by Tom Coyne
I was accustomed to the Irish birthright of resentment toward all things English, a cut-and-dried grudge between occupied and occupier. It was more complicated in Scotland, where it was great being Scottish, but not all that bad being British, too. It was convenient to reduce Scottish history to painted faces versus English armor, but Scotland’s history was a jagged saga of those face-painters (the Picts, Scotland’s Highland natives) clashing with the Irish-rooted Gaels, who kept their distance from the Britons, who all feared the Vikings but joined forces with them—for a while—against the Angles, until the Normans came along. It was a country born of a half dozen peoples sharing three distinct languages (English, Scottish Gaelic, and Scots, a near-extinct derivative of Old English), each with a myriad of regional dialects. It all forged a uniquely Scottish strength and identity, but perhaps an unsettled one as well, in which the meaning of Scotland for the Scottish was not so obvious to every Scot.
We didn’t broach politics with our new friend at Scotscraig—it was a subject I avoided on any golf course—and what would be the point, as I knew that golf compromised the sample. Golfers skewed conservative, and in Scotland, that meant there would be more Union Jack wavers than separatists on the links. I suspected that I had inched closer to a nationalist pocket when, at Anstruther, I saw a blue-and-white flag planted on an outcropping along the coast, the Scottish banner wind-torn but untouchable on a tiny isle of rock. It was isolated but conspicuous in a poignant way. And on the remains of a World War II–era bunker down the coast was spray-painted Soirse Alba—Free Scotland, in the native Gaelic tongue—a billboard aimed toward where the royalists might be walking: namely, the town golf course.
Trying to explain all this independence business to my dad would have passed some time, but instead we shared a few polite jokes and told the Scottish gentleman that we would see him on the next tee, where we would surely be waiting again. At home we would have joined up and made a foursome, but foursomes with four balls in play were relatively rare in the Scotland I had seen. Twos and threesomes seemed the regular game, and it led to a better pace, aside from today.
I was bubbling with golf rage by the time we turned at nine. Accustomed to three-hour rounds, I had lost touch with golf patience, and instead of enjoying a few extra minutes with Dad, I was convinced that this course was full of fumbling hackers who’d arrived at particularly this time to thwart my journey, a golfing conspiracy set against my having dinner with my kids. How dare they, these chops, these twitchers, wandering the links land as if the holes were there for their diversion, when there was serious business at hand?
It wasn’t good when the golf slowed down; the days then presented me empty spaces that I might fill with doubt or delusion. Go was working, but pause was tired and hungry and prone to self-pity. I wasn’t good enough. Golf should be easy, but some days—this day—it was a mystery, and the last thing I needed was more time to wonder how all these people could fail at it and still smile, could live and golf effortlessly when to me it was all grind.
Somewhere on the back nine we passed a tee box we had already played, where a twosome was waiting on a bench. They nodded and said hello, not a bit of bother or rush anywhere on their faces. They were bundled up comfortably and sat there waiting as if they might soon get to golf or they might not, but it would hardly matter either way. They were outdoors on a sunny afternoon in this setting of craggy earth and quiet trees, where someone had been brilliant enough to forge them a path to play a game. I walked past them to where my ball waited on the fairway, and some advice a friend once shared occurred to me: If you find yourself in a room full of assholes and you can’t find one redeeming face in the crowd, then there’s a good chance that you, in fact, are the asshole. This course wasn’t filled with chops and rubes and morons; there was only one here, actually, and it was the guy who couldn’t enjoy himself on a bright afternoon of golf with his dad.
I tried to slow my pace and notice my footsteps. I considered the air and the shapes of the holes, and the ancient seabed on which I was now standing, the waters having pressed these ripples into the soil. I summoned a little bit of gratitude for my circumstances, and the rest of the back nine went peacefully, even as I pulled my drive on eighteen so far to the left that getting home in two required a cut 6-iron off an adjacent fairway and over a cluster of trees to a deep pin I couldn’t see through the branches. I didn’t see my ball land on the green, and I had to guess from the ball mark that it hit long and reversed its way back to the cup, where I tapped in for the best birdie I had yet made in Scotland. There were no demands or requirements or grind in that three; there was just hit and follow and tally. And once again, the less I demanded, the kinder the sum.
Found
Overlooking the seaside village that shared its name, Kinghorn was a sneaky little liar of a golf course. At just over five thousand yards, it had me teeing off in expectation of a quick waltz across the dunes; I got Kinghorned instead. Back in 1850-some, Old Tom discovered a way to design a course in which every hole played uphill, a course whose scorecard flaunted junior distances like some sort of pernicious lure, pulling in linksmen unprepared for the battle ahead. But I cherished my afternoon on a surprising and somewhat forgotten Morris gem for its zany par 3 holes and endless ascents, for the extraordinary company, and for the fact that the starter could not have given two sheep about who I was and why I was there.
I’d grown accustomed to feigned recognition in the pro shop—Ah, yes, the wandering golf-writing person—followed by directions to the first tee. But at Kinghorn, the gentleman in the starter’s office listened to my spiel about my cross-UK endeavor and my prearranged tee time via the tourism office as if I were reciting obscure French poetry. When I finished, he responded with Philadelphian frankness: “Right. I don’t have you on the tee sheet. And we don’t do courtesy greens fees.”
The Kinghorn rate of fourteen quid was generous enough, and I was happy to pay and play as a true visitor on a locals’ course that was operated by the Fife Golf Trust, an organization keener on selling tee times to Scots than to busloads of my countrymen. The club’s website and scorecard made no mention of its Morris heritage, so I felt as if I were playing a bit of hidden history known only to the locals in the village below. And after a serendipitous meeting with the man who became my playing partner, I would love everything about this curious little course that was worth so much more than my twenty bucks.
I was chasing my scorecard toward the parking lot—upon my opening the door from the clubhouse, it had been ripped out of my hands by the sort of gale that people in my country chased around in vans but here was dismissed as a fresh breeze—when I literally bumped into a foursome of members coming off the eighteenth green. Perhaps it was my fumbling, apelike gait that revealed I hailed from yonder, but whatever the tell, one of them asked where I was from and whether I was heading out to play alone. John was in his retirement years but was fit, and he was determined that I not play Kinghorn for the first time without a chaperone.
John proudly navigated me through a clifftop amusement park of crisscrossing fairways and vistas of cold, dark water. He pointed out two tiny islands in the Firth of Forth that, when I zoomed in with my camera, resembled a battleship and a surfaced submarine parked in the current. Structures had been built on the islands during the World Wars to deceive the periscopes of German U-boats, and from the Kinghorn tee boxes, they still did the trick. He pointed out the nearby peak that locals called Crying Hill, as it was the vantage for a final view of loved ones leaving Scotland by choice or by force, and he made note of the town graveyard below number eighteen where witches were once strangled and burned on Witches’ Hill. I assumed these slaughters were the reason the eighteenth tee was cursed with a twenty-degree upward tilt and a blind skyward drive that felt like hitting from the depths of the netherworld. He showed me the Kinghorn beach, where Scottish King Alexander III died in 1286 when his horse fell off a cliff, and he translated my favorite hole name in all of Scotland f
or me as he took a picture of me standing by a tee box sign on fourteen that read Lang Whang (long path, or long hit, in the local dialect).
John’s pride in Kinghorn was matched only by the pride he showed in his gear. I was a longtime Mizuno devotee and couldn’t help but notice he was playing Mizuno everything (including Mizuno balls, which I had never seen Stateside), with bag and glove and jacket to match. I remarked about our shared brand loyalty, and he promptly put my dedication to shame by rolling up his sleeve and showing me the Mizuno logo tattooed on his forearm. Because his tattoo made perfect sense to me, I knew I had found a kindred spirit, and it was comforting to spend some time in the company of one of my golf-afflicted brethren.
I had been collecting logo balls and ball markers during my visit and was disappointed that I wouldn’t be able to add Kinghorn to my gallery at trip’s end. There was no pro shop or club paraphernalia to speak of, but John, being golf mad and knowing what a golf souvenir meant to our lot, offered to find one of his Kinghorn ball markers at home and deliver it to me that week in St. Andrews, a good forty-five minutes’ drive up the coast. I described our location to him but didn’t expect him to actually go through so much trouble. And then I arrived home from golf a few days later to find a Kinghorn ball marker waiting for me on South Street, a kind note from John attached. His wife had stopped in and met my entire family that afternoon, charming them in full and leaving my souvenir. She told them she wished me health on my journey and a quick return.
I don’t play tennis or racquetball or pickup basketball, but I don’t think you meet these kinds of people when you do. Maybe I’m wrong. But I doubt it.
• • •
Perhaps it was collective guilt in this southeast corner of Fife about all the witch-broiling (the area had been an epicenter of Scottish witch-purging) that made the inhabitants so affable today, but that afternoon, after being offered a bacon roll in the clubhouse, I found a playing partner as joyful as John in Kinghorn’s neighboring town of Burntisland. Golf at Burntisland dated to 1688, and the club called itself the tenth oldest in the world. The parkland/links blend was carved into cliffs overlooking the firth and had Morris and Braid and Willie Park Jr.’s fingerprints on it, but I found its architectural vintage was upstaged by the company of Edward, a host who was a few years my senior, with a thin build and a bespectacled-schoolteacher vibe. I thought I had joined up with a reserved historian for my tour of Burntisland, but I soon discovered I’d been partnered with one of the resident characters who provided not only an education in playing Burntisland but also instruction in how to enjoy it, a golfer who could both laugh and lament in the same breath.
Edward pointed out the former mining villages that had once thrived in the hills around the course, the remains of formerly bustling towns grown over with forest. History was always close along the coast of Scotland; I had expected plenty of golf lore, but it was the remains of World Wars and ancient clans that reminded me that golf was relatively new to this landscape where legends had been born and embellished before my country had even been discovered. Burntisland took its name from either the Romans’ attempts to burn the village to the ground, fishermen’s charring their huts on its coastline, or the appearance of a nearby island of dark, sooty rocks. Romans were more exciting than rocks, so Edward gave naming credit to their legions.
As a course guide, Edward was handy at pointing out sight lines for my drives on the tight and tumultuous track—“That red van in the distance is a good line . . . well, if it would stop moving”—while he described to me his role as one of the caretakers of the links. The course was dotted with a few tiny ponds that he explained were old quarry pits, each precariously deep. In one of the pools, dead fish had recently been spotted floating on the surface.
“One of the lady members was on to me about it,” he said. “She wrote an email: ‘Something must be done about it!’ So I thought, Yes, I will do something. I hit delete.”
His teasing the lady members was mild play compared to Edward’s welcome routine for newcomers to Burntisland (which for some reason I was spared). Like most Scottish courses I’d played, the grounds were shared with rabbits and occasional piles of their pebbly scat. Edward would put a few coffee beans in his mouth before heading out onto the links with first-timers, and later on would inconspicuously drop the beans around his ball on the fairway. He would call the guests over to explain a local rule stating that you were allowed relief from hare droppings.
“Like this here; I’m entitled to a drop,” he would explain, pointing to his ball sitting atop a pile of wet brown beans, “as long as you’re sure it’s rabbit shit. I’ll check.” His partners’ eyes would go wide as he picked up one of the beans and popped it into his mouth.
“Yup,” he would say, swishing the bean around his teeth. “Rabbit shite for sure.”
The crisscrossing quarry course was unlike any I had played in the UK, all serpentine holes wrapped up in wild knots, with cliffs and bumps and stone embankments that had me unable to find a boring bit, and its blind par 3 seventeenth was as much joy as a golfer can find in 150 yards. I scraped together a decent 74 on a course you would want to play a dozen times before claiming to know all its angles. Edward had struggled and lipped out a half dozen putts during our round, and after burning yet another edge on seventeen, the mild-mannered club historian noted, “I’ve shaved more holes today than a maternity ward.”
I thought I’d heard every clichéd golfing depiction ever concocted, but at Burntisland, my putting lexicon expanded with unwholesome glory.
• • •
In my search for golfing miracles, I found a pocketful at St. Andrews. They aren’t difficult to locate around the Old Course, where even the divots hold a puff of magic. Divots on the Old explode in the wind, a sandy burst instead of a scalp of turf being the mark of a genuine links. Unless, of course, those puffs were breezes full of grandpa; a caddie informed me that visitors’ sprinkling Dad’s ashes on the Old was a weekly occurrence—a cloud of smoke, and There goes another one! Rest in peace!
It was a course that did not require a case to be made on its behalf. It actively hosted more majors than any venue save Augusta National; it was highly accessible and had been experienced by traveling golfers the world over; and its history, from Robertson to the Morris men, from the origins of the eighteen-hole round (golf as an eighteen-hole affair was born on the Old Course) to the seven double greens with two pins in each to the Road Hole and the Swilcan Bridge and the Hell Bunker to the fact that you could actually play the course clockwise or counterclockwise, made the place more catalogued and chronicled than any property in golf. But the Old never gets old, not when you’re standing on the first tee and you understand that this patch of tight grass is the only space on earth that has been shared by everyone who ever meant anything to the game of golf (save Ben Hogan, who never did cross the Swilcan) and that they all did precisely what you’re about to do—albeit in a straighter and farther fashion.
Playing a few months before the 2015 Open, with grandstands already erected around the course, was an unplanned thrill, but doing so with my eighty-one-year-old father whose ocean-crossing golf trips had seemed a thing of the past was true grace, a blessing I could not earn nor repay. I suspected I was the luckiest golfer on the planet. And then I knew I was the luckiest golfer on the planet when I returned home that afternoon from the Old Course with my marriage still intact and my vows still wrapped firmly around my finger.
A mutual friend had made an introduction for me to John Boyne, a top looper at St. Andrews who looked like a fitter version of Darren Clarke. John took my bag and enlisted his friend Denny Coyne to carry for my father. I couldn’t recall the last time my dad had walked a golf course; it was likely eight years before in Ireland, where at Tralee he had purchased the wool cap that was now pulled snugly down around his ears. For months, I had compiled a list of hopes for my round on the Old with Dad: shoot a low score on a course where Rory and his ilk would be teeing it up th
at summer; own the Road Hole/take on the hotel without fear; pose for an album’s worth of shots with my father on the Swilcan Bridge, one foot propped up on the wall in my best Nicklaus impression; win applause from at least one tourist watching golfers finish on eighteen. Some of these hopes would be realized, but they would all be supplanted by a new dream for that afternoon: that Dad and I both remain upright for most—perhaps all—of our five-hour round on a frigid day that would have sent meeker souls to church instead of the golf course. It was an end-times wind.
Denny Coyne kept the mood bright by educating us on the history of the Coyne clan, and even presented my dad with a copy of our family coat of arms. They got along like the cousins they might have been, and on the third hole, Denny inquired about the course Dad played back home.
“Oh, it’s a course outside Philadelphia. You wouldn’t know it. LuLu Country Club.”
“LuLu?” Denny said. “In Glenside?”
My dad’s eyes widened. My caddie at St. Andrews knows LuLu? He stammered at the inconceivable coincidence, explaining that yes, that was the very course.
“Is Jonny Rusk still there?” Denny asked, invoking the head golf pro.
Dad was astonished to near speechlessness. He laughed and shook his head, then said that Jon was there and was doing a great job. Dad talked of LuLu and his head pro until they reached the fourth, when he stopped and asked Denny, “So how do you know Jon and LuLu?”
Denny shouldered his bag and walked ahead. “Don’t have a clue about either,” he said. “But I can read your bag tag.”
On the wind-ruined sixth hole, as we watched our balls play Ouija on the green, sliding around in circles with no help from us, John confided that they would have suspended play if this were the Open. I decided bogeys were fair scores and went about making plenty of them. On the twelfth tee, we watched players to our right go sprinting after windblown trolleys, their golf clubs blasting across the fairway at a good twenty knots. When one trolley launched off the edge of a pot bunker, the wind lifted it up into the air for a moment—a poignant breath, poetic almost—and then slam-dunked it into the pit, bag somersaulting and clubs exploding like gear off a wrecked skier. We chuckled without moving our mouths, lips frozen into thin grins and lines of dried tears traced along our temples.