by Tom Coyne
Dad played steady golf around Car-Nasty, knocking low and short shots along the fairway but keeping his ball in play and out of the bunkers. Steve coached him around with enthusiasm and good humor, handing my dad the 4-wood without his having to ask for it and reading the requisite two inches of wind into Dad’s putts. On the sixth green, Steve knelt down behind Dad’s ball and confidently declared, “Two cups outside left.” When Dad missed left by a good four feet, Steve explained, “I didn’t say two Stanley Cups.”
Perhaps it was my pent-up Carnoustie anxiety, but I played my nines by a flip-flopped script. The back nine and the final five holes were supposed to be the card-wreckers, but I played them in one over par, making the four on the final hole that van de Velde had so needed, and I parred the 446-yard tenth that had the best name on the card. It was called South America, and Steve explained that its curious moniker came from a clubhouse party many years before. A local lad was shipping off to seek his fortunes in South America, so they celebrated him with a proper sendoff, at which most of the Scotch in Scotland was consumed. The merriment inspired him to set out on his trek to South America that very evening, and when he was found asleep near the tenth hole the next morning, the name of his destination stuck.
I flailed my way through the front nine, where I attempted to play down Hogan’s Alley on six but instead blazed a new path down Coyne’s Crumbling Sidewalk, sampling a medley of bunkers on my way to double bogey. I feared I wasn’t going to be able to summon the courage to ask Steve about the secrets to his game, not after a front-side 44; surely he would dismiss me with a charitable “Keep your head down, and keep swinging.” But after navigating my ball safely over the famed Spectacles on fourteen in two shots (the two side-by-side bunkers that gobbled approaches on the par 5 resembled spectacles if you missed them but looked more like giant sheep balls if you didn’t), my confidence was buoyed. I managed a par on the 245-yard sixteenth, a hole Watson called the hardest par 3 in golf, and I somehow kept my ball out of the snaking Barry Burn on seventeen and eighteen, both played into a wind that doubled their already punishing length. The looping burn plagued the closing holes and seemed to defy the rules of nature—water was not meant to flow in nine directions at once, and Bernard Darwin had aptly described the stream as “the ubiquitous circumbendibus.” As we approached the finish I closed with a string of hard-fought pars, so I sidled up to Steve and asked him what was going through his mind when he was playing his best.
“I don’t know. I’m not thinking about much, really. I’m just thinking about going low. If I’m swinging well, that’s it—just go low.”
Just go low. Easy enough. I should have expected an unsatisfying answer to such an obvious question. I already knew that when you were playing well, your head was mostly empty. But Steve did elaborate after a drag.
“In a tournament, I’m just thinking about fundamentals. I’m thinking about using what’s working on that day. Every day, your makeup is different. Your nerves, your muscles, your head—it’s always different. You can’t change it. So you go with what you have on the day. Stay on your fundamentals, use the shot you have with you, and make birdies.”
I was interested to hear him hint at acceptance and not forcing a game you didn’t bring with you. His keys might have seemed overly plain, but as with all grand mysteries, the answers were wrapped in simplicity. The player’s mind-set was not one of Go pretty good or Go to not shame yourself or Go look good or Go make the right swing or Go find that backswing position you’ve been working on with your coach for a year but can’t quite find this morning or Go make them think you can play or Go so they’ll say generous things; rather, it was go to one place, and fuck everywhere else: Go low.
Steve also shared that he would not have played golf today. He was glad he was caddying, because playing in wind like this had wrecked his swing in the past.
“My coach tells me to take two days off if I play in bad wind. You start making swings in this stuff that you need to forget about. You can learn a bad way.”
I understood what he was telling me, and it hit a vulnerable spot. I didn’t have the luxury of two days, let alone two hours to put down the clubs, and I could feel how this week’s tempest had left my swing feeling like I was throwing wild haymakers at my golf ball. With a little more than a month to go, I’d expected my links moves to be thoroughly grooved by now, but there was nothing groovy about punchy stabs at a wobbly golf ball.
Acceptance, he said. Well, the wind would have to change, because my itinerary wouldn’t. I was sticking with the plan that brought me here, and I was trusting the powers that had me completing Carnoustie with my eighty-one-year-old father, who had just finished the toughest closing stretch in golf in a wind that would have kept a Tour player indoors, and neither one of us took off our shoes even once. Who knew—maybe the wind would be blowing fifty miles per hour at Bruntsfield. If it was, I would have to find a bookmaker and double all bets.
• • •
As we loaded my family’s car seats and suitcases into the back of a taxi van, I was reminded of the rationale behind my irrational itinerary. I recalled thinking as I filled my spreadsheet with two or three rounds per day, loading up blank dates once reserved for rest, that not only did I want to cover every corner but I didn’t want to leave any gaps to mull or meander. My mind was safest when occupied, and on departure day, I was grateful for the diversion of the busy week ahead as I kissed my girls and buckled them into the cab. I’d left myself no choice but to get on the road and race for the next tee time at Montrose before my afternoon round at Stonehaven. And thank goodness, because if I didn’t have the obsession to distract me, I would have pondered the upcoming month away from Allyson and the kids, imagining my new trajectory up into the Highlands where the golf grew sparer and had me hopping ferries and planes to far-flung islands, and I might have climbed into the taxi with them.
As I plugged Montrose into my car’s GPS, I took consolation in the knowledge that we would someday revisit St. Andrews, and that my kids would again play in the garden behind Cowper’s Close. Allyson wouldn’t leave without insisting we come back to this new home away from home. Now it was up to her husband and his sack of clubs to find out how soon that return would be.
Honor
I feared that I had set off Scotland’s fireworks in the third inning. I’d surely read its finest and final chapter too early at St. Andrews, and by going counterclockwise, I might have gotten Scotland all out of order. But as I blazed my path up toward Aberdeen and Inverness, I discovered that St. Andrews, though it would remain unrivaled as the universe’s ideal municipality, was just a golfing amuse-bouche for the links bacchanalia ahead of me, to the point that in a week’s time I would be playing the course I would come to call the finest in the entire home of golf.
My Irish travels had taught me that once you’d played all the links, you would consistently be asked to confess your favorite. Carne in brilliant Belmullet was my go-to Irish medalist, but I needed to identify its Scottish counterpart, so my eyes and feet were on high alert for a darling. Just as I had at Carne, I would know it before I knew it, an epiphany of spirit and body born of a cosmic confluence of circumstances that fired my every neuron, leaving me weightless and overwhelmingly aware. It was Faraday in the laboratory, Newton under the apple tree, my kids at Chuck E. Cheese’s: a click of discovery and relief wherein all was revealed, right before you bought every last shirt in the pro shop. I trusted that it would happen for me in Scotland, not knowing that it was going to happen twice, and that the first such revelation lay just up the road in the shadow of Dracula’s castle.
My search for golf’s secrets was designed to include the first, the finest, and the farthest courses of the UK—the westernmost, northernmost, and southernmost links, the longest courses and the shortest—but I couldn’t have expected that I would visit the most holey of all golf courses, until I showed up for my round at the Montrose Links with a Scot named John Adams. Given the history of the pl
ace, his name sounded about right.
John explained how golf had been recorded on these links as far back as 1562, making it the fifth-oldest recorded links in the world and, at one time, a golfing loop that held more holes than any course in the world. Montrose formerly boasted a layout of twenty-five holes, and in 1866 it hosted the first and only twenty-five-hole pro golf championship, at which Willie Park and Old Tom competed for a purse larger than they were offering in the Open, where you just got a belt.
Scotland’s original links varied in their tally of golf holes; most held closer to five or six and were meant to be played two or three times, until St. Andrews’s twenty-two-hole rounds (in which ten of the holes on the twelve-hole layout were played twice) were shortened to eighteen-hole outings by way of combining fairways and enlarging the putting greens. It was Allan Robertson who stretched the carpets and gave birth to St. Andrews’s famed double greens, where two pins share the same putting surface; one pin to be played to on your way out, the other on your way in, allowing for an ingenious method of course preservation whereby the Old was alternately played in clockwise and counterclockwise directions to manage wear. The R&A’s rules of 1842 decided that eighteen holes consecrated a match, and its members’ broad sway eventually saw other courses following St. Andrews’s lead.
It took a while for that number to become the standard, but the move toward the eighteen-hole round signaled a shift in golf’s power structure. Golf’s original standardized Leith rules had the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers taking the lead as golf’s trendsetters, but in the centuries-long pissing match among the gentlemen of Musselburgh, Muirfield, Prestwick, Bruntsfield, and the like, the acceptance of the eighteen-hole round perhaps marked the moment when the R&A’s influence outdistanced that of its club peers. Golf, once a tribal miscellany of rival clubs playing a variable sport in their own showcase invitational tournaments, began to coalesce into an identifiable form under the leadership of the Royal & Ancient, a post the R&A still occupies. For a game so tightly governed today, it’s strange to think of golf as an untamed and blithe pastime unencumbered by convention. Six holes or twenty-five, played clockwise or not, with a list of rules you could fit on a business card—there was once a little rebel spirit in golf, with innovations and nuances in one club’s version that might not be found in another’s, and as we search for ways to make the game quicker, cheaper, and easier (twelve holes, anyone?), we might do well to remember that golf’s traditions were often born of accident and not of tablets on a mount.
The Montrose Links were the first to follow St. Andrews’s lead and make the move to eighteen holes, before deciding that if eighteen was good, twenty-five must be great. They eventually rounded back to eighteen holes by 1888, and what an eighteen holes it was: shaped by an all-star cast of Old Tom, Willie Park Jr., and Harry Colt, Montrose was a natural links with a front nine stretched along the strand and a back nine cradled by lumpy dune land thick with blooming gorse. John Adams proved as knowledgeable as his namesake on matters beyond golf, as he taught me the difference between gorse and broom, and how the stems of the latter were traditionally used in the making of—you guessed it—brooms. He was fiercely proud of his club’s ancient legacy and thought too many skipped it when coming to play Carnoustie. I agreed. Unlike at its Open neighbor down the coast, where the sea is largely out of view, at Montrose you felt and saw the water on most of the holes, and as a breezy walk on a pure links, I would take it over Carnoustie for the fun.
Playing with John made for a good part of that fun; it never got old for this American to hear him exclaim, “John Adams!” when he botched a shot. He explained that while the links didn’t bear the duke-decreed Royal designation, one of its golf clubs did—the Royal Montrose Golf Club was one of the three clubs associated with the Montrose links, alongside the Caledonia and Mercantile clubs, and it was one of the sixty-something clubs around the world with the Royal designation. The moniker is a label of somewhat unspecific prestige: There are no set criteria for a Royal club, outside of it residing (or once residing—see Royal Dublin) in the British Commonwealth. A member of the royal family simply had to grant the title, often by way of a yellowed letter that one could find hanging in the clubhouse. It meant your club was well connected, I suppose, and it granted you reciprocal playing privileges among the other Royals. John was keen to point out that the oldest Royal club was not the Royal & Ancient but rather a golf club in Perth. I was stunned to hear that they were golfing in Australia before they were at St. Andrews, until I realized I would need John to further educate me in Scottish geography—he was referring not to the Perth Down Under but to a very old city in the heart of Scotland, home to the R&A’s rival for royal longevity.
As the Montrose links expanded and contracted over the years, John explained how its metamorphosis was ongoing. Two of Montrose’s best holes were threatened by coastal erosion, and the course would have to be replotted in upcoming years in order to maintain an eighteen-hole layout. It was not a unique story in links land. As tides swelled and winter storms grew more severe, courses were suffering around the British Isles—one of my Irish favorites, Mulranny in County Mayo, had already conceded nine holes to the sea, and its remaining nine were nearly washed away entirely in a storm in 2014. But Montrose was the first course I encountered that was already preplanning a redesign ahead of an inevitable defeat. Receding tides conceived these dune courses, and encroaching ones were coming to take them back. It gave me pause to consider how many other courses were vulnerable, and how many of my favorite tracks might not outlive me. I was lucky to be playing them now, and would encourage any links lovers to do the same.
One of the on-course features at Montrose, however, was built to outlast the floods. I thought I’d played out of every conceivable style bunker until I found the concrete World War II pillboxes cradled in the dunes. It seemed a humbling reminder of the soldiers who once stood here, looking out for U-boats and bracing for German boots on this very beach. The irony that golf-loving Germans now played their way around these fortifications less than a lifetime later felt both strange and hopeful. Such remnants were not a unique discovery—I had found beach paths built for brigades all along the UK’s coast, and regularly came across gray blocks tossed into the dunes, anti-tank blockades around which I chased a golf ball. On the radio just that morning, I’d heard of a football match at Wembley being delayed because nearby construction had discovered an unexploded German bomb from the Blitz. It all reminded you of the guts of the place. The sense of honor that the Scots wore and had imbued the game with—the stone boxes reminded me where it came from, and what it had endured.
A score of four over par felt reasonable for the family getaway day, as John Adams kept me distracted from visions of my wife chasing a toddler around the Edinburgh airport, having to beg help from strangers to carry the car seat. Surely some traveler would take pity on her, forced to raise two little ones on her own. Parental guilt set in for a moment on the drive to Stonehaven, but it didn’t last. Upon eyeing the course from the parking lot, my imagination fired, and in my mind Allyson’s seven-hour flight transformed into an opportunity for some quality bonding with the kids, real memory-making time. What a generous partner I was, I thought as I skipped my way down to the Stonehaven clubhouse for a bacon roll and a crack at a golf course that seemed to be sliding off a clifftop and into white breakers below.
If Montrose was a breezy walk on a happy course, Stonehaven—one of Gene and Gramma Billy’s picks—was a spelunking expedition packed with deep belly laughs. It was a good course to play alone, my confusion at the preposterous layout just another part of the adventure. Better to not have a member try to explain the overlapping fairways or the glacial gulley that required a ten-minute walk—twice—beneath a mammoth stone railroad bridge splicing the course or the seventeenth fairway that was literally impossible to hit (it was wide enough, but at a sixty-degree sideways slope, you couldn’t hold it unless the greenskeeper forgot to mow). It would h
ave been useful, though, to have a local there to tell me that the pit between one and two had a designer of international reputation. Forget Morris and Braid—Stonehaven had “Hitler’s Bunker,” put there by a German bombardier returning from a raid.
As a whole, Stonehaven was a head-scratching course on the edge of the earth, the cliffs of Aberdeenshire’s coast haunting nearly every swing, with the best collection of par 3 tee shots I had ever seen on one property. Gully Cup, number fifteen, had me teeing off next to a crumbling chimney—the only remains of the original clubhouse—across an unreasonable gulley that shined yellow with gorse to a lofted green that looked more like it was 161 acres away than 161 yards.
I went around the short course in 70 swings, but I wasn’t considering my score as I finished eighteen on a green the size of a kiddie pool set next to the ruins of a cliffside church. I was too busy studying the tombstones and considering the lives of the people who called this jagged landscape home. Though it was a bit shaggy with fuzzy greens, the place had shades of Old Head drama, with gnarly black shipwrecking rocks holding up the golf course. I felt waves of vertigo on at least three tee boxes, and at 5,103 yards on the card, it was a walk to make you feel old as you took twice as many steps to cover the place. Still, it was worth the fatigue. The view from the modest clubhouse of a golfing battlefield on the brink of Britain was a tonic to revive one’s feet. Stonehaven was one of the few courses where I needed to stop in the nineteenth to catch my breath, and as I watched the lads play snooker while I quaffed a life-restoring ginger beer and devoured a bag of peanuts (if there was any doubt as to whether a human being could subsist for two months on bacon rolls and peanuts, I was blowing it away), I was again thankful for Gramma Billy, the former stranger turned golfing spirit guide who cracked open another one of golf’s secrets at Stonehaven: to the open mind go the happy surprises. What I expected to be my heaviest days had become my lightest, and as I sat alone in the Stonehaven clubhouse, I thought of my friend and wondered what she must have felt like after that trek. She probably felt the same as I did—absolutely wonderful.