by Tom Coyne
Along with lofty expectations, designer cachet brings a temptation for golfers to play Monday-morning architect, as I did at Renaissance, wondering whether more could have been done with such remarkable property that might have led to a more consistent course. And it was difficult. Stretching to just over 7,300 yards, with bunkers placed for modern distances (versus Gullane, where I could pretend they weren’t there), it was merciless in the wind. Severely shaped greens didn’t add much to the playability, and while the stone wall running through the course was a nice homage to North Berwick, my knowing it had been built in the twenty-first century detracted from its character. Unlike the wall at North Berwick, this partition was not older than me, and I could argue with it. Renaissance was immaculate and dramatic (and covered with pheasants, I was amused to find). I wouldn’t hurry to reschedule a flight if told I was coming back tomorrow, though if it meant another night in the clubhouse, I would skip the whole way there. The following morning, I woke refreshed in a room that made me feel like a proper member of the gentry, which seemed the appropriate mind-set when one was headed for golf at Muirfield.
• • •
There is some debate as to whether the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers was the oldest club in the world. The Royal Burgess Golfing Society dated its origins to 1735, when it was mentioned in the Edinburgh Almanac, preceding the 1744 founding of the Honourable Company, whose club dates to those first rules of golf. I’m sure there are wood-paneled rooms full of men in red coats where the subject is still hotly discussed, but no matter who was oldest, what I found most interesting about those early days of golf companies was the separation of course and club. The Burgess golfers began playing their golf on the Bruntsfield Links, while the Honorouble Company was over at Leith, where some contend the warning call “Fore!” originated. With holes planted beside the battlements of the long-since-gone Ramsay’s Fort, the cry may have warned golfers during artillery practice that cannon fire was coming overhead. Golf on Leith’s five-hole layout had been recorded as far back as the time of Charles I, and if you think our presidents golf at inopportune times, consider the scene depicted on the Carnegie Shield at Royal Dornoch: It shows King Charles learning of the 1641 Irish rebellion mid-round at Leith. Whether the shock on his face was genuine or performed we’ll never know; accounts claim the king was down in his match and used the bad news as a handy excuse for skipping out early.
There are few more decadent ways for a golf degenerate to pass a rainy afternoon than by clicking his way around Neil Laird’s ScottishGolfHistory.org, an exhaustive golf encyclopedia in which Laird’s chronicles shine with the intrigue of caddie-yard gossip. Though the circumstances of golf’s first game are unknown, Laird details the first international match, a Scotland versus England dustup in 1681 at Leith. The Scotland-loving Duke of York had taken offense when two visiting Englishmen claimed golf was an English game, and he challenged them to a match. The Duke enlisted local stick John Paterson as his partner, and they swept the links with the Londoners. Paterson bought a house on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh with his winnings, calling the place “Golfers Land” and adorning the exterior with the motto “Far and Sure.” It’s a pub today, but worth a pilgrimage for any former caddie, and not just because caddies tend to thrive in pubs. A plaque commemorates the match, which also marked the first recorded use of a caddie in golf. The word came from the French le cadet, meaning boy or youngest; it had been borrowed in Scottish slang to denote a lackey or a porter, and the first one in golf was a boy named Andrew Dickson, who was hired to carry the Duke of York’s clubs that day. By steering the Duke to victory, Dickson forever cemented the essential role of bag-toters in golf.
The Honourable Company and the Burgess golfers eventually left Leith and Bruntsfield as Edinburgh grew, both moving to a course set within the racetrack at Musselburgh. Without a clubhouse to call home, members stored their clubs under the grandstands and battled the crowds for tee times. The new and cheap guttie balls had turned golf into everybody’s hobby, and upward of sixty golf societies shared the nine holes at Musselburgh. The two clubs tired of the golfing hordes and again moved on to quieter pastures, the Honourable Company landing at Muirfield while Burgess built a parkland course near the city. This division of course and club persisted all over Scotland, where I would visit courses shared by three or more different golf clubs with four distinct clubhouses lining an eighteenth fairway.
I tried to imagine starting my own club wherein we borrowed the course at Augusta National and built our clubhouse across the street. I found this scenario unlikely, but it provided insight into why golf over here was open in a way I could only wish it was back home: in Scotland, the club was the precious thing, while the course was viewed as a sort of shared playing ground. The St. Andrews courses are associated with five different golf clubs (the R&A, the New Golf Club, the St. Andrews Golf Club, the St. Regulus Ladies Golf Club, and the St. Rule Club), yet half the tee times at the Old are reserved for visitors. The arrangement at Carnoustie is much the same, proving that member golf and daily fee play can coexist amicably, if we decide that golf is a game to be shared rather than a status symbol to be peacocked on hats and sweaters. There were plenty of things I would want to transplant from Scotland—ginger beer, brown sauce, Alan McPherson—but even more than their Right to Roam, it was the Scots’ right to golf that I coveted most.
It struck me as strange that the game came from a place where class and exclusivity seemed so entrenched, yet it was in America, the everyman land of bootstraps, where golf became truly exclusive: We took the open game from the closed place and made it a closed game in the open place. Here was the oldest golf club in the world (probably), and I was walking right up to it, with clubs pulled from my trunk and every intention of playing it, almost positive they were about to let me do so. I stopped to quickly snap a picture of those famed black gates lettered in gold—The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers—and then tucked my phone away, lest it be confiscated by that guy with the binoculars who enjoyed chasing Yanks away.
I was confused by the warmth of my greeting from the starter. Mr. Coyne, we received your email, and I was able to reserve a good caddie for you. If there was a course that did not need to be impressed by a writer’s visit, this was it, but for the next six hours I would have to continually check my scorecard: This is Muirfield, right?
I played with two members and the club secretary, Stuart, a young and energetic manager who had recently been hired from Fife’s Kingsbarns, a visitors-only course where hospitality reigned. Apparently Muirfield had become aware of its reputation (Google Muirfield and snobbery and you’ll see why), and decided it needed to change. What was the point of being open to visitors if they didn’t enjoy the experience? The place had so much to offer, Stuart explained, and they didn’t want old stories to get in the way of people coming to experience it.
Muirfield still wasn’t Disney World. I felt nervous tiptoeing around the clubhouse and walking the grounds, searching for my caddie. You want to feel a little nervous at the place that wrote the rules, but as we got out onto the golf course, the two Muirfield members in my foursome and my caddie were just a pack of tightly bundled cohorts fighting the wind. I was pretty sure my Italian playing partner owned most of Florence (he casually noted that he was in Scotland for his other club’s annual meeting: Which club? I asked. The R&A, he explained. Oh, yeah, I’ve heard of them), while my other partner’s thin English accent was so fine that I couldn’t help but wonder when his family finally decided to give up the abbey. But the pursuit of par was the great leveler, and as I made back-to-back birdies in a breeze that had some North Berwick to it—sans the rain—I was just a golfer on a golf course, and a very good course at that.
Muirfield was an intricate links; not punishing or overly long from the members’ tees but full of inexplicable bogeys. It was a target course where you eyed a hole and thought, I can do this, until your approach shot kept getting farther and farther away from the hole,
finally settling into a subtle dip where par was still right there in front of you, if only you knew how to play this shot. Some rota courses seemed to reward wisdom, while others could be muscled into yielding birdies; Muirfield required both power and prudence, and it was no wonder it had crowned such a distinguished roll of Open champions, from Nicklaus and Player and Trevino and Watson to Faldo and Els and Mickelson. The ocean never quite came into view on the Old-Tom-then-Colt design, but its effects were omnipresent, and as the course worked in loops versus the links-typical coastal march, the direction of the breeze shifted with every shot.
My caddie, whose knowledge of the greens had gotten him hired by Dustin Johnson for practice rounds at the 2013 Open, gave me great directions that I struggled to follow in the gales. No matter; this was a round to not let bogeys get in the way of the experience or the access to such a seasoned looper. Since he had been around an Open, I was sure to ask him about the secret to getting into one.
“Short game,” he said. “They get it up and down from everywhere. Their strikes are lovely, and Johnson hit it far, no doubt. But he would hit four different chips—high, low, spin it, bump it—and they’d all end up in a barrel. They can all hit it, but the most impressive thing is the wedges. They’re lethal with a wedge in their hands.”
And I was not. Mild-abrasion-dangerous, perhaps, but I had miles to go to get to lethal. Luckily, the miles awaited.
We’d started on the back nine, and having played like rabbits through the wind, we came around to find a backup at the first tee, so Stuart invited us into his office for a cup of tea while we waited. I soon found myself in a leather chair in the secretary of Muirfield’s office, listening to him talk with the members about the upcoming Open at St. Andrews and who they would be inviting to play their course in the days leading up to it. Mickelson—Muirfield’s most recent champion—for sure, but you can’t invite Phil and not invite Rory, last year’s winner, and then what about Tiger? It became an awkward business, like drawing up the A and B lists for a wedding.
I saw a pile of Muirfield member ties next to Stuart’s desk and asked him if I could buy one. He laughed; this was still Muirfield. “I can’t even get one of those,” Stuart said, handing me a small picture frame. “Here you go. We’re looking for a better place to hang that.” I was looking at Mickelson’s final-day scorecard from the 2013 Open, the actual competition card filled out in Francesco Molinari’s handwriting, those four back-nine birdies so humbly written in small numbers. So the pros didn’t circle their birdies. I, on the other hand, enshrined mine on the scorecard with circles or sketches of flowers and fireworks, highlighting them with a glitter pen. Expect birdies, I reminded myself. Play to that standard.
The standard was well over par on the back nine, and Muirfield proved why a modest three under was Mickelson’s winning total. Even though we played from the boxes and not the Open tees, my 81 was no great disappointment. Today was about playing beside the honourable gentlemen, not my results on their golf course—the club was the thing. And I had learned something from my caddie and taken some confidence from playing such a venue with a minimum of nerves. Plus, I had finally learned what playing from the boxes actually meant.
I had heard the regular tees referred to as the boxes during my trip and imagined there was some legend behind the name, some tale of Old Tom teeing off atop a box in the Open, or Willie Park once eating a box of haggis and winning the champion’s belt, but I understood the meaning when I saw actual red boxes on the Muirfield tees. I looked into the first one, expecting to find Old Tom’s pipe or James Braid’s ashes, but it turned out that the boxes, along with serving as tee markers, held things like banana peels and cigarette butts. They were trash boxes. But possibly, I mused, the oldest trash boxes in golf.
I soon understood why lunch at Muirfield could be a three-hour affair, even if you were drinking John Pantons instead of Churchill martinis. Dressed in our jackets and ties, we sat in a stately drawing room and talked quietly about things I pretended to know of. Stuart told me about the club calendar’s highlight, the twice-a-year members’ dinner at which the gentlemen dressed in their red coats and arranged all their foursome matches for the upcoming season. He showed me around the trophy cases stuffed with ancient silver. Cooler than the trophies, though, was the old voting box he pointed out, a wooden case with a hole in the front. You would take a black ball in your hand and stick it into the box—to vote yes, you dropped the ball into the chamber on the left; for no, you dropped it into the right. One no-ball could deny someone membership—thus the origin of the term blackballed. I would find similar voting boxes at other Scottish clubs, lest I give Muirfield credit for inventing everything.
Stuart could tell I was antsy to get on with our meal. I had more golf ahead of me that afternoon, so he finally asked our members if they would like to “go through,” which seemed a smart way to ask if you wanted to get some grub. The buffet lunch eaten at long tables had a boarding-school vibe to it, the members distinguished by their club ties as we paraded along a protein-laden smorgasbord. Stuart said the menu did not change, and why would it? I piled my plate with beef and fowl and potato and pasta, a manly feast built to provide ballast in the wind outside, or to soak up the gin served next door.
I thought I would be racing my way out of Muirfield that day, yearning to roam free and breathe twenty-first-century air again, but I was actually disappointed to go, having made a few unexpected friends. Once again, my conviction prior to investigation was well off the mark. But I did have to hurry my exit and skip dessert, leaving my partners mid-banquet. I had thirty-six holes left in my afternoon, and I wasn’t playing foursomes.
• • •
I would recall Kilspindie as a charming links fit for any skill level, a locals’ course with scenic vistas that you could go around twice a day without risking boredom. And I would remember Craigielaw as a young but solid track at the ocean’s edge, with a sublimely located lodge where my bed waited a few hundred steps from the final hole. Kilspindie was a shorter, more compact course and Craigielaw a roomier links, but I finished three over at both of them, fair scores in an uncommon wind that I needed to start accepting as common.
I recalled seals on the beach at Kilspindie—I’d played among foxes, sheep, and, on a trip Down Under, a spread of lounging kangaroos, but gray seals were an exciting first. Yet clearer than any memory from that afternoon is a distant call of FORE! I can still hear it, probably louder now than I heard it then, and I see myself standing in a fairway, stiff with confusion, wondering if a better name for Kilspindie might have been Kilgolfer.
We’d been shepherded around Kilspindie by a member named Chris, who shared a friend in common and had come out to battle the breezes with me, Gramma Billy, and Gene. With a white beard and a tartan cap, Chris was a twinkle-in-his-eye sort of Scotsman whose thin, blue sweater contrasted our layers of wind-breaking armor. His full frame took the buffeting of the air unbothered, and his was a look I saw all over Scotland and recalled from my Irish afternoons—that mien of sincerity and peace that seemed so elusive to a Yank. As someone who hailed from a land of unsettled aspirers, I sensed a brilliance in the Scottish countenance; it seemed one-layered—not in a simple way but in a wise, you-get-what-you-see sort of candor. Good people or bad, angry or elated, Scots were genuine in a way I envied and admired. Chris was not only sage about the quirky little links of Kilspindie, he educated me on some more Scottish slang as he pointed across the water at two soft hills that the Scots called the Paps of Fife.
“Paps—that means hills?” I asked.
“It means tits,” Chris said.
We were happy to have a guide, as Kilspindie’s snug layout made for intertwined golf holes and a peculiar routing that squeezed eighteen holes into a space better suited for fifteen. I didn’t know whether it was the turkey from lunch or the emotional hangover of visiting Muirfield, but I dragged myself across Kilspindie’s short back nine. As we headed down sixteen, a downwind par 4 where my ba
ll had come to rest a short distance from the green, we paused in the fairway for Gene to play his ball. Gramma Billy and Gene were golfing well, and I had grown accustomed to GB’s hustle and self-critiques and Gene’s golf chivalry. We made a good little group, and as the scorecards had shown, they brought out my best golf.
As Gene played his shot, I heard a faraway Fore!, barely audible in the wind. Too tired to move very fast, I turned my head and mumbled, “Heads up,” then turned back around to watch Gene hit. But there in the grass in front of me I saw a sparkly hoop earring. And next to it on the ground—were those sunglasses? I looked up and saw Gramma Billy holding her face.
She wasn’t speaking or moving. None of us were.
“Did that . . . hit you?”
“My god,” was all she could say as Gene tended to her, peeling back her hands to show a bright red spot on the upper corner of her cheekbone. The drive had come from over two hundred yards away, and it missed Billy’s eye by the width of a tee. The impact was one ball away from her temple, where contact could have been far more dire. Gene waved his arms at the golfers on a distant tee, calling “What the hell?” He looked as though he was ready to grab a club and head after them, but one of them was already sprinting toward us.
I stood there, not knowing what to do, tired in a way that made the circumstances feel somewhat unreal. I surveyed my options—do I run for help? Call an ambulance? Say paps? I’d seen people get hit by balls before, but it was always in the leg or ass, and it was always somewhat funny. I had a sick impulse to laugh—Wow, that ball hit you in the face, how about that! But this was serious, so I tried to comfort my friend and show genuine concern, because I was genuinely concerned, though a small part of me wondered how close my ball was to the green and if I could get it up and down for birdie.