A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  It was somewhere around the turn, so very far away from the clubhouse, that I recalled Martin’s toast: I now understood why there were few like us and why they were all dead, and I suspected I might soon be among them. I envied them for being elsewhere. They couldn’t have been this soaked in heaven, and at that moment, a toasty little campfire in hell sounded just fine. I did my best to keep my head up to see the holes I’d read so much about. There were courses with more acclaim and more championship history, but there may not have been another course with as many individual holes of fabled status.

  Number thirteen, called Pit, was the hole I had been most warned about, a short par 4 with an ancient stone wall running along the front of the green. It seemed a merry touch of old-golf whimsy that we golfers were fortunate to see unchanged. Don’t argue with the wall, they say at North Berwick; it’s older than you. The par 3 fifteenth was called Redan for the way its outward-cropping green mimicked a redan fortification, where a V-shaped wall jutted out toward a point of attack. It was a hole whose name had become its own term in golf architecture and that had been copied on courses from Hawaii to Long Island. A redan hole has a sideways-running green with a portion extending outward and a deep dip in front; it asks a golfer to run the ball up to the green and use contours to turn his or her ball back to the pin, and on this original redan hole, I was pleased to card one of the very few pars that morning. I didn’t fare as well at sixteen, where the thin green was divided by a gully so deep and severe that I could have ducked down into it and hidden from Chris. If I’d had an umbrella with me, I might have.

  Chris told me how Nicklaus always stayed in the same room at the Marine overlooking this green when the Open was at Muirfield. He would watch golfers try to putt its contours in the evening and make dollar bets on their chances of getting down in two. He would have won money betting against me, it turned out, but putting through a five-foot dip was worth the bogey. North Berwick was quirky to such an extent that its quirks transcended the eccentric and approached a sort of organic brilliance. The fact that I could see this through sheets of water spoke to the place’s greatness, and to the fact that I would have to came back someday, no matter that I ran from the eighteenth green that afternoon as though it were on fire.

  After returning to my flat and quickly stripping off my layers, thick and damp as papier-mâché, I found a curious ball of pulp in my left pants pocket. It was a pink-and-white spongy sort of thing that fit in the palm of my hand, a weird little dumpling whose origin I could not understand. Was it an old piece of forgotten sandwich? Did it snow out there? I hesitantly peeled it apart to find some numbers written on it. It was my scorecard, turned into a glob of mush by the hurricane through which I had just attempted golf.

  I was happy to see its state. There was no need to write those scores down, though I unfortunately remembered them. It was that kind of day, a character-builder, a test of golfing mettle during which my game regressed to a state of whack-and-chase but my mental toughness leapt forward several ranks. Nobody at Bruntsfield would have played through that, I was sure, and I had made it through, with this dripping marshmallow of a scorecard to prove it.

  God bless Gramma Billy and Gene. They soldiered to the thirteenth hole, only to finally throw in the towel and make the long trek back to the clubhouse. She was so apologetic for quitting, insisting that she had never walked off a course before, and no matter how many times I told her that I understood and desperately wanted to follow her in myself, she felt as though she had let me down. Hers was a selflessness with which I was not familiar. I had had friends since childhood—Robert among them—who would be sitting in the clubhouse at a table of foam-lined pint glasses laughing at the sight of me tumbling down eighteen, but this woman and man to whom the game had introduced me wanted to cheer and support me through a golfing pneumonia. ’Twas a great game, and even on its worst days, I was so fortunate to play it.

  • • •

  My morning resolve was rewarded with an afternoon of sunshine, and I spent the second half of the day shooting a 73 on the Dirleton course at the nearby Archerfield Links, a new and luxurious complex with a membership list full of celebrity footballers. When I was finished, I stopped by Drew and Moira’s to collect my laundry, which was not only washed and folded but also pressed and wrapped in paper. I almost wept at the sight of my lone pair of jeans.

  “You ironed my jeans?” I asked Moira. I didn’t know jeans could be ironed.

  “We have our standards,” she told me, refusing my money but accepting a hug. Standards—I remembered those. They’d been all but abandoned as I judged my days by numbers and miles. But as I dashed onward and forward, I had to remember to pause and play with standards in mind. I needed a tidier game, a golf defined by a criterion of quality to which I held myself accountable. I was good; I had to stop letting myself off the hook by settling for okay.

  Four birdies at Dirleton showed that my game was tightening as I had hoped it would, my misses turning into potential pars instead of scrambling bogeys, and a good-enough swing had become engraved in my muscles. With time to go, I was further along than I had hoped, with so much more to be discovered. And yet, there was a part of me that felt as though Robert was doing it right, even as he did almost nothing at all.

  Robert hadn’t appeared in North Berwick yet, and I missed my friend who would have rued the golf but relished the chance to retell the day’s despair through lips warmed by local malts. As I walked through the streets of North Berwick on my way to the chipper that evening (I embraced my right to hard-earned fried dinners, and was still shedding pounds by way of walking fifteen-plus miles per day), I saw the smokers congregated outside the pubs, taking long drags and hurrying back inside to where, through the doorways, I saw men in dark rooms leaning over bright glasses. I could hear the quiet conversation, the lovely sound of small friendships audible from the sidewalk. Robert would have had them all slapping his back by evening’s end and would have a game set up for us the next morning, back in the days when I would have had few words to say about the town’s golf course but whole chapters to share about its bars.

  There was no comparison between life then and life now, no matter how I romanticized the thud of full pints landing on tavern wood or the repartee of like-minded strangers. Back then, I wouldn’t have fought my way through North Berwick, and I wouldn’t have headed back out in the afternoon. And I wouldn’t have spared a moment’s thought for anyone but myself.

  There were children in the chip shop that evening, and while I’d been too golf distracted to miss my own kids as much as I had anticipated, it hit me in North Berwick as I watched a little girl beg her dad for change for an ice cream.

  Parenthood was a peculiar business. When I was with my girls, I was too often searching for kid-occupiers that would allow me to return to truly important matters, like researching golf shoes online or scouring TripAdvisor for the best B&B in Inverness. Kids were hard when you were with them. I would shuttle them around to the zoo and the kids’ museum or the place with the dinosaurs rather than have to sit and wonder who these little people were, whether they were happy, and whether this parent was getting anything right.

  I walked back to my flat with my bag of fry, missing every minute that I had been given with my girls and failed to really see them, unable to recognize that the stuff I was searching for was standing in front of me, asking me for another snack. I resolved to make every day away from them count, so that one day, when such things might matter to them, I could be doing nothing at all with my girls and say, Let me tell you what Daddy did.

  • • •

  Golf owes much to Morris, Jones, Palmer, and James Braid and the bunch, but its debt to Ovis aries can never be repaid. There is no golf today—not as we know it—without our fluffy friends in white. Next time you pass a field of grazing sheep at home or abroad, take a moment to smile and say thank you; our game’s birth and evolution rests upon their delicious shoulders.

  Golf wasn’t inv
ented by bored shepherds, as some stories might suggest, and as I would have told you before spending a summer in Scotland. It was played alongside them, certainly, as sheep were golf’s first—and potentially future—keepers of the greens. Links comes from the Old English hlinc, meaning hill or ridge, or even lean, and it referred to the sand hills that were good for grazing and golf but not much else. In getting the unfarmable leftovers for their game, golfers were blessed with a wobbly dune topography that designers have labored to re-create ever since.

  Without sheep to nibble the grasses to a tight playing height, golf’s first courses would never have been spotted among the wild dune overgrowth, nor would it have been possible to maintain them. David Owen’s New Yorker piece “The Ghost Course” gives credit to rabbits, too—sheep excelled at munching grasses to fairway height, but rabbits’ smaller jawbones meant their flattened warrens were puttable, making for golf’s first greens. But it was sheep and the role they played in bringing the game to Scotland that make them the patron quadrupeds of golf.

  Robert loved to explain how the name golf was born of an aged acronym for Gentlemen Only, Ladies Forbidden, an etymological tale so stupidly false that I dared not mention it while in golf’s homeland. The word’s most likely origin is a guttural variation of the word colf or kolf (Dutch for club or bat). Colf was a Dutch game dating to the thirteenth century that involved clubbing a ball over and through towns and countryside until successfully sending it through a designated doorway—meaning that the windmill hole on your miniature golf course is a more accurate replica of golf’s ancestry than the Old Course. Property damage eventually pushed colfers from the towns to fields and frozen rivers, where they struck their balls toward poles instead of windows, but the next time you hit a house with your ball, consider yourself a golf historian. And if you lose and have to buy drinks in the clubhouse, know that you’re being faithful to the legacy of colf, where the losing side owed the winners a barrel of beer.

  Early Dutch art shows club-holding figures playing colf all over Holland, portraits that far predate the first mention of golf in Scotland in the fifteenth century. And it was in one such painting that I witnessed proof of how colf/golf arrived in Scotia. In a small room attached to the clubhouse of the Gullane Golf Club, one of its longest-standing members pointed my eyes toward a print depicting colfers on ice dressed in kilts.

  Mystery solved! Roaming Scots played colf before golf, and this was proof that the former had inspired the latter. This gentleman at Gullane had righted all my wrong notions about the origins of the game, and had even written about them in his lovely little book, Golf on Gullane Hill, a copy of which he signed for me: Enjoy Every Shot! Archie Baird.

  A friend had told me to phone the club before my round at Gullane (pronounced Gull-in) and ask if a Mr. Archie Baird was available and if he could show me his golf museum. I did so, and the receptionist assured me that she would try to contact him and let him know about my interest in his collection of golf history. I went around Gullane’s Course No. 2 with GB and Gene rather quickly, Gramma Billy bringing me more good karma as I played to the standard of a man wearing pressed boxer shorts (they actually were), carding six birdies and shooting a 69 on a sunny morning. There was no sign of any museum curator when we arrived back at the clubhouse, but as we waited outside, a short man with white hair stepped off the local bus and slowly made his way across the lawn to the entrance. He apologized for being late, but poor eyesight had recently lost him his driver’s license, and I felt a wave of guilt—why had I bothered this gentle old soul to come down here on the bus and open up a locked door to see history I could find in a book somewhere? But when he did open the door, I understood that it was worth the trip for both of us. For me, the place held strange, beautiful treasures; and for Archie, it was a chance to show his life’s collection to someone to whom it genuinely mattered.

  The one-room museum was stuffed with leather-handled golf clubs and rusty club-making wrenches, with ancient brown golf balls scattered around the floor and walls covered with grainy photographs and headlines and course layouts. Archie walked us through the Dutch art of kilted colfers to Scots first playing golf here on this coastline (colf would die out in Holland, but its cousin would thrive in Scotland) to that seminal moment in golf history when the featherie ball was replaced by gutta-percha. Archie showed me a top hat full of goose feathers that would have had to be boiled down and packed into one expensive and labor-intensive featherie ball versus the iron press that could crank out dozens of cheap rubber pellets. Featheries were so dear that Archie showed me an old boot with a hole scooped out of the heel, a tool engineered for the stealthy stealing of golf balls. Pilfered featheries fetched a fine price in the pub, and their cost ensured that golf would remain a pastime of the moneyed gentry. The shift to gutties changed everything about the game, making golf affordable and accessible; right after sheep, golf owed its all to rubber.

  Archie’s compact collection of memorabilia was a windfall for a history buff, and he explained how he had married into golf treasure hunting. His wife was the great granddaughter of the legendary Willie Park; the Musselburgh father-son duo of Willie Park Senior and Junior won the Open six times between them and would be golf’s greatest father and son if not for the Morrises. Archie’s archives had begun as a handful of Park memorabilia collected to celebrate his wife’s relative; after a lifetime of golf scavenging, he had amassed his gallery at Gullane. It was an appropriate venue for a museum, as golf had been played on the dunes of Gullane for 350 years, dating back to matches between rival weavers from nearby Dirleton and Aberlady. Weavers; again, golf was inextricably linked to wool. It was Scottish wool traders returning from Holland who brought a Dutch game to the dunes of places like St. Andrews, Dunbar, and North Berwick—their hometowns—and that game’s descendant had brought me to Gullane to meet one of the great men of golf.

  The four of us retired to the members’ lounge, where Archie introduced me to more golf history by way of a beverage. John Panton was a beloved Scottish golf pro who won championships on both sides of the Atlantic, besting the likes of Sam Snead in the World Seniors Championship and representing Scotland in the Ryder Cup three times. He retired as an honorary pro to the Royal & Ancient, and the drink named after him—ginger beer and lime—was Scotland’s version of the Arnold Palmer. The John Panton would become my go-to clubhouse beverage. Ginger beer, spicier and crisper than our ginger ale, had its own golf legacy: the fourth hole on the Old Course at St. Andrews was named Ginger Beer for the carts that would sell bottles of the stuff to thirsty golfers.

  We talked long after our pints of John Panton were empty. Archie was impressed by my endeavor, and I was humbled when he said the poster I had given him would go up in his museum. He was pleasantly surprised to see a few Scottish links on my map that he didn’t know. We said our good-byes and Archie refused a lift home, perhaps headed back to tidy up the museum for the next group of visitors who might be lucky enough to know to ask for Mr. Baird.

  • • •

  The Golf Coast offered all styles and ages of golf, from the prehistoric links on Gullane Hill that had been designed by god to newborn tracks by Tom Doak; from the dusty history of Archie’s room to the modern luxury of the Renaissance Club, where I ended my day. In selecting my courses, I had originally left Renaissance off the list for its youth. It had been built by a Florida businessman on the Archerfield estate, a parcel of one thousand acres located beside Muirfield that also held two other courses and took its name from King Edward I’s archers, stationed there in the thirteenth century. Archerfield’s latest resident, the Doak-designed Renaissance, had just opened in 2008. In a country where golf had been played before America existed, I thought I might save time by skipping a course that couldn’t possibly hold the Scottish golfing soul I was trying to tap. But a friend insisted I play Doak’s only design in Scotland and first in Europe. While I didn’t get terribly excited about designer names, favoring courses that had me imagining a celest
ial creator versus a celebrity architect, I still wrote to Renaissance, and was glad that I did.

  As well as the Scots did golf, Americans ruled when it came to accommodation. After weeks of Euro-sized hospitality, my sprawling room at the Renaissance Club looked like a banquet hall, my bed an acre of soft down, and my shower a vault of glass and tile. Replete with American electrical outlets, Renaissance was a nostalgic return to the largesse of home. The Mickelson burger in the bar that evening was a delicious tower of meat and chili, and I had to smile at Lefty getting pegged to the most caloric item on the menu. My room was upstairs in the clubhouse, and I was encouraged to treat the stunning new facility as my home. No worries about walking in through the members’ door or not wearing a jacket in the dining room; wear your spikes wherever you wanted, come down to the locker room for a soak in the Jacuzzi, or hit the gym downstairs—just relax and partake. It was good to be home, if just for an evening.

  The global reverence for Tom Doak’s designs inspired unfair expectations as I imagined a stretch of pure golf Canaan, eighteen grand golfing landscapes that reimagined course architecture in the game’s homeland. The opening three holes were tree-lined and sort of plain—good tests, but nothing this Tom couldn’t have sketched out. As the course worked its way out to the water on holes eight, nine, and ten, I sampled some of the celebrated genius on designs that were inspired hikes around the ocean’s edge, wide swaths of fairway that looked like a dreamy sea of wavy green, the sort of soulful golf expanse that Doak’s name conjured.