A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  I had been told good golf required a certain amount of selfishness. I possessed it by the pallet.

  The offending long-ball slicer apologized frantically as we stood there waiting to see if the injury grew more severe, if there would be blood or a collapse, which seemed well possible. Gene and GB accepted his apologies as politely as they could, given the situation. Only in golf do you get beaned in the face by a stranger’s rocketing projectile and tell him No worries, keep playing your little game. And in a moment, Gramma Billy reached for her chipping wedge and moved ahead, telling us she was fine, that we should play on. She finished that hole and the next two without complaint, all of us quiet and uneasy from this strange dose of danger dropped into our carefree afternoon.

  I made par on sixteen. Damn it.

  After we loaded our bags in the parking lot, we hugged our good-byes and promised we would tee it up again someday. Gene and GB’s trip had come to a close, but they said they would be following my progress all the way around, and that the email check-ins would be abundant. It was not until that evening as I lay in bed that I realized what had happened at Kilspindie, and grasped the disaster with which we had flirted. Aside from some swelling, GB would be okay, but today had reminded me that injury was a possibility—now a reality—on this trip, and that if I made it through without a car wreck or a busted ankle or influenza or a golf ball to the face, I would have been granted my golfing miracle.

  I would later get an email from Gene that read, “Thank you for your friendship to Billy. It makes a difference in her life,” and as I read it, I felt a strange sensation squeezing my eyes and tickling the top of my nose—I think some people call it crying—because Gene had it the wrong way around. Gramma Billy’s kindness made the difference. It gave me something to strive for that, unlike all these goddamn golf scores, I could maybe figure out. Her life was about much more than her own living. Maybe by the time someone called me Grandpa, mine would be, too.

  • • •

  From the Golf Coast of East Lothian, I was headed through Edinburgh and up around the coast to the next pocket of storied links in Scotland, the courses of East Fife. The plan was to meet my girls up in St. Andrews; we had rented a home with a history that I hoped would seep into my game through our two weeks living there. Called Cowpers Close, its front door sat on South Street in the heart of town, where nearly a century and a half before it had been the birthplace and family home of James Foulis Jr., winner of the second US Open, whose father was a club maker alongside Old Tom. The girls were excited for the flowery yard out back, while I was eager for the rare chance to stay in the home of a major winner, as I didn’t envision Tiger or Rory renting out their places anytime soon.

  At the airport, I stood around the customs exit as families poured through the sliding doors, travelers hugging loved ones and searching out their drivers among the crowd of sign-holders. I waited twenty minutes, then thirty, until the doors weren’t sliding open anymore. The flight from Newark had deplaned, I was told, as the wait approached an hour. I paced inside and outside, checking my phone and looking for a good place to throw up, until the doors finally slid open one more time, and out rode a yawning two-year-old with curly red hair. She looked confused to see me until her five-year-old sister ran around from behind the stroller and jumped into my arms.

  As we drove to St. Andrews, I listened to Allyson tell me about the flight—it had taken forever to get the car seats off the plane—and I looked in the mirror at my two girls watching Scotland rush past them. I wondered if this was really my life. I was taking my small children to the home of golf. My girls are going to walk those fairways. This was so much better than that trip to Hershey Park. Maybe they wouldn’t agree, but my gratitude for what I was going to share with them was overwhelming.

  I wasn’t even there yet, but I so badly wanted to return to St. Andrews for the Open in July. When I finally got home from Scotland, I wanted to be able to tell them we were all headed right back. I already knew the town’s motto—Dum Spiro Spero—and as we pulled up to our new Scottish home, I was breathing hope deeply.

  Perfect

  Scotland abounds with great golf towns and great castle towns and great cathedral towns that overwhelm you with history. There are whisky villages and foodie retreats near college hubs and ancient burgs where yesteryear drips from the sooty walls. There are hamlets for hunting gravestones, districts for queuing up at museums, and enclaves of family-friendly fun. But there is only one town that is all of the above, a veritable utopia nestled into an elbow of Fife’s coastline.

  Any proper search should start at the beginning, and Archie Baird had taken me to golf’s back in Holland, then moved me forward to the time of Old Tom Morris, keeper of the greens at St. Andrews for forty years, and a figure I had always considered a grandfather and patron saint of golf. Truth was, some of those laurels belonged to his boss, the formidable Allan Robertson, resident club maker in St. Andrews and the man who broke golf’s gentility boundary. The game had been left mostly to nobility who could afford the equipment and time until Robertson became golf’s first pro and earner, making cash as a featherie stuffer and perhaps more as a gambler on the links—it’s said he never once lost a money match.

  At St. Andrews, you could reach even further back than Robertson, to Mary, Queen of Scots, the mother of golf who kept a cottage at St. Andrews and played the course incognito. After her husband was strangled to death in 1567, Mary was spotted golfing at St. Andrews a few days later; her enemies claimed her golfing mood was proof that she was in on the murder plot. She would lose her crown and spend the rest of her life in prison for what might be history’s most costly round of golf. But even before Mary and her devotion to St. Andrews, there was King James II, who banned golf in the village in 1457 because it was distracting his archers. The ban was lifted in 1552 by Archbishop Hamilton in a decree that guaranteed the people of St. Andrews would forever be allowed to use their links land for golf. And before James, there was St. Rule, who shipwrecked here with the bones of the apostle Andrew, and then there was Andrew on his crooked cross. One could go back as far as history tempted at St. Andrews, and with the ancient ruins of its castle and cathedral looming behind the Royal & Ancient clubhouse—both far predating the town’s golf courses—the temptation was everywhere.

  I had struck up a correspondence with our landlord, who had grown up in our rental, the home that had previously belonged to Henry Foulis and turned out to be, in my mind, the Internet’s prime achievement to date. We could not have dreamt up a more dreamlike accommodation, with copious clean bedrooms and book-lined sitting chambers, a playroom in the basement with a closet full of toys for the girls, and a long garden crowded with flowers and butterflies that, for my city kids, was a storybook in their own backyard. She described for me what growing up in the idyllic town of St. Andrews was like, and how today it perfectly prepared one for life in the 1950s. We would come to agree, to the point where Allyson was inquiring about whether the house might be for sale (sadly, it wasn’t) and insisting that we come back every year on vacation. For this miracle of spousal conversion, I would forever be indebted to the magical perfection of this town.

  When my mother arrived at our temporary home, she walked through the hallways with her mouth agape, saying, “This is so nice,” as if she were on a design show where her dream makeover had just been revealed. Mom and Dad arrived shortly after Allyson and the kids, and at eighty years of age, they confessed that they had a very different expectation of Scotland. They had recently watched a travel show on which the host went on an epic Scottish pub crawl, replete with booze and brawls. “I thought everyone was going to be drunk from whisky and fighting in the streets,” my mother said. I laughed and assured her that was just Glasgow. (I kid, my Weegie friends.)

  You would expect the home of golf might be only that—golf pubs, golf shops, golf museums. St. Andrews had plenty of those, but it also had culture and history and learning, with golfers blending into packs of unde
rgrads from St. Andrews University as they hustled to and from classes in academic robes. You stay here and feel like you’ve done more than chase a ball around, and that your travels are better for it.

  When it came to the golf, there is no stage as revered and as accessible as the Old Course at St. Andrews, and driving into town for the first time is a breathtaking epiphany: That’s a golf course? And then: That’s THE golf course! There’s the R&A clubhouse, the first tee, and that shot-bending hotel—you don’t have to go hunting for them; they call for you to step right up and touch them. The golf pours into the heart of town, and the course is treated by locals as their public park. In fact, the Old Course is closed every Sunday to maintain its status as a public green space. Come walk your dog or stand in line with tourists for pictures on the Swilcan Bridge. The picture we took of my girls atop the famed stone overpass on eighteen, smiling in their yellow rain boots—if there were someday a picture of the two of them standing on the moon, it would not make this golf dad any prouder.

  It was a joy to walk from my front door down to one of the first tees, leaving the car parked on South Street and bounding past the pubs and the golf shops and the tall windows of the Royal & Ancient, feeling as though I’d lost several pounds. I actually was lighter by at least a stone (fourteen pounds) already, and Allyson wondered where in the UK I had left my jowls. Golfers came for the Old Course and often bundled it with the New (the second course at St. Andrews, with an 1895 birthdate that rendered it not terribly new), but it was on the less-crowded Eden, Strathtyrum, and Jubilee, each with their own histories and signature holes, where I felt a welcome break from the rush and was able to retune my turn and rethink my habits on challenging but generous links.

  The Balgove was a wee course, ideal for a round with kids or the golf-timid, as the challenge of St. Andrews’s courses ascended from Balgove to Strathtyrum to Eden to Jubilee, then to the New and Old, and finally up to a wild storm of a course newly built above the town.

  As rich with lore as St. Andrews was, its courses were not the most theatrical in Scotland. The links land was relatively flat, and the magnitude of the town’s layouts, particularly the Old, hid from players looking for framed wows. Opened in 2008, the Castle course felt as if it had been built in response to this void of conspicuous drama; it was a big, ballsy routing of collapses and climbs and wild greens. As massive as the greens were on St. Andrews Old, with sixteen double greens making for putting surfaces the size of hockey rinks, they were relatively flat. Not so at the Castle. The 75 I shot there might have been my best round yet, given the punishing topography, with green complexes that I was told had already been redesigned to make them more playable. I shuddered to think what they were like in 2008, because their current state was like putting across a potato chip.

  Locals complained about the Castle as something of a circus course, and Tom Doak had blasted the design in one of his books, giving it a zero rating and dismissing it as a maelstrom of design excess. I wondered about his impartiality; the Castle course was designed by David McLay Kidd, a sort-of rival who had gotten the nod over Doak to design the first course at Oregon’s acclaimed Bandon Dunes. Surely there was an ax to grind in a zero rating; the course deserved critique for its severity, but I found the Castle to be a mighty spectacle, and a yin to the other St. Andrews courses’ yang. While the New and Old Courses might feel a bit reserved on a windless day, the Castle would test all your golf muscles on any afternoon.

  My love for St. Andrews was certainly nurtured by the amount of golf I could play without lifting my suitcase. It wasn’t just the courses in St. Andrews; there were links all over the Fife coastline. Some of the closest were at Crail, the seventh-oldest club in Scotland and home to a pair of contrary links. The new Craighead course was a longer track set back from the sea and had been designed by Gil Hanse, a favorite of mine for his ties to Philadelphia; his Craighead layout made Hanse the first professional American architect to design a Scottish golf course. It offered golf of genuine quality and intrigue, but I found it to be entirely empty of players. Members preferred its shorter, quirkier, and aged sister course, the Balcomie Links, where the layout ducked into sea caves and twisted around dunes, with its final four holes seemingly squeezed into the space of a football field. Hanse had done his best, but he couldn’t compete with history, and at Balcomie, the history was rare.

  As I crept along the path from fourteen to fifteen at Balcomie, with waves on my left threatening to crash me into the stone wall on my right, I found a dark pocket in the rocks that was marked by a plaque. I’d read plaques commemorating Bobby Jones, Arnold Palmer, and Old Tom, but a golf sign for Constantine was a first. His plaque beat Old Tom’s by centuries. I had stumbled upon Constantine’s Cave, where Constantine I, king of the Picts, had been killed by invading Danes after being abandoned by his army in 874 AD. I didn’t see an X, but no matter; I’d found the spot—a prehistoric waterside cave on a golf course by St. Andrews, and the tomb of a king. Surely, the secret lay within.

  I stepped inside, out of the rain, and breathed cold, ancient air that smelled of Viking blood and stale beer from the crumpled-up cans at my feet. I waited there like Linus in his pumpkin patch, expecting golf’s spirit to show itself to me in the form of Old Tom’s ghost or an angel wearing knickers or a gray apparition of the unknown Scotsman who first brought golf to these hills and had been waiting here a thousand years to whisper golf’s secret into my ear, but all I heard was my buddy Rich: “Anything good in here? Wow. Smells like piss.”

  Rich, from New York, was taking a break from his Irish golf holiday and had joined me for a day at Crail with his golf-devoted wife. He was in his fifties, but it was his younger and fitter partner, Kim, who dragged him around the golfing world, pulling him out of bed at dawn for tee times. He’d discovered that their tee times on the two courses at Crail would amount to a price that wasn’t much cheaper than an international membership, so he decided to just go ahead and join the place. So it was with two members from New York that I enjoyed one of my favorite thirty-six-hole days, where two first tees were a 9-iron apart.

  On the Craighead links, I was laboring through my worst front nine of the trip (I opened with a double, then chased it with a smattering of bogeys to prove it was no fluke) when a golf cart approached us. Perhaps they’d gotten word of my play and had arrived with more golf balls.

  Out of the cart stepped Martin Dempster, a tall and serious-looking Scottish golf reporter who had finally tracked me down to detail my quest, and who I wished had arrived on any morning but this one, when I was begging my clubs for contact.

  “Tom?” Martin said, extending his hand. I looked around for a moment—Tom? No Toms here. We walked the fairway and talked of my quest and my impressions of Scotland. It had all been magical, I assured him, and our conversation turned to my chances for qualifying for the Open.

  I told him I was hopeful, and as I stepped up and ripped a drive down the fourth fairway with a reporter looking on, I thought, Why shouldn’t I be?

  “There will be nobody there who’s more prepared,” I said. “One hundred seven courses—this is sort of the world’s longest practice round.” I waggled my wedge and posed confidently over my ball, ready to knife a knockdown through the air and make it dance by a pin that was looking vulnerable on the front of the green. Pity he didn’t bring a photographer, I thought, or a film crew to witness what this Yank was doing to Scotland.

  The ball danced, but it was a drunken peg-leg sort of boogie, my Titleist gently kissing the hosel of my wedge and pirouetting hard to the right. I held my follow-through, postured and deliberate, as if my pitchout into the cabbage had been perpetrated with purpose and skill. If I stood there long enough, maybe time would freeze and then reverse to that moment right before I fisted a shank in front of a reporter who had come here to bear witness to my British Open ambitions. I wanted to tell him about the time I saw Steve Stricker shank one at Merion—It happens!—but instead I did the only thing more embarra
ssing than hitting a shank: I reached into my bag for another ball without bothering to look for the first, like some careless Sunday chop.

  The article would be generous in talking about my journey around Scotland. I desperately wanted to text Martin that evening and tell him of my afternoon round at the Balcomie: Stop the presses! I made four birds and was two under through fifteen! I would leave out the part about finishing with three bogeys to close with a 70. But Martin was kind to me, even though he did work in a mention of my shank. I was a writer; I knew I had granted him copy gold. He said that my game was otherwise in good form and that he would be there at the Open qualifier to update readers on my final progress. I bought a half dozen editions of the Scotsman in which, on a page in the sports section, my face was smiling beside a Crail flag. When I showed it to my two-year-old, Caroline, as she sat in her high chair eating a crumpet from the bakery across the street, she looked at the newspaper and pointed at my picture. She smiled and said, “Daddy.”

  I so wished this place were for sale.

  During lunch in the Crail clubhouse between rounds, Rich dispatched three quick pints and turned wistful in the way links golf and pints could make a man. He gazed through tall glass windows onto a world that, from our chairs, looked like it was all fairways and cliffs and ocean.

  “Look at the people here,” he said as we watched the locals finish up a competition on the Balcomie links, the members pulling their trolleys and going about their glorious morning routine. “They look content. They’ve got their friends and their families and they’re out playing some golf. Good enough. You think they give a damn if they have a BMW or not? They’re not trying to keep up with anything. They’re happy. Life looks pretty good from here.”