by Tom Coyne
I’d had too many such moments so far in the UK, where the elements seemed so set against my endeavor that I felt I was practicing endurance instead of golf, and where I wondered how there was anything fun about this game that was FLOG spelled backward. The frozen fingers and the pin-snapping wind did more than push our balls around—it blew away the artifice and whipped back a curtain, revealing golf to be a silly, sinister endeavor of placing tiny balls into tiny holes using glorified garden hoes. It made you forget what you loved about this expensive and demanding and delinquent spouse and wonder why you were with her in the first place.
Scores quickly became irrelevant, and the dream round’s dream was again streamlined: get Dad to dinner in good-enough shape that Mom wouldn’t have to spoon his soup into his mouth.
A retired stockbroker from an era of smoky trading pits and deals done via handshakes, Dad had been through a lot; he beat cancer and buried a brother, survived his kids’ calamities and scraped through grim markets. Age had worn some curve into his stature over recent years, and the unsteadiness of eighty-one was more noticeable now in his hands and steps, but his mind was clear, and at St. Andrews he once again proved himself a tougher man than me. While in my head I was whining like an infant spoiled by too much golf, an insufferable brat who got everything he wanted and found it lacking, Dad played on without complaint. He even smiled, and he showed me what it was to love a day—a single day—as he savored good shots and bad. He popped his ball out of Hell Bunker in one shot and made a solid six on the Road Hole. His quick smile on the Swilcan Bridge (we didn’t pose for long) was entirely real. And so was mine, because I had just narrowly avoided one of the most tragic rounds in the history of husband golf. The Old Course had thrown her best shot at us, and for our resilience had rewarded us with a fantasy outcome of Tolkienesque proportions.
Allyson had given much to the golf courses of Ireland and Scotland, losing her husband to the links for months at a time. But when I looked at my fingers on the thirteenth to check that they were still there, I noticed that the blue and bony icicles looked wrong. Curious; was something missing? My left hand was too light, too bare—and a shot of instant guilt ran from my throat to the bottom of my ass. Now the links had taken the ring Allyson had given me, too. I’d never thought it unwise that I played golf wearing my wedding ring, or that I took my glove off after almost every shot. It turned out that it was.
Lost pounds had made the ring loose without my noticing, and that afternoon’s freeze shrunk my fingers two more sizes. I looked out over the links that now seemed to expand into a vast continent of shoulder-height shrubs and wondered where that golden hoop might be hiding. So many shots, so many steps, so many trips into the high stuff. I imagined two hobbits hiking the dunes and pits, but their ring hunt was duck soup compared to the impossibility facing me. A cliché came to life in my imagination—a needle in a haystack had nothing on a wedding ring on a golf course.
I was technically still golfing, but in my mind, I was forecasting a conversation: Do you remember that time you lost my sunglasses and how I didn’t get upset? Even though they were prescription? I hadn’t wept since high school and worried about my ability to conjure tears at the appropriate time. The girls would be waiting at eighteen, so maybe if I burst into sobs after picking my ball out of the hole—My day at St. Andrews! Ruined!—I could turn resentment into sympathy. Perhaps I could talk John into staging a greenside mugging. Worst case, I was sure there were jewelers in St. Andrews. Dear, what better way to commemorate our time in St. Andrews than with new wedding bands? I didn’t notice the caddie running toward us as we waited on the sixteenth tee, and if I had, I would have probably hidden out of shame.
He was out of breath when he reached us, but what a beautiful breath it was that he had left in him: “Did anyone lose a wedding ring?”
I’ve had only one hole-in-one in my golfing life—a weak sum, really, considering the amount of golf I’ve played. But all the near aces were redeemed, and no albatross or triple-eagle could have felt more inexplicable. The ring looked brighter this afternoon than it did on my wedding day; on that morning, it had arrived as no surprise. But at St. Andrews, life proffered a miracle. Luck, coincidence, providence—I rarely noticed them when I wasn’t on a golf course. Maybe that’s what kept all of us sadists coming back.
The small stone hump of the Swilcan Bridge on eighteen gets all the photos, and there are some corners of Augusta that must feel pretty special, but for me, the shared expanse of the first tee and the eighteenth green on the Old at St. Andrews is the altar of golf. My favorite golf shot out of many thousands was played to the center of it, where I saw two redheads in pink St. Andrews ski caps bouncing around behind the green, waiting for their dad to come take them to dinner.
I putted out for par and Dad saved a scrappy five, and Maggie and Caroline ran down onto the green to hug me and their grandfather, entirely unaware of the hallowed ground upon which they were standing. That was what was so unique and so transcendent about St. Andrews: it wore its lore effortlessly, and it gave me my moment on eighteen at the Old. No matter who lifted the Jug there in July, I would know a small piece of what they were feeling as they stepped to the green and understood perfect in a whole new way.
• • •
As divine as an afternoon that ended on golf’s altar was, the following evening I learned that there was an even more celestial experience nearby, back behind the altar in the sacristy known as the clubhouse of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club.
I allowed myself certain prejudices in life and in golf. Scientologists, golfers who buttoned their top button, and links built in the last fifty years were all a priori suspicious in my estimation, so I took some baggage with me to Kingsbarns, the raved-about new links down the road from St. Andrews. In fairness, golf had been played in the area by the Kingsbarns Golfing Society since 1793, but their course had long since been plowed under, and its latest installment was opened in 2000 and designed by Mark Parsinen and Kyle Phillips, the latter of international design fame for recent courses in Korea, America, and the UAE. I was prepared to dismiss this course as overpriced and tailored to foreign visitors (a round plus caddie will run you north of $400), convinced through much research that the greatest links were discovered, not shaped, and therefore courses built after the advent of bulldozers should be discounted as man-made imitations instead of true, organic gems. I felt confident in my closed-mindedness and satisfied with my antidesign proclivities, and I was almost sad to see my philosophy discarded at Kingsbarns. I had been invited to come play the course in a Scottish tourism outing, where I quickly learned that I had been dumb to judge the new guy for being new. He had plenty to offer, it turned out, as Kingsbarns earned its place on a short list of courses for which I would sign a credit card receipt without looking.
From the pro shop welcome to the practice grounds to the perfectly diminutive clubhouse—a small stone castle where I enjoyed a bacon roll and views of a mountain range of golf holes set against blue-black seas—Kingsbarns seemed to have nailed a kick-ass golf day before I even stepped foot on the course. And when I did, I found a links where the ocean seemed to watch every shot on a property that had not compromised the landscape for any sort of phony drama. With each new tee box came a fresh smile and another highlight; I was having too much fun to mind losing Open tickets for closest to the pin on number eight, where my invincible fourteen inches was bested by a hole-in-one. Did that roar come from eight? You’re joking.
“Hard lines,” my Scottish playing partner told me, a native lament I had come to learn meant tough luck.
Hard lines indeed. I had plans for getting my own Open tickets, anyway.
It would have been a great day of golf if it had ended on eighteen, but this was the first time on the trip when I was more excited for dinner than I was for the round. The tourist board had special plans for us back in St. Andrews, so I showered and dressed in jacket and tie and left the family with meat pies from the butcher across
the street (let us all pray that someday meat pies will come to American ovens) while I walked alone through town to my dinner reservation.
Set at the end of the Old Course, the tall gray stone of the R&A wasn’t surrounded by any fence or barriers—just another old building in an old town—but in my mind, it was enshrined inside a force field of history and legend. The idea that I was going to enter it, to walk through its doors without an alarm sounding—I didn’t quite believe it, especially when I went to the wrong door and stood there knocking, nervous and ready to cry. A butler showed me into a drawing room where golfers from our outing were cocktailing amid trophy cases and bookshelves crowded with golf tomes. There was an excitement among us as we talked about matters of no consequence, a collective energy about where we were standing that made chitchat feel joyful and rare. And then suddenly my shoulders jumped at what sounded like gunshots, and we all turned to find a butler banging a gavel against an old, certainly historic board that he had set against the sash of the doorway.
“Dinner is served!” he informed us with an almost angry formality that felt pitch-perfect in context. I lagged behind the group as we were shown upstairs, searching the shelves of books for any that might resemble my own—it was the longest of shots, but so was my having dinner in the R&A. No such luck, and with a fresh dollop of humility in my pocket, I scrambled to catch up and find a seat at one of two long tables where a description of the coming meal was waiting at my place—Beef Wellington, yes, that will do nicely—with R&A stamped in the corner, a menu that somehow found its way into my jacket that evening and ended up on my office wall. (I don’t always eat beef Wellington with the Claret Jug set at the head of my table, but when I do, I steal the menu.)
We worked our way through a parade of dishes as I soaked up stories from my neighboring golf journalists and power players, gents who spoke of pints with Ernie Els and weekends in Spain with Rory. We finished our custards and were escorted back down to the first floor and into what looked like a small ballroom for after-dinner drinks. I could tell by the angled windows that we were in the room I had always wondered about from outside, where the walls of the R&A bowed outward toward the course and, from afar, looked like the greatest seat in golf. There were a handful of sharply dressed men drinking from glass tankards in the light of those famed windows as the sun set over the course. We presumed them to be members, and the rest of us kept a safe distance on the other side of the gallery with our cookies and tea.
A giant portrait of Queen Elizabeth guarded a fireplace wide enough to sleep in, and paintings of men in red jackets adorned the high walls. The lower portions of the walls were covered with old oak panels with names etched into the wood. I wondered to one of my compatriots about the names—were they past captains? Golf Hall of Famers? Knights Templar? He told me that the panels were actually doors. He pointed to small keyholes and explained that what I was essentially standing in was the grandest locker room in the world. There were golf shoes and dirty socks and golf bags behind those doors; this room that seemed appropriate for royal nuptials was a place for members to change their shoes. The longer you were a member, the better your locker position, so this was a room of R&A old-timers who might rarely play, while the newer members had to put on their trousers down in the basement, which I was sure was the greatest basement in golf. There was cool in golf, and then there was changing-your-pants-in-this-room cool. All these names of old men—do they appreciate their forgotten lockers, or how much we would have given to drop our wet socks into one? Privilege, I thought; it’s so wasted on the privileged.
On my way out that evening, I stopped by the glass case in the lobby for a picture. Inside was the genuine Claret Jug (not the winner’s replica that we had dined with), which I would learn was named not for some golfing Earl of Claret but for the Claret wine Brits enjoyed from jugs of a similar style. Next to the Jug was the Challenge Belt. I’d always thought of the Claret Jug as the oldest trophy in sports (though if you count yachting as a sport, the nod actually goes to the Americas Cup), but the Jug is predated by the maroon leather and silver buckle of the Challenge Belt that was originally awarded to the Open champ. The rules stipulated that any three-time winner got to retain the belt, which Tom Morris Jr. accomplished in 1870, so with no trophy to play for, the Open wasn’t held in 1871. The golfers came back when Prestwick, St. Andrews, and Musselburgh chipped in for the Jug, but it wasn’t ready in time for the 1872 tournament, so that year’s winner got a gold medal, and Open winners still do—today’s victors are announced as “champion golfer and winner of the gold medal.” Jug, belt, and medal—it was the only championship I knew that celebrated its winner with a trinity of trophies, as if everything an Open win embodied could not be contained in one vessel, no matter how fine the silver. I left the R&A more convinced than ever that the Open held no rival as a golf tournament. Perhaps it was the beef Wellington talking, but from my view in St. Andrews, green jackets were nice, but you couldn’t leave the house without a belt.
• • •
When Caroline woke up with a scary fever the following morning, I was shaken from my golf myopia and reminded that I was a father with responsibilities larger than a tournament in June. My morning tee time at the Panmure links, a renowned Open qualifier, would have to wait for the next trip to Fife. It felt strange to pause the obsession for a moment and put something—or someone—ahead of golf, but I needed a rest as much as my daughter did. I found a doctor in case we needed her, and that afternoon I took Caroline’s sister, Maggie, out for a walk on the beach and a visit to the aquarium down by the water, just behind the R&A. We climbed down onto the strand, and she clambered over the beach rocks and found tidal pools with shells and strange seaweeds that she wanted to bring home to show her sister.
The sun was bright, and we were warm in our thin jackets, and on an unhurried day, it became clear to me that I was not a jug hoister or a belt wearer. When it came to my golf, I wasn’t destined for so much as a plastic spoon, and that was fine. As I watched Maggie run circles in the sand, I was a dad. A pretty good one, I hoped. I wanted to qualify—more than anything, I wanted to play on—but in the sun in St. Andrews, I felt my need to prove something slipping away. Standing here in front of me was proof, four feet tall in yellow boots, that life was stuffed with the extraordinary. I thought I had to keep fighting and grinding to grab it, but it turned out that I just needed to notice. And because I did notice now, I could give this shot my honest everything without worrying about its results, hoping that it would help Maggie do the same someday—to see her dreams and be unreasonable in her pursuit of them.
• • •
On my list of many courses, there was only one whose name conjured actual fear. Perhaps the panic came from the 1999 bloodbath of an Open Championship, when the links famously left a poor Frenchman barefoot in a burn, and where the winner’s score of six over was a throwback to the days of hickory-shafted champions. But if you gave most golfers a free-association test and threw them the word “Carnoustie,” the flinch responses would be “Hard,” or “Really hard,” or perhaps, as the locals called it, “Car-Nasty.”
When I told Dad that the last round of his week in Scotland would be at the site of Jean van de Velde’s unwatchable collapse, I could see the apprehension in his eyes as he gazed off into the distance and nodded, whispering “Carnoustie” with the look of a willing but outnumbered soldier.
In case you missed it—and you’re lucky if you did—in 1999, the French pro brought a three-stroke lead to the final hole, prompting the Claret Jug engraver to begin etching his name into the trophy. He would soon go hunting for sandpaper as van de Velde knocked his ball around the grandstands, taking off his shoes and standing in a stream to contemplate a water blast, and eventually getting up and down out of the sand for a triple bogey that led to a playoff he would lose to Scotsman Paul Lawrie. Sadly for Lawrie, few remember that his record-setting ten-shot comeback on the final day was one of the greatest feats in golf; it would fore
ver be overshadowed by one of the most tragic.
Some might remember Carnoustie for the Irish pride of Pádraig Harrington’s breakthrough win in 2007, or the birth of Tom Watson’s links love affair in 1975, or Ben Hogan’s victory during his only trip to the UK, where his gutsy play on number six between death bunkers and out-of-bounds led to the hole being named “Hogan’s Alley.” But most of us recall watching golf on a Sunday morning back in the 1990s and feeling that sick excitement the Romans must have felt in the Colosseum as lions had their lunch. For all the pain and empathy, I remember feeling a tinge of relief as well—golf was hard for everyone, it turned out, and it could embarrass us all.
I expected to find black clouds swirling above a haunted clubhouse, with a soundtrack of grim organ music and a staff dressed in funeral colors. But there were no hearses queued up in the parking lot at Carnoustie; rather, it was a bright and cheery place with a modern clubhouse and a laughing starter eager for us to have a great day. Like St. Andrews, the course was a true municipal track shared by six golf clubs, and the spirit of welcome was palpable, most notably in our sage caddie, Steve, who came along to carry for my father.
In his early thirties, Steve was wrapped up in wind gear and tattered hiking boots with a cigarette held in his teeth, but I could tell before shaking his hand that he was a player moonlighting as a looper. I had learned to spot the sticks over the years; it was their comfort on the course, combined with the sinewy frame of someone who spent more on tournament entries than on meals. Steve had that lean, unshaven, unimpressed look of a person who golfed with his rent check and for whom an Open venue was his natural setting. For Steve, it actually was—he had grown up on the Carnoustie links and played on professional tours around the world. He was a journeyman on hiatus, making a few pounds and visiting his family before plotting his next season on the minitours. Maybe it was the way he skillfully lit his cigarette in a thirty-mile-per-hour wind or how he didn’t flinch at Dad’s mishits, but his was the look of a golfing creature, and this was his living room, while I too often felt like I was crashing in somebody else’s. I wanted that look and that feeling. I wasn’t going to leave Carnoustie without asking him how he’d gotten it.