramma Billy, ever eager and early, along with a dozen or so Canadian golfers, everyone dressed in layers of bloated waterproofs that looked like their own personal tents. We stood there in the hallway wearing the same look of concern, as if we were all waiting outside a hospital room. Is it going to be okay? Is this really happening? Among us were many collective decades spent waiting for this round, yet we had arrived on the nastiest morning North Berwick had seen in years.
I wasn’t expecting a reception by the club secretary (secretary is the UK title for general manager—i.e., the most important person you could meet at a golf club), but the large frame of Christopher Spencer appeared from out of the office, his North Berwick tie hardly long enough to reach his belt. He surveyed the crowd of waiting golfers with a dubious look, as if to say You either play or you don’t, and he greeted me with an all-business voice and a Manchester accent that suggested I had arrived at a place of high standards. You expected—even appreciated—a little bit of lofted nose at North Berwick, which, having been founded in 1832, was the world’s thirteenth-oldest golf club.
I was informed that North Berwick regularly received tee time requests from writers, and that they were rarely able to accommodate them. I wasn’t sure whether I should be flattered or frightened for having scored one, but it seemed clear that I shouldn’t waste my chance. Mr. Spencer asked if I would like for him to join me for my round, a question to which I opened my mouth without any words leaving it. Not really, I thought, because I’m a little bit afraid of you, and I don’t want to be the one responsible for subjecting you to the end times out there. But he answered for me. “You’ve never played here?” I shook my head. “Then I should join you. A lot of history in those holes.” And he was off to the locker room to locate his waterproofs, and we were off to the first tee to test ours.
I was beginning to hope the rain might make him reconsider his stewardship of my round, but Mr. Spencer—Chris—emerged as one of the best surprises at North Berwick, on a course that simmered with them. He didn’t smile much (it’s hard to smile with rain in your mouth), but I did manage to make him laugh when I learned of his transplanted status and asked him, “United or City?” It was like asking a Chicagoan “Cubs or Sox?” and potentially as inciting. He was Manchester United without a doubt, and a little football banter was a chance to forget the sport we were pretending to play. Misery loved company, and on this day, it required it, for I wouldn’t have seen all eighteen holes of North Berwick without my friend Chris to pull me along.
Chris was a repository of North Berwick history, and he took the time to share stories when I could barely summon the resolve to nod and acknowledge them. He pointed out the home of John Imlay, god rest his soul, the part-owner of the Atlanta Falcons who was beloved around North Berwick. His stone manor had been refurbished with its own grand golf locker room, frequented by NFL players when they visited. And Chris told me about the time he met Tom Watson in his travels. Hearing that Chris was secretary at North Berwick, Mr. Watson said hello, and then, “I was once kicked off your golf course.” Chris could laugh, because he knew the circumstances. Watson, in town for the Open at Muirfield, was staying at the Marine Hotel in North Berwick. He had been watching from his room as golfers struggled to play the short number fourteen, a hole called Perfection for the two perfect shots it required, when he headed out with a handful of clubs to attempt the hole himself. He was met by the superintendent, who told him, “I’m sorry, Mr. Watson, but you cannot be out here playing the course without a member.” Taken aback, Watson wasn’t sure what to say, until the superintendent told him, “But you can play it with me.” With three clubs, they played the 358-yard fourteenth hole together three times, the super making three pars and Watson making three bogeys, tallies no doubt influenced by the effects of passing time and lager.