by Tom Coyne
I’m sure our weather had something to do with my fervor, the sunshine only briefly interrupted by a few passing rainbows, and Kevin’s company no doubt hoisted my Cruden Bay impressions. Or maybe it was that I made the best swing of the trip on my approach to fourteen and Kevin caught it on camera, a zippy wedge fired up to a deep green that was cradled by swollen mounds of sand. Maybe it was that I closed with a birdie to make the postround ginger beer so much sweeter, or perhaps my affinity had to do with the fact that at Cruden Bay I saw something more beautiful than rainbows and eagle putts. On sixteen I stopped Kevin and said, “Look at that. That is a sight I haven’t seen in six weeks.”
And there it was, more elusive than Nessie herself: a flag sitting still atop a Scottish flagstick, hanging dead as a wet rag. I had to rub my eyes at this miraculous vision. I would have been no more gobsmacked if the Virgin herself appeared and told me to keep my shoulders square.
I wanted to think that the heavens had something to do with why Cruden Bay struck me deep in my golfing soul. I wanted to believe that they had something to do with many things, and I had been trying to get there in recent years. Every morning on this trip, I woke up and said, Whoever you are, whatever you have in store for me today, with some help, I’m up for it. It was as much of what one might call faith that I could summon, and so far, so good. And the golf course seemed to agree.
On seventeen at Cruden Bay, a small wooden well sat tucked at the edge of the fairway. An old sign above it read: St. Olaf’s Well low down by the sea, Where pest nor plague shall ever be.
A thousand years before, a battle between Scots and Vikings had bloodied these dunes, and to commemorate the lost lives, a chapel was erected in Cruden Bay to St. Olaf, king of Norway and an early defender of Christianity. Built in 1012, his chapel marked the start of Christian services in this part of Scotland.
Out of Cruden Bay grew a millennium of faith, and that was plenty good enough for me. All I was asking for was a day.
Contact
My name in Scottish Gaelic is Tòmas or Tam, and it means twin. I don’t have a twin, nor did I hear much Gaelic at all in Scotland (supposedly it was still spoken in the Outer Hebrides, where I was headed at trip’s end, but the Scots’ erstwhile language was known by only 1 percent of the population). Plenty of Toms had left their mark on golf—few golfers are more popular in the British Isles than Tom Watson, and the Morrises elevate the Tom brand for sure. It was a fair golf name as far as forenames went, but there were some first names that just sounded like six under.
You can’t be called Bubba and hack. Bob, Joe, Frank—they might all cheer for net bogeys, but I never met a Chandler who couldn’t play (I’ve met only one, but he can). Bradley—he probably stripes it, and Alan is a stick; he takes money off Al every time out. Jimbo and Jimmy mash it, while Jim plays in cargo shorts. And then there was Garth. Garth golfed his ball. Garth was a country-club rat who played on scholarship at a Christian college down South and had a cushy sales gig at his dad’s insurance outfit waiting for him, where his job would be to dazzle clients on the golf course and sip transfusions full-time.
I had never actually met a Garth, not until the winter before I left for Scotland and learned that, just as I couldn’t judge the Scots’ playing abilities by swings that sometimes looked like an angry janitor mopping the cafeteria, I shouldn’t judge a player by their moniker. This Garth was not a born linksman. He had the name, the carefully parted hair of a corporate hustler, the starched Brooks Brothers shirts, and the Ivy League education. But he was also raised in Altoona, Pennsylvania, in that red center of my home state where schools closed for the opening of deer season and a trip to Sheetz was reason enough to iron the Dale Earnhardt T-shirt. He was thirty-four but had taken up golf only the previous year after marrying into a golf-mad, mainline Philadelphia family, and was now scrambling to catch up to their handicaps and win himself a spot in the Thanksgiving foursome.
When I threw out a Facebook invitation to friends to join me for a few rounds in Scotland, I was shocked when Garth came back as one of the instant commits. His local handicap was 38.4, and he had just recently achieved his goal of making his posted scores actually count, shaving a few strokes off the default max of 40. We met over coffee to discuss the trip at hand. I needed to make sure Garth knew what he was signing up for in links golf, in wooly-hat golf, in buying-more-balls-at-the-turn golf. And he was in, without a breath of hesitation. He had a line on a gross of golf balls through DrMulligans.com and was eager for the test, as long as, he explained, I didn’t mind playing with a beginner. He knew my golf had earnest ambitions and didn’t want his learning curve to interfere.
Any golfer who busted his ass to shrink his handicap from 40 to 38.6, who counted every single stroke with an almost agonizing veracity, who was ready to take a winter’s worth of lessons and wanted so badly to be a golfer without cutting a single corner or taking a single putt, was as worthy a partner as I could find. I assured him he would be doing me a great favor in making the trip to come find me up in Aberdeen, but I didn’t tell him that it would be a treat to see a links course through the eyes of someone who had never imagined one, and to again see the game from the perspective of someone who was still courting it.
A round of golf is full of silent rhythms and nuances that players take for granted: Where do you position your bag, stand on the green, drop the pin, take a leak? Contact is hard enough, but the etiquette and flow of a game takes years to master, and I wonder how many beginners give up for feeling like outsiders, unwelcome because they don’t know all the secret handshakes. I once heard a Tour pro say that he didn’t golf with members at his club because he didn’t want to play “with a bunch of chops.” But the chops are the future. They’re the most important players on the course, and they need our stewardship. So hug a chop, because we are all chops at least a few times every round.
I wasn’t a benevolent guru inviting a beginner along to marvel at my drives; rather, I was fortunate for a playing partner who loved golf more than I did. He must have, because I wouldn’t have spent the money on a ticket to Scotland for the chance to add up to 124. I was born in the church of golf and had watched my faith lapse, while Garth was freshly converted and chased the game with the fervor of the born-again. He wouldn’t teach me anything about the golf swing, but that was fine, because I suspected he would show me something about golf guts.
And he did, straight off the plane. We might have oriented him on a wee parkland nine-holer or warmed up on a practice range, but the schedule demanded Garth belly flop into the deep end, teeing up his first Scottish ball on a course that had hosted the Scottish Open and the Walker Cup, the sixth-oldest club in the world, where King Edward VII himself added the royal to Royal Aberdeen.
After a kind welcome and a tour of the aged clubhouse that showcased trophies older than Texas and an encased sample of the members’ red coats, I felt the nerves myself. I hoped Garth didn’t know enough about the game’s history to be daunted by his surroundings. His goal on this trip was to break 100 in Scotland, and I hoped this course wouldn’t prove that goal a pipe dream on day one. On the opening tee box, Garth turned to me. I expected him to make some excuse about jet lag or his new golf shoes, but instead he smiled and said, “Guess what, Tom? We get to golf today.”
Unafraid, he stepped up and knocked his ball down the first fairway in a mostly forward and airborne fashion. And suddenly, the trip had changed: I was no longer the lone seeker, and as I walked the opening hole, a par 4 that rolled downward toward an ocean horizon, I felt a lightness in my steps. What a relief to take a break from worrying about myself and my scorecards and cheer for someone else for a while.
It turned out that my cheers weren’t going to be enough—not on this afternoon. Royal Aberdeen flogged Garth with contempt and abandon, but his spirit never wavered, even as his carefully calculated ball budget took a hit that threatened his Dr. Mulligans stash. I didn’t have to explain that the five-minute rule for ball searches was
invented at this very club (if you don’t play the gorse as a lateral hazard in Scotland, dropping instead of running back to hit again, you’ll have the course backed up in no time); Garth looked, dropped, and got on with it. “I’m not playing Royal Aberdeen,” he explained from the high herbs off the ninth fairway, “I’m exploring it.”
Both refined and bombastic, Royal Aberdeen was a status course with a wild side. It blended the formality of Muirfield with the giddiness of Murcar’s dunes next door, and its nine-out, nine-in routing was a steady meal of thinking shots and hopeful strategies. If Garth never golfed another links, he could say he had played one of the true ones. He hit a surplus of shots that day, but none would top the magic of his approach to the final green. Eighteen was an angry par 4 that played upward to a green set directly beside the clubhouse. As Garth stood over his third shot, 5-iron in hand, I eyed the tall glass windows of the clubhouse. This could be terrible, I thought. And then I realized, This could be awesome. What an extraordinary mark to leave upon the sixth-oldest club in the world. Surely they had insurance.
As his ball rose against the breeze and turned toward the clubhouse and the adjacent practice green where a member was putting, I heard Garth let out the meekest Fore? in the history of golf. We both exhaled as the ball dropped safely without making humanly or window-ly contact. Garth had actually hit the green, albeit the practice one, and we watched as his ball rolled up to the member’s feet and stopped. The man looked down, wondering where this extra ball had come from, perhaps trying to guess who Dr. Mulligans was. He putted on without a word or even a look our way, and we left Royal Aberdeen with a new understanding that in golf, it isn’t always the things you hit but the things you miss that matter.
I had been keeping a number of lists in my evening journal—favorite holes, toughest pars, best par 3s, best short courses—but over the next week, I would start a new list that I enjoyed more than all the others: Shit Garth Hit. The first entry was Practice green at Royal Aberdeen, but it would grow to include various obstacles and conveyances, both natural and man-made. At the short locals’ links of Inverallochy, the list would acquire its most impressive item: Flagpole. Not a golf flag, mind you, but a literal flagpole in the parking lot that waved the Scottish standard.
Inverallochy was a cheerful par 66 perched directly atop the cliffs, where Garth greeted me at the first tee with his morning catchphrase: “Hey, Tom, guess what? We get to golf today.” I wondered when I would tire of hearing that, but I reminded myself that Garth was right and I was golf-spoiled, and that I should stop hoping that one morning I might hear, Guess what, Tom? We get to sleep/do crosswords/shuck oysters/juggle fire/scratch our asses today instead.
The layout was a nice break for Garth—shortish and void of the gorse that crowded Royal Aberdeen. The hospitality in the clubhouse, where they were pleasantly surprised to find Americans had arrived to play their wee track, was surpassed only by the kindness on the course, where a greenskeeper hopped out of his tractor to tell Garth he found his drive two fairways over. It was a morning of majestic views where you could let it fly, and we did. I signed for what was becoming my too-common five over, and Garth flirted with the hundred barrier. He didn’t break it, but his ball budget was back in the black as he lost nary a pebble, though he did nearly lose all the cash in both of our wallets.
The first two holes played past the clubhouse, but the third came directly back toward it, the green set next to another terrifying amount of glass. A crowded parking lot was far more frightening than the clubhouse from yesterday, and I imagined Garth engaged in a cliffside wrestling match with the owner of that Audi SUV. As Garth reached for his 5-iron, I decided not to say what I knew we were both thinking, but as we watched his ball bullet toward the cars, I wished that I had. The projectile banked hard and locked in on its shiny target; we braced for impact and let out sighs of Shiiiiit. But then came a miraculous DOING! The club’s thin flagpole was the only barrier between Garth’s shot and a sea of windshields, and he somehow managed to hit the sucker dead-on, his ball careening sideways and bouncing through the lot.
Unafraid and unashamed, Garth walked into the parking lot, nodded hello to the family loading into an unblemished Audi, and conspicuously collected his Titleist from beside their tire. My boy had balls, and he left Inverallochy with all of them that morning. And on we went, in search of 99.
At nearby Fraserburgh, the only addition to the Shit Garth Hit list would be a road, which seemed like more of a rite of passage than an error—everybody had hit a road ball and cringed, waiting for the impending smash and tire-screech. Fraserburgh checked in as the seventh-oldest club in the world, yet it held none of the affectations that one might expect at a club of such heritage (Fraserburgh fun fact: It’s the oldest club in the world still operating under its original name). It was a sort of second-tier links that touring golfers might skip, and to do so would be a great shame, as Garth and I both adored this wild seaside climb of a course. Laid out by James Braid, whom I was now convinced neither slept nor ate, the course stretched up, over, down, and around a massive hill set in the heart of the links. The first and last holes from and to the clubhouse were sleepy appetizers, but once we took on the mountain at the course’s middle, the holes were rambling romps of uneven lies and sneaky turns. It was less manicured than the tour-bus courses, with tiny white flowers dotting the fairways and driving both of us dizzy by the end; hunting for balls camouflaged in the fairway was a nuisance, but it was worth the trouble for the chance to play a course that lived up to the oft-abused label of hidden gem.
As we played our way home on eighteen, we passed a member coming up number one for a few evening holes. Our drives had crisscrossed, so we stopped to say hello. We told him how much we enjoyed his course, and he said, “Happy to hear it. As long as you’re having fun, that’s all that matters.”
It was true, and I wondered whether that was the obvious wisdom I had traveled so far to find. Perhaps it was. I was sure to keep having fun as I closed with a bogey and Garth licked his wounds from his 118 swipes. Two rounds completed, but on this evening, there was still more fun to be had.
With Garth’s arrival came the question of shoe-changing etiquette. There was always the debate about whether one could or should change one’s shoes in the parking lot or in the clubhouse, or if the clubhouse was open to visitors, or if there was a separate visitors’ locker room (there often was) and if we knew the entry code for the door (I often didn’t). I avoided such quandaries by wearing golf shoes full-time, but as Garth had some actual sense about driving in spikes, we would pull into a parking lot and have to wonder if bare socks in the car park would be an affront to someone in a red coat. At Rosehearty, a nine-holer just up the coast from Fraserburgh, such concerns were alleviated when we watched a gentleman pull into the parking lot, step to the back of his car, and in a fifty-degree breeze, drop his work trousers and change into golf pants, a process during which he proved that it was not just the French or the Italians but all European men who preferred banana hammocks. In this gentleman’s case, the hammock was in fact banana-colored, his bright yellow briefs partly obscured by belly overhang.
I turned to Garth. “I think we’re okay to change our shoes in the parking lot.”
He agreed.
The small building beside the Rosehearty parking lot was locked. It might have been a clubhouse, but it looked like it was rarely inhabited. I noticed a pub across the street, and I recalled Alan back at the Glen telling me of a course where I was going to have to check in at the bar across the road; he warned me that there were downward steps inside the doorway, and coming from the light into the dark bar was blinding—he ended up going down the steps on his ass the first time. We gave it a shot, and sure enough, we found the steps and the dark bar, where a lone woman tended an empty room.
“You here for the golf?”
We told her we were. She took our money and handed us scorecards, and off we went to play one of the least-fussy courses in Sco
tland.
Rosehearty was a punishment-void and judgment-free nightcap to Garth’s first day. The course was essentially a field with nine holes in it, albeit a lovely, lofted field overlooking the ocean. If it were my local golf escape, I would have been happy enough. Garth broke 100 by forty-eight whole shots, proving what I had always known was the secret to better scoring: playing fewer holes.
It was an hour’s drive along the northern coast to our guesthouse in Nairn, where we would be able to unpack for four nights. This stretch of coastline east and north of Inverness was another pocket packed with links offerings, so I had been careful to book us quality accommodations; the four-star Sandown House deserved a fifth. The B&B was large and spotless and a par 5 away from the Nairn links, where we would be playing in a few days. The owner, Liz, was a traveling golfer’s angel. Hers was a golfing household, and her two boys had just returned from their semesters in America, where they were both playing college golf. I felt wonderfully at home with this surrogate golfing mother whose breakfasts were so good I actually woke up for them (common practice was to grab as much sleep as possible and shovel a fistful of peanuts into my mouth on the way to the course). She offered club storage and gear drying and end-of-the-day whisky for her clientele. I declined my dram each evening, though she was kind and Scottish enough to keep asking, and her bagpipe-playing neighbor walked over to serenade us one evening with what I believed was the Scottish national anthem. Or it might have been ours. Sounded great either way.
We unpacked, and Liz steered us toward a hotel up the road for a late meal, where I was hungry enough to eat every ounce of my haggis pizza. I was confident that only Americans ordered the haggis pizza, but I embraced my traveler’s naiveté. The spicy brown stuff put pepperoni to shame. Ever the golfing actuarial, Garth pored over the math on his scorecards between bites. His 106 at Inverallochy was a tease. I assured him that if he’d given himself the putts and breakfast-balls some golfers did, he might have broken 100 today, but he wanted to do it the right way. Good on ya, Garth, I thought. Golf was happy to have him onboard.