by Tom Coyne
“That one’s in the lap of the gods.”
I scribbled it down on my scorecard: In the lap of the gods. I suspected that he meant the ball’s fate was unknowable and left to fortune, or perhaps that Clem’s ball had left this earth and now rested in a happier place. Either way, I liked the idea. I liked the sound of that place.
• • •
“You see those dunes out there?” my friend Neil said, pointing at gray mountains in the distance. From our view atop the Newburgh on Ythan links, I could see where it looked like a storm had tossed the coastline upward into a wavy pile of peaks and valleys, an angry dunescape at odds with its more serene surroundings. It looked a little frightening, and a bit unreal. “That’s Trump,” Neil said. “That’s you tomorrow.”
Miles from its first tee, the developer’s course already loomed large, not just in its size but in the lore surrounding its origin. I didn’t want anything to interrupt my day at Newburgh, where I was relishing the company of my two playing partners, Neil and Graeme, as well as I had enjoyed any of my new Scottish friends, but it was impossible to play golf in or around Aberdeen and not think about the course my countryman claimed was the greatest ever built. You were either playing it, asked if you were playing it, or asked why you weren’t playing it—put the words golf and Aberdeen together and suddenly you were confronting a reality-TV world of trumped-up heraldry and hairspray.
I could dismiss the hyperbole easily enough—Greatest course in the world?—exaggeration was his brand. But I’d wavered on whether I was going to play his course on this trip. Too new, too controversial, too Trump-tastic, I reasoned. I was determined to play courses that could teach me something or reveal a glimpse of this game’s soul, and there was nothing soulful about self-branded glamour-turned-golf-course. But primary among all my strategies for this course called Scotland was to keep an open mind, so I said thank you when offered a tee time at his International Golf Links Scotland and prepared to learn what all the fuss was about. Besides, who knew if the high-ticket course was going to make it, or if its developer would be around much longer before another bankruptcy exiled him to irrelevance? Better see it while I can.
I didn’t dislike the developer, at least not as much as some people I met in Scotland did (I also met others who loved his golf course and applauded his ventures in their country). His politics and persona aside, I appreciated that he invested in the game I loved. No matter that he scooped up financially distressed courses and paid a fraction of their former worth (à la Doonbeg, Turnberry, and Pine Hill); he put money where others wouldn’t, at a time when courses were failing daily and golf was in a dangerous decline. One could have resented his golf takeovers and his plan to buy his brand a major championship, but I honestly couldn’t. If I had millions to shed, I would buy myself some golf courses, too. As long as his Aberdeen course honored the game, the landscape, and the community, I could overlook my aversion to his bluster and appreciate the site as a contribution.
I really tried. I wanted to love the International Golf Links Scotland as much as the gregarious pro shop staff told me I would, to care about it as deeply as the convivial starter did, but in the end, I couldn’t look past so many of the developer’s sins against the game. The most mortal among them was evident before I even set foot on the property—before golf, before course, before Aberdeen, on the sign there was TRUMP. I believe real golfers understand that the game we play is bigger than us; its beguiling beauty is in the way it demands our respect and humility. You cannot truly honor the game if you’re using it as a platform for self-aggrandizement. Slapping his name on courses, turning Doonbeg into Trump International Links Ireland, Doral into Trump Doral, and Turnberry—Turnberry!—into Trump Turnberry was an iniquity beyond forgiveness. They didn’t call it Bobby Jones’s Augusta National or Tom Morris’s Prestwick. A great golf course should not be a personal billboard, as it turns a round played there into an awkward homage to its owner. And in the case of this particular developer, it blended golf with politics, a recipe for which I have no appetite.
I endeavored to try to overlook such hubris, hopeful that his course honored the land or the community in Balmedie, near Aberdeen. It was an effort that I would be spared. In the construction of his Aberdeen links, the developer didn’t play well with his neighbors. Anthony Baxter’s award-winning documentary You’ve Been Trumped (which the developer’s lawyers tried to block from airing on the BBC after Baxter was arrested for filming on the Aberdeen worksite—so much for the Scottish Right to Roam) shows the American bullying his course into existence. He accused one longtime resident whose farm was perceived as an eyesore against a future luxury hotel of living “like a pig” in “disgusting” and “slum-like” conditions. The farmer was later voted “Scotsman of the Year” at the Spirit of Scotland Awards by his countrymen for holding out. Eminent domain threatened the homes of long-standing Balmedie denizens, and the 6,000 promised jobs for locals came in closer to 150. A ninety-year-old woman who lived next to the site had her clean water supply cut off, not for days but for years. Such large-scale construction was an untidy business. Might the ends justify the means if what had been created lived up to its billing as the greatest golf course in the world?
If only it were the greatest golf course in Aberdeen. His International Links was good—very good: an extraordinarily dramatic layout, a course of eighteen signature holes. It played like a meal of exclusively mains, no starters or salad, just T-bone after T-bone, all overcooked with a slathering of ketchup. It felt forced. Manufactured. Whether it was the six sets of tees, the ten-foot-wide cart paths cut into the dunes (I was told the developer insisted on paths wide enough for golf carts to pass one another), the forced walks to another sky-scraping tee box, the ubiquitous signage directing golfers to so many different tees—there were fewer arrows at an airport—the placards and markers smothered with his heraldry (is there anything less regal than an American’s faux royal crest?), or just the knowledge of how much earth had been moved in its construction, the place seemed so relentlessly over-the-top that I couldn’t help but feel the human handprints all over it. Though Martin Hawtree had succeeded in designing a procession of postcard holes for his client, I couldn’t shake the notion that I was playing a man-made imitation. Perhaps all the coverage of its creation gave me too much insight into how this particular sausage was made.
As for my morning round at Trump International Golf Links Scotland: It was nice. It was hard. I shot 77. But I had more fun at nearby Newburgh on Ythan.
Newburgh had been stretched to eighteen holes only in recent decades, so the course played like two distinct tracks: a front nine up and down pastoral hillsides, and a links-ier back nine along the river Ythan. I was well shepherded around both halves by two locals, Graeme and Neil. Graeme met me outside the clubhouse, his summer sweater seeming to mock my three layers and wooly cap. He was tall and thin, with gray hair and a careful smile that hinted at a dry wit, while Neil was a stocky bomber around my age who we found looking for a game in the pro shop. Between the two of them, they knew every ounce of Newburgh history, reminding me that if you played with a local, every course in Scotland held enough legends to rival St. Andrews.
The fourth hole, Drovers, made it directly onto my list of the top holes in Scotland as I eyed the short stone wall in the heart of the fairway, remains of a former drover’s (shepherd’s) sheep pen. I thought Graeme was kidding when he told me to aim for the doorway, but it turned out to be a joyful touch of minigolf, my drive miraculously rolling through the slim opening and gifting me one of my five birdies that afternoon, modestly balanced by six bogeys for a 73. I so wanted to birdie the final par 5 for a round of one under but turned a good drive into a bogey when my approach found a curious rectangle of low, marshy ground. Neil and Graeme had different stories on the origins of this patch—one said it was an old curling rink, while the other claimed it had been used to lay out and dry salmon. They both agreed that sticky toffee pudding had been invented in the kitc
hen behind the thirteenth tee, the most exciting history I had heard since visiting Archie at Gullane—sticky toffee was a spongy fig cake (not pudding as we Yanks know it) covered in caramel syrup that I had yet to pass up when it appeared on a menu. As to the origins of the name of the hollow on the fifteenth hole, Neil deferred to his elder playing partner. Old members disputed whether it was a World War II bomb crater, but Graeme explained that it was better known as Rosie’s Hole, named for the local lass who enjoyed canoodling in it with the lads, thus sharing with me the least likely hole name to ever make it onto a scorecard (Newburgh’s card more modestly dubbed number fifteen Boathouse).
As we made the turn down to the lower, waterside back nine, Graeme pointed my eyes to a beach across the Ythan where seal watchers flocked, and said that the hillside overlooking the lower course was called Gallows Hill. I assumed witches were hanged there, from my education in Kinghorn, but Graeme explained that it was for golfers who didn’t pay their greens fees. “Or unkind golf writers,” he added with a nod.
Toffee pudding, Rosie, seals, gallows—local knowledge flavored our every shot. We got to talking about place names, and Neil explained that Inver and Aber both denoted the mouth of a body of water, as in Inverness at the head of the River Ness and Aberdeen at the start of the River Dee. I was still unsure of the meaning of Inch, a word I had seen on road signs around Scotland, so I asked him for a translation.
“Ah, Inch,” Neil said. “That would be one-twelfth of a foot.”
“Actually,” Graeme corrected him, “I think an inch is a piece of land protruding out into the water.”
“Really?” I said.
“Yes,” he said, and smiled. “As in, Pen-inch-ula.”
The origins of Inch remained unknown, but I did learn of a British Olympic track hero named Sally Gunnell. The back nine held a few drivable par 4s guarded by thick, marshy brush, and Neil encouraged me to try to drive the fifteenth, “if you have enough balls.” I stopped; They say that over here? “Balls in your bag,” he added.
I grabbed the bait and ripped my driver, catching the bottom of the clubface in an almost perfect miss that skipped, ran, and hopped its way up to the mouth of the green. As I groaned at my meager contact, Neil exclaimed, “Sally Gunnell!”
“Sally Gunnell?”
Neil nodded. “Not pretty, but she runs a mile.”
We discussed the courses coming up on my list. They told me I was in for some special days, especially at Cruden Bay, and they would have known; aside from Trump, they’d played all the links around Aberdeen and Inverness. The price at Trump was hard to justify, they explained, at 165 quid ($235), when golf everywhere else in Scotland was so inexpensive. Graeme had just joined the local seniors’ golf society, where, for thirty-six pounds, he was entitled to twelve rounds of golf at area courses.
“I couldn’t afford not to join,” he said. “It’s an incredible deal. Golf in Scotland, you may have noticed, is very reasonable.”
I said that I had noticed, and asked how he’d gotten into such a group. There had to be a waiting list at that price.
“Well, you see, as they’re seniors,” Graeme explained, “they tend to die. So it works itself out.”
It was always better to play with partners matched in sense of humor than in playing ability, and in Graeme and Neil I had found two friends with whom I knew I would be teeing it up again. I left Newburgh on Ythan with the energy of my first day in Scotland, not yet aware that this would become one of the days in my golfing life for which I would trade so many others.
• • •
The Kilmarnock Arms Hotel seemed like the only place to stay in Cruden Bay, and while previous travels around the British Isles had proven that any accommodation with Arms in the name was actually the prescribed length one should keep from its front door, my limited options in the area resulted in a happy accident. The three-star hotel with a cozy pub had clean, spacious rooms in a new addition toward the back. Upon checking in and studying the small lobby, I soon learned this was the hotel where Bram Stoker, Irish author of Dracula, had spent his holidays, his novel inspired by the nearby ruins of New Slains Castle overlooking Cruden Bay from a perch atop the cliffs. I set off to the golf course, where Dracula’s castle would be in view from nearly every hole, its walls golden in the late-afternoon sunlight. A rainbow was touching down on the ruins as I arrived at the Cruden Bay pro shop, and if you hadn’t already known it, you would have guessed that the place had inspired a masterpiece.
It was appropriate that I had an Irish author on my mind as I was about to meet another one for my round at Cruden Bay; Kevin Markham was a less gothic author than Stoker, but he was still a bit mad. In his wonderful book Driving the Green, Kevin and his camper van embarked on a seven-thousand-mile journey around Ireland (I didn’t know there were that many miles in Ireland) to play every eighteen-holer in the country, some 351 in total. He was the rare golfer who could look at my itinerary and think, Well, that’s a bit tame. We’d never met before but had exchanged emails over the years as the two wandering chroniclers of Irish golf, one by car and the other by foot, and the quality of his driving narrative gave me license to drive this one—not that I was ever really tempted to hike the Highlands.
I expected to find a long-bearded and zombie-eyed waif falling out of a van in the parking lot, thick Irish fingers trembling for another golf hole or dram of whisky; I knew the lonesome obsession behind adventures like his, but mine had been only a quarter the length of his quest. Surely he would be unwell. I prepared myself to meet a golfing gypsy who might beg a sandwich off me or lift a putter in the pro shop, but Kevin turned out to be a very reasonable Irishman of good humor and genuine class. He was bearded but neatly so, and was already snapping pictures of the golf course from where the hillside clubhouse overlooked the first hole. We greeted one another like old friends, an instant comfort shared between two men who knew the trials of the golfing road. It was an unspoken bond—we both understood the small joys of smiles in the pro shop, of empty club parking lots, of pubs that were still serving food at 9:00 p.m. And we knew the sting of hostile starters and the despair of tour busses in the car park, and the pain of playing through arctic monsoons because the calendar said we must. The fact that we met for the first time at Cruden Bay turned out to be no accident. It was as if the golf gods were jointly rewarding us for the blisters and the credit-card debt with a visit to a course I quickly knew was my Scottish beloved.
I worked to resist comparing Irish links to Scottish ones during my trip, but it felt as if this was a day when I was supposed to stop trying—from Stoker’s castle to my Irish playing partner, I couldn’t help but think of the dunes of Enniscrone and Carne and the blind shots of Lahinch and the drama of Tralee’s closing nine and the welcome playability of Waterville as I experienced Cruden Bay. Designed by Old Tom Morris, like so many courses in Ireland and the UK, it was a railway course, commissioned as the railroads spread around the British Isles in the late nineteenth century for all the new-money travelers. With British industry came wealth, leisure time, travel by rail, and golf on the coasts of their islands. Golf might have remained a pastime for a few pockets of Britain had steam engines not come along and spread holes far and wide.
Kevin was a thoughtful playing partner, far more interested in photographs than his score—he took three times as many pictures as swings—and our conversation naturally turned to our impression of Scottish links versus Irish. We both agreed that there was something more subtle about the Scottish layouts, courses with hints of restraint that needed to be studied in order to understand their quiet quality, whereas Irish links were often as subtle as a slap, knocking you across the eyes with their drama and peculiarities. Cruden Bay was far more the latter, with towering dunes and views that had smoke pouring from Kevin’s camera. The tee box perches at the ninth and tenth made us both giddy about the par 4s awaiting us below, and the fifteenth, a 195-yard doglegging blind par 3, was my best par in the UK. Everything about Cruden
Bay felt as organic as a Morris course should—the honest drama of an old landscape, not a manufactured note to be found—though my favorite feature on the fifteenth was man-made. A buried pipe allowed one to pull a rope beside the green, flipping a lever by the tee to signal to players that you had cleared.
Golf pundits and course-raters talk of “shot values,” “design variety,” and “resistance to scoring” when assessing a course’s greatness. I know what some of those terms mean, and I appreciate that a rubric needs to exist if our cherished annual course ratings are going to have any proper measures of assessment. In a recent Golf Digest ranking of the world’s top one hundred, Cruden Bay ranked seventieth in the world, somehow fourteen spots behind the International Golf Links down the coast. You could probably throw most of the top one hundred in a bag, pull one out, and make an argument for why it belonged in the top slot. And my argument for Cruden Bay would have nothing to do with shot values or design data; it would be the utterly subjective flight metric by which I would find myself sprinting from Aberdeen or Edinburgh if you told me I had a tee time at Cruden Bay tomorrow. Hopefully Kevin would pick me up in his camper van along the way.