by Tom Coyne
I was sure that not everyone in Scotland was happy, and I imagined Rich would concede as much, but his generalizing possessed a useful insight: There did seem to be a contentment to life here that looked foreign to this table of Americans. There was something about the mood in old countries that felt distant for a person from a young one, like the people here weren’t so hell-bent on rearranging the world, as if they understood that it had been around for a very long time and that their place in it was modest and should be accepted with an ounce of humility. I was from a land where one’s place in life was malleable by law, where accepting one’s station was in some way a failure; over here, knowing one’s place seemed a source of peace, and perhaps enjoyment. It was hard to really enjoy yourself when you weren’t sure who you were, and it seemed the people here did know, at least from our view through the glass.
• • •
Even as I cherished my weeks in St. Andrews, I knew they were my halcyon days. Each morning began with a walk to the baker for crumpets (fancy pancakes) and pastries in the shop that had been frequented by the Royals when they visited Prince William during his studies at St. Andrews University. William had met Kate at a coffee shop down the street—I knew this because a banner shouting WHERE WILLS MET KATE! covered the shop windows. Next to the bakery, I would buy that afternoon’s lunch at a place called Munch that I imagined the Royals skipped, lining up with a gang of guys in yellow construction vests for my sack of bacon rolls (I had learned to follow the hard hats for a good, quick bite).
The bacon roll seemed to be the ubiquitous belly-filler in Scotland, proffered with a frequency matched only by tea and biscuits: Time for a bacon roll? Can we get you a bacon roll? Stop into the bar, they have bacon rolls. And tee times were often advertised as including a bacon roll at the turn. I’d yet to sample a bacon roll until I visited Munch. Having been offered one on a daily basis, my expectations were high for what I was sure was a national culinary treasure, a fine pastry of pork and elaborate fixings with a secret sauce whose recipe had been handed down through the generations. It turned out that the bacon roll was a piece of bacon. On a roll. And it was good. Add some brown sauce (the best thing to come out of the UK since Sir Francis Bacon himself) and it was a traveler’s lunch perfected.
As the seat of higher learning in Scotland, home to the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world, with alums like King James II and the reformer John Knox, St. Andrews boasted a food scene more vibrant and ambitious than one would expect for a coastal golf town. We loved dinner at Forgan’s gastropub, which had once been the 1-iron factory of Robert Forgan. A trove of cleeks had been found under the floorboards during restoration, buried in dark purgatory as all 1-irons should be. Around the corner from our front door, white boxes of fried fish couched in vinegar chips from the Tailend takeaway saved us money, enough to splurge at Rocca in the course-side Rusacks Hotel, where our table in the window allowed us to judge players’ swings on the Old Course while forking foie gras. For lunch, the pepper bread from the Old Cheese Shop or the scones that spilled out the windows at the Gorgeous café were Allyson’s favorites. St. Andrews had us wondering whether we came to golf or eat, while its bevy of pubs could have a visitor forgetting to do either. The Jigger Inn, beside the seventeenth, was a staple for golfers; our caddies told us that you “jigger in and stumble out”; these were the same guys who referred to the storm shelter on the golf course as the Fairway Hotel, where one could grab a few hours’ rest between the Jigger Inn and a loop at dawn. While the Jigger had its devotees, it was the pub a few paces from the final green on the Old that captured golfers from around the globe, a hotel lounge harder to escape than Hell Bunker.
The Dunvegan was sacred drinking ground for hackers and Open champions alike, where you could barely make out the wallpaper between all the hanging history and photographs of its catalog of celebrity guests, from Tiger to Neil Armstrong to Ben Roethlisberger (who, legend tells, signed his crew’s record-setting number of emptied Grey Goose bottles as though they were footballs bound for the Hall of Fame) to the Claret Jug itself. It was both a scene and a hangout, the rare combination of tourist stop and local haunt. Before Robert even suggested a place, I knew it was where I would be meeting him.
The bar was uncharacteristically quiet when I found him seated in a back corner of the lounge, and his thin frame looked as if it hadn’t moved in a week, like he was stitched into the crimson upholstery. You could have mistaken him for one of the characters in the still portraits hanging above him—he moved about as much as they did, and had taken on a similar gray pallor. But he was smiling when I arrived, as if he had something he was eager to share. First, he ordered a new bottle of Chardonnay to replace the empty one in front of him. I declined the fresh glass and asked for a John Panton as Robert got to telling me that he had it all figured out.
“I love . . . this place,” he said, and I could tell by the slow turn of his head as he surveyed the room that he was well marinated, even though nobody here would notice it or cut him off. I had been the same way, able to remain inconspicuously sozzled through almost any occasion. Inside, his body was a pickled mess, but he could still talk to you as if he had been nursing a shandy, clear and clever and engaged. And on this evening, he was even excited. His wet eyes were alive as he told me, “This place is it.”
“This pub?”
“St. Andrews,” he said. “It’s just . . . everything. So obvious, too. St. Andrews. Not exactly a clandestine destination. I knew it, when we were here in college, and being here now—I get it. It’s overwhelming. The peace, it’s like a giant womb of golf and goodness, and feeling settled—actually feeling settled.” He exhaled a long breath. “So guess what, Tommy boy?” He didn’t wait for me to guess. “I’m staying.”
So much for the Coynes buying that house and relocating to St. Andrews. Robert finally had his plan—move to St. Andrews, join one of the clubs, and golf and caddie permanently. There were enough new faces passing through every day so that the place would never get stale, and enough old faces to meet and make the place home.
“You’re going to live here? For good?” I said.
I watched him swallow a deep mouthful, and though it had been years, I could still feel the warm bite in the back of my throat. “Home of Morris. Home of golf. Home of me,” he said. “You don’t see it?”
Of course I did.
“Golf courses,” he continued. “Co-eds. Loops for days, and a library right over there. And this place, right here. Anybody who’s anywhere else right now is a sucker. They’re losing at life, TC.”
I sipped my ginger beer and nodded, and for a moment I forgot that Robert was anything other than my hero.
“Old Tom’s buried around the corner,” he said. “Did you know that?” I did. “Have you seen it yet?” I had. “He fell down the steps, right over there, in the New Club, and he died. Old Tom—he took a header, and poof. Sic transit gloria.” From the distant look in his eyes, I could tell he was imagining such an end for himself, and finding it beautiful.
A foursome of American golfers entered the lounge, their cheeks red from the wind. They inspected the room with wide eyes, a look on their faces like they’d been searching for these chairs all afternoon.
“More pilgrims, come to see the holy blissful martyr,” Robert said. “Look at them. Their promised land. But they’ll abandon it in a week, because their dental practices are thriving.”
Robert waved down a waitress and sent the foursome a round. “Tell them it’s on him,” Robert said, pointing across the table at me. “He lives here.”
I smiled at the young woman. “That’s fine. Thanks.”
Robert was in such high spirits that he even asked about Allyson and the family. He had never met Caroline, and he’d seen Maggie only during a brief visit for her baptism. That night in St. Andrews, I’d told the kids I was going out to visit Uncle Robert, but they had no idea who that was. It was a sad circumstance, but in that moment it made me grateful, beca
use it meant they didn’t know who I was then, back when Robert wasn’t such a stranger.
“It’s incredible when you think about it—the coincidences, all the trips, and how it all brought us right here,” he said. “It’s so clear I could cry. Think about where I was—you remember where I was?”
I nodded. Five years before, I had visited Robert in the hospital after he died. It wasn’t enough for him to die once—he had to flatline three times in the emergency room while docs paddled him to try to reboot his heart. It had stopped pumping after a week spent drinking in a hotel room in Philadelphia where he’d said he was holed up to work out a new business plan. They pulled him out of his room on a stretcher after he managed to call 911. I quit drinking a short time after seeing Robert that morning, my friend hooked up to bags and a bank of blinking machines. Robert did not. A little reboot was all he needed, he said, and so St. Andrews would be his next one. A new plan in a new place.
“I used to wonder, why the hell am I still alive? What’s the point?” He looked out the windows, his eyes damp and strangely sober. “It makes sense. It actually makes sense to be alive. All along, there was a point. What a fucking relief.”
Robert said he would come by that week to see the family, which we both knew was an untrue but polite way to end our evening—when false courtesies overtook the conversation, it was a sign that our time was up. I wished him well and genuinely meant it, though I wondered if it might be the last time I would see Robert. I knew that the thing he loved most about St. Andrews was the chance to expire in the town where Old Tom and his sons had passed, some drunken romantic notion that he would be laid to rest next to them. Sic transit gloria. An end that finally fit him was the point my friend had found.
Or maybe I would see Robert in a week or a month or a year. Some people lived, danced, cried, worked, died. But Robert—he lingered. Even when he wasn’t, he was there.
• • •
If Robert did find his way out of the pub and remain in St. Andrews, he would have a lifetime’s worth of golf surrounding him in Fife. He would love the quirkiness of the Kingarrock course on the Hill of Tarvit estate, where you played a restored parkland nine-holer with hickory-shafted clubs and balls designed to fly turn-of-the-century distances. Before your golf, the hospitable head pro, Andrew, gave you a short primer on golf and the estate and the history of the game, then rewarded you with snacks and ginger beer after your round, a day of back-in-time golf worth the short drive from St. Andrews. The Leven and Lundin links, two side-by-side courses, shared a lofty and intertwined history: As chronicler Neil Laird points out, golf at Leven dated to the eighteenth century, and it was likely the first golf course with eighteen distinct greens. Old Tom added his touches to its design, and Tom Jr. won the first invitational there in 1868. As the course became too crowded for the four clubs using it, Lundin and Leven eventually split the links, and each developed their own courses, the former seeking out James Braid to bolster their half of the holes. The annual MacDonald Trophy is still contested over the original layout, combining holes from both eighteens, and yellow flags on each course identify holes that comprised the old Leven layout. And there are people who care about which flags are yellow; design wonks get giggly at the mention of Leven, as the name denotes one of the hole “templates” utilized by American golf’s founding father, Charles Blair MacDonald, who borrowed his hole plans from Scottish designs. His “Leven Hole” was a short, risk-reward par 4 inspired by Leven’s original seventh, and you’ve probably played one—MacDonald’s templates, including the North Berwick–inspired “Redan Hole,” have been copied the golf world over.
While they were both fun tracks, I found Lundin to be the more special of the pair. The Braid pedigree showed through in the course’s meticulously lumpy layout, busy with burns and gorse and green-hiding hillocks, and its condition had me guessing that Lundin’s greenskeeper’s budget was envied by his colleague next door. The hybrid I cut into the wind on the closing par 4 was the best shot I’d hit in years, and as I stood there watching the ball follow a path even better than the one I had intended, working against the breeze toward the Lundin clubhouse, I hoped that the windows were crowded with golfers to see my ball cozy up to the hole. As I tapped in for birdie I saw that they weren’t, but a 73 on a first visit felt like my scores were settling into a proper latitude.
Elie was harder to find but worth the confusion, and the embarrassment of asking for directions to Elie as I stood, unknowingly, in the Elie pro shop. My car’s GPS was outfitted with an inspired feature for finding golf courses, so each morning I simply punched up the next links on the list and followed the gentle British accent to my destination. But Elie was not on its course register, even though, as the childhood course of James Braid, it owned one of the more prominent reputations among the East Fife clubs. I eventually found a place called the Golf House Club near the village of Elie (the division between club and course would continue to confuse me, and my GPS), and when I entered the starter’s hut—don’t enter the clubhouse at the Golf House Club, I was told, which was a separate entity from the course—I knew I had found Elie when I saw the periscope.
Alan McPherson had foretold that I would be visiting a club with a working submarine periscope near the first tee; and after I met the starter at Elie, he invited me to come grab the handles and survey the course. The periscope had been salvaged from the HMS Excalibur submarine and presented to the club, and from what I could tell through its viewfinder, I was in for a giddy morning of golf played down to the water’s edge, waves breaking against the bulwarks of dark cliffs and tall sand that bookended the course. I had Elie to myself on a cold, clear day, when I discovered the ocean run from holes ten through twelve to be Fife’s Pebble Beach, and the most obvious of epiphanies continued to come into focus—that Scotland was stuffed with great golf courses large and small. Nearby Anstruther (called Anster by locals), a town better known for its fish and chips than its golf course, was a wee oasis of golfing bliss. Having to walk only nine holes over the compact routing inspired my enthusiasm, but Anster’s fifth hole (called the Rockies) was rated the hardest par 3 in the UK, and at 245 yards off the top of a precipice and across a wasteland of sea-soaked rocks to a green tucked behind a cliff without an inch of safety between the tee and the hole—it was a tough shot. I took my five without complaining, because the nine-hole course at Anstruther was, yard for yard, as much fun as I had had with my golf clubs in a while.
My scores continued to contract across the links at Monifieth, a worthy locals’ course where I drove a par 4 and made the putt for eagle, uncovering another Scottish secret to golf: hit your drive onto the green. It’s easier. And my dad and I had a good day at Scotscraig, a tight links-ish course that regular Fife golfers revered. Designed by Morris and Braid and founded by R&A members who wanted an extra venue, Scotscraig was void of ocean views but boasted two or three holes that you could put up against any in Fife—particularly the fourth, called Plateau, where you drove to a landing pad hovering above wasteland with eager OB down the left, as hard as any Scottish par 4 that I had seen or played.
On the Saturday we visited Scotscraig, the course was congested with a tournament, and in all the waiting, a member struck up a conversation with my dad. The member was a round, gray-haired man whose twosome kept riding up on us in their cart. When we met on the sixth tee, I expected him to ask to play through or to complain about the pace, but he was jolly and untroubled, pleased to hear we had come to Scotscraig from the States. Often overlooked by travelers on a St. Andrews binge, the course had its own history, where David Robertson, the father of Allan, was once the official ball-maker. Scotscraig called itself the thirteenth-oldest club in the world, no matter that I was confident I had already played the thirteenth-oldest club in the world. Twice. (The ordering of Scottish clubs’ origins was no small matter, it seemed, with clubs defending and trumpeting their rankings with vigor.) Scotscraig was one of the original red-coat clubs, à la the R&A and the Honour
able Company, where gentlemen played in crimson jackets as if riding horseback on a hunt. The original penalty at Scotscraig for playing in less suitable attire was two bottles of port, to be donated to the membership.
As we waited on the tee box, my father explained my trip to our new friend in Fife—over one hundred courses in eight weeks—to which he replied, “I used to do that. But then the doctor gave me something and it went away.” Such wit was the Scottish demeanor to me, polite and droll and proud—more Irish than English, but with a British polish and a touch of mannerly restraint, and with considerably fewer fucks sprinkled into their daily dialect than their Gaelic cousins. Theirs was a curious national identity, particularly at the time of my visit, fresh off the heels of a tight national referendum in which the country (barely) voted to remain tied to England as a part of the United Kingdom. What seemed strangest about the recent vote was how few people were talking about it, as if the winners didn’t want to gloat about remaining linked to their onetime adversary, and I sensed a collective, quiet unease about the way the whole thing went down.
Leading up to the vote, the independence-promoting Scottish National Party had been rerunning Braveheart on TV, but I was told the move for independence had less to do with William Wallace and more to do with the oil up in Aberdeen. You were far more likely to see Ferraris cruising the Granite City than Edinburgh or Glasgow (I counted three during my Aberdeen pass-through), as the oil from the North Sea off Aberdeen had made Scots wealthy and eager to keep that bounty Scottish. But it was tough for some—the majority, it turned out—to bind their fortunes to the fickle price of oil and to abandon the comforts of an ancient and reliable commonwealth. I had imagined the move for independence as a kilt-and-bagpipe affair, a Celts-versus-Angles dustup about long-fingered landlords and pure Scottish blood, but it seemed, as did most things, to come down to dollars, or pounds. What would the Euro mean for Scotland? Who would run the health system? What if oil prices took a dump (which they would soon thereafter)?