by Tom Coyne
He confessed that he had not only never played two rounds in a day but that two rounds in a week was his highest previous tally, so, scores aside, forty-five holes in a day was a total of which to be proud.
“Ready to do it again tomorrow?” I asked.
“Totally ready. Can’t wait,” he said. “Is that strange? That is strange. What is it about golf? It’s addictive. I mean, thirty-six holes a day. I think this qualifies as addictive behavior.”
I smiled. He knew my story, and I knew what he was getting at. Perhaps I had traded one dependency for another. I’ll admit, the thought was there every time I lifted my absurd stack of an itinerary.
People talk about addiction as a weakness, as a lack of will or character. Maybe they’re right, but I imagine such folks would be surprised to know that it’s they whom the active addict views as lacking. Lacking the truth. Lacking awareness and emotional sincerity. Lacking any idea as to what life really is and what living it actually feels like. A drunk doesn’t drink to feel good; he drinks to not feel like death. They would say an alcoholic wants to drink. They wouldn’t have a clue.
Above all other things, addiction is about being unsettled. It’s about an unshakable discontentment, and all the fear that comes with it. Those people wouldn’t call it a disease; call it a dis-ease, then. The simplest solution for unrest is to seek more, to chase better, to find the greater and bigger and funner. Settling for pain or, worse, settling for normal is for the weak and foolish. That’s how it starts, anyway: trying to level the unsettledness, until it eventually just becomes about getting through the day.
This quest was a dry one, but who knew how sober it was. There was addiction all over it; I was still a chaser, still unsettled. I was grateful that the things I was chasing of late weren’t necessarily going to kill me, and hoped it would remain that way until I figured out how to stand still.
In the meantime, I ate haggis on my pizza and fell asleep to snooker on TV, relieved that there was more golf tomorrow, convinced it could be better.
• • •
I could smell it in the air at Moray: the talent. It was hanging around the practice green and playing in foursomes of college golf bags. Next to whisky, Scotland’s greatest export had to be eighteen-year-old golf hopefuls shipped to American universities, and they were all over Moray, playing second balls and putting not to the pins but to the tees they stuck in tomorrow’s hole locations. Practice rounds were under way for the next day’s Scottish Open Stroke Championship. Qualification was based on handicaps, and while mine might have snuck me in off the waiting list, the three days it would have stuck me in Lossiemouth was not part of the plan; I had eight courses to explore in that time. But it was helpful to play a course set for championship golf, and I put my mind to playing this round as if my name were on the board and every shot were posted.
The locals referred to the Moray course by its town name, Lossiemouth, but whatever you called it, it was a formidable, gorse-clogged test. There was a St. Andrews feeling about the start and finish of this Tom Morris course, where the clubhouse sat snugly between the ocean and the town. It was a steep forty paces down to the golf course from the street, giving the finish a sunken-stadium vibe. The course also possessed an immovable obstruction I had yet to see anywhere else in golf: landing lights for the nearby Royal Air Force base. You got relief from the wooden towers that were mostly confined to the rough, but it took us a few holes to figure out what they were for. Were they clues to a shortcut to the green, or some sort of elaborate laundry-drying apparatus? When a landing fighter jet nearly knocked off our hats, their purpose became clear.
They came in by the dozen, close enough that Garth’s hit list had a chance to go from comical to legendary status. We didn’t hit any planes that day, though we got some great pictures of us putting with their landing gear overhead. A plane-strike had apparently happened once, in 1971 when a schoolteacher popped up a drive at Moray that struck a Royal Navy Hawker Hunter jet. I could only imagine the clubhouse deliberations over that ruling. I didn’t recall anything from the Leith rules about Navy jets, but the schoolteacher’s case was pronounced rub of the green—play it where it lies.
My 75 would have had me playing from the wrong side of the cut line in tomorrow’s field of Walker Cup players and future minitour pros, and Garth’s 110 would have been a sub-100 round at a gentler track. I was tired at Moray and felt frustration setting in; I was too far along to still be losing balls and making thoughtless doubles the way I did on the second hole. My wipey cuts were not going away; they were getting worse, and I worried that eschewing the driving range in favor of actual play had been a flawed strategy from the start. My swing path needed retuning, but the idea of finding a range to do video work nauseated me. The meal was prepared; it was too late to go back to the mixing bowl. I would have to find a change on the fly and go with the miss I had.
I also had to give myself a break. Back in Philadelphia, Dynda had stressed that golfers who demanded consistency were chasing Bigfoot. Even the best players in the world missed fairways and greens—often, actually—and while on TV it looked like they never missed a putt, the data showed that pros holed less than half their putts beyond eight feet. He believed in golf as a bell curve on either end of which there would always be outlying shots—good and bad—and that while practice might tighten up the curve or shift it forward, the golf ball would always disobey us during a round. Such was its design. How we recovered when it did, and how many putts we made inside of eight feet, was where the money was made, and where the pros separated themselves from the guys shooting 75 in a practice round.
Somewhere along the front nine of Royal Tarlair that afternoon, on my way to an opening 40, it occurred to me that it might not be that I was growing tired but that I was getting weak or strong in the wrong places. I had carried a one-strap bag slung over my right shoulder over some fifty golf courses, and I wondered whether my strengthened right side might have something to do with my expanding misses, grooving me a more over-and-across path that wiped the golf ball and, as I had proven recently, even brought the hosel into play. I understood all of this abstractly, but without drills or a range to rejigger my move, I didn’t know what to do about it. So I did something obvious: On number ten at Royal Tarlair, I set my right shoulder back and weakened my grip, stuff they teach you at the junior clinic when you’re twelve. I felt the club head dropping inside the ball, and my wipe morphed into a cannon. I made three birdies and shot 33 on the closing nine, and wondered if there were any spots left at Lossiemouth from no-shows tomorrow.
Today’s swing fix rarely lasted into tomorrow, and it likely wouldn’t be my answer by trip’s end at Bruntsfield, by which time I would have worshipped and discarded a half dozen remedies. But the key was to keep looking for one. The fixes didn’t last, and the good shots were only as dependable as the bad ones, but if I kept trying to play golf—think, adjust, react—rather than trying to beat it, 33 was not out of the question.
Royal Tarlair was a clifftop course of wild vistas and straightforward holes that might have visitors wondering why they weren’t back at Cruden Bay until they arrived at the thirteenth, a par 3 called Clivet that shot to the top of my list of the most dramatic holes in Scotland. At 152 yards off the edge of a rocky precipice, Clivet required you to loft your ball across a crashing sea and down to a saucer of green planted on a stony ocean outcropping far below. It felt like god’s version of the seventeenth at Sawgrass, worth the visit just for that signature hole. It might have been a one-hit wonder of a golf course, but as far as one-hit wonders go, Clivet was an absolute Chumbawamba.
Garth’s stretch of Scottish golf east of Inverness was crowded with such courses: lots of locals’ tracks that didn’t shine quite brightly enough to stop the busses but were still classy little jewels, places like Spey Bay and Strathlene and Nairn Dunbar and Buckpool and Hopeman. If your friends wanted solid and unbothered golf, you could plan a nice getaway among the lot, for a tidy little pri
ce.
We pulled up to Spey Bay to find campers setting up tents outside the barn of a clubhouse, raising our suspicions about the golf we might find at what looked like a campground from the parking lot. But behind the clubhouse was a genuine out-and-in links stretching along the ocean that had been laid out by Scottish golf legend Ben Sayers, who, as it was explained to us by the manager inside the one-room clubhouse, came up from North Berwick in the early 1900s and laid out the course in one afternoon, using nothing more than two flags. He marked a tee with one and then waved to a lad in the distance until the flag marking the green was where he wanted it.
The topography of Spey Bay showed why Sayers’s job was such an easy one. The tides had left dunes that were shaped like long gullies, so some of the holes played like you were skiing through a half-pipe. A bit ragged around the edges (as we heard everywhere, the wet spring had been cruel to courses across the country, and maintenance had yet to really begin), Spey Bay won the competition for best scorecard in my growing collection. Rather than another picture of a golf hole, its cover featured a black-and-white photograph of club member James Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister of Great Britain. Word was that he had been kicked out of nearby Moray for opposing Great Britain’s involvement in World War I, though our friend in the clubhouse said he was barred from Moray for being of illegitimate birth, and for being a member of the Labour party.
Spey Bay’s tunnels were tight and the wind was blowing out to sea, so it took only a few holes before Garth added ocean to his list of things hit. But his spirits didn’t sag. As we watched his second tee ball chase his first one into the thick gorse on number twelve, he said, “Look at it this way: I’ve just doubled my chances of finding a ball in there.”
It would take all Garth’s optimism to make it around Hopeman that afternoon. I had warned him that we had a tournament in our path, but I didn’t know until we checked in at the pro shop that it was a stroke-play event. No equitable stroke control, and no blobs or surrenders—it was hack until it’s dead.
“You don’t have to do this,” I told him. “You can just pay and play and say you aren’t going to post a score.”
“Oh, I’m posting a score,” Garth said, unfazed. “I’m in, baby.”
We paid at the scorer’s table, and they asked for our handicaps for the gross prizes.
“Thirty-eight,” Garth proclaimed.
The man looked up from the score sheet, presumably surprised to see a healthy young lad standing before him.
“You’ll be a twenty-eight today. Tournament maximum.”
I winced, while Garth smiled and said, “Fantastic. Twenty-eight it is.”
I couldn’t help but fear for my friend, a real-life tournament virgin. I had tournament scabs on top of tournament scars, so maybe he was better off with this being his first stroke-play competition. Ignorance was bliss, especially when they just about chopped your handicap in half.
Luckily for us, it was pissing rain and freezing cold at Hopeman; perhaps the water would wash the numbers off our scorecards or freeze our fingers to the point where we could no longer write them down. Hopeman wasn’t particularly long at a par of 68, but the place felt like a gorse nursery wherein they’d cleared a few paths for people to attempt to advance a golf ball. Whether it was the weather or the frustration of having to locate every single one of our threesome’s shots, I felt like I was golfing in one giant shrub of thorns, hacking my way through a damp perdition. I jammed a 3-iron to six feet and three-putted. I backhanded a tap-in and missed. I checked out in every possible way. The best shot I hit all day was a chip-in for triple bogey on the fifth after blowing two tee balls into the prickly nevermore, and while Hopeman’s signature twelfth was another cliffside downhill par 3 that recalled the joys of Clivet, I played like a petulant toddler, convinced that if I grew angry enough, they wouldn’t make me post.
My bitterness about shooting 81 had blinded me to the travails of my friend. I knew that Garth was working on a number of genuine heft, but I barely helped him look for his balls on number five, lamenting my triple instead. When he told his marker his score for the hole—“That would be a fifteen”—I should have stepped in and told him to no-card and just try to enjoy himself. But I think he did, at least partly, because he didn’t hesitate to sign his card at the scorer’s table, and as names rolled down the digital scoreboard in the bar, it was all laughs and smiles as we watched GARTH R—USA flash onto the board beside a final tally of 130 gross, 102 net: 130 wasn’t all that bad with a 15 in the mix. We took a picture in front of the scoreboard with two big thumbs-up and wide, American smiles.
We treated ourselves to Steak Night at the Golf View Hotel in Nairn. From the look of the place, it was a golf traveler’s indulgence planted next to the Nairn links, with a spa and a four-star rating. The garden dining room was lovely, though our service proved that there are still curious wrinkles to hospitality in the British Isles. Table service often felt a bit stiff and utilitarian, perhaps the product of the nontipping culture, though 10 percent is welcome, particularly when they know you’re a Yank. At Steak Night, our rib eyes came with a free bottle of red wine. When I asked if I might substitute a bottle of sparking water for the wine, the waitress looked at me as if I’d asked for a carafe of rare morning dew. She paused, then said she would have to consult with her manager.
I thought it a simple request and figured I was doing them a favor by substituting a three-dollar thing for the twenty-dollar thing, but when she returned and told me, “I’m sorry, sir. You can only have the wine. We don’t allow for substitutions,” I had to shake my head.
“Okay. Bring the wine. I’ll just dump it in the garden.”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“I’m kidding,” I said. I wasn’t. “I’ll pay for the water.” I didn’t always feel like the only person in Scotland who wasn’t having a drink in the evening, but on Steak Night, I felt a kinship with all the gluten-allergists and anyone who needed the walnuts picked out of their salad.
The steak and chips were lovely, and as I doused my fried potatoes with vinegar, I cataloged for Garth my frustrations at Hopeman. I’d missed three birdies within ten feet on the first three holes and then given up. It was a movie I’d watched before and hated every time, but when I got out on the course, I insisted on playing it again.
“You should learn from today,” Garth said. I didn’t expect golf advice from a newcomer, and I wasn’t sure whether I resented it, but I listened all the same. “Learn from what happened at Hopeman so that it doesn’t happen in the qualifier.”
I appreciated the input—I think—but it wasn’t anything I didn’t know. What I did not know was how to learn from my mistakes. I’d been beating myself up on the course and checking out in competition since I was a kid. And why? To punish myself? To teach golf a lesson? I’d learned plenty from my blunders; I just didn’t want to do anything about them. What Garth was really telling me, I later understood, was that when it came to my golf, I needed to grow up.
Reworking my swing path or recalibrating my grip were easy, but growing up—now that sounded like work.
• • •
I came to Scotland craving some quirky, and experience had taught that seaside short-courses where golf had been squeezed into a tight swath of coastline were the best places to find it. And Scotland did not disappoint when it came to tiny tracks. I hoped Garth had played enough golf to understand that what he was witnessing at Cullen and at Covesea should not be dismissed as too peculiar or diminutive; rather, these two wee treks through the dunes and boulders were condensed genius, veritable golfing muses to fire the imagination of a links golfer for whom all the green and gorse were starting to look the same.
Word around these parts was that the Cullen golfers were nearly invincible in Opens and scooped up trophies by the bushel, because if you could get around Cullen’s tight 4,623 yards in a low number, it meant your short game was aces and your irons were grooved on a par-63 course of ten pa
r 3s. A lot of golfers, myself included, treated their 3-through-6-irons like unteachable pupils, misbehavers that we tolerated having in our bags in case of emergency. We fawned over our drivers, wedges, and putters, but Dynda had explained that his friend Sean Foley, Tiger’s former coach, believed that mid-irons were the real talent separators. On Tour, proficiency from 180 to 230 yards was a huge statistical divider between the goods and the greats; Cullen required such yardages off most of its tees, so its members owned the elusive two-hundred-yard dart. I also suspected that the Cullen members had a toughness to them that might have intimidated their competition—in the men’s locker room, a sign that asked members to remove their trolleys from atop their lockers had been edited with a dissenting opinion scrawled across the bottom: FUCK OFF YE BAMS. I didn’t know what a bam was, but I looked forward to referring to most of my friends as such for the foreseeable future.
I finished Cullen at level par, testament to an improved dexterity with my 4-iron, but most likely a result of my not thinking about my score once in my 63 swings. Instead I was thinking about where the pin might be on the handful of blind par 3s or how we were going to get down to those other golf holes two hundred yards below us or if we were really supposed to climb that slope without some sort of lever and pulley system or how these rock formations had come to exist. The lower valley of the course was partitioned by a massive wall of brown stone and was dotted with gigantically phallic stalagmites. At some point this valley had been level with the cliffs, and prehistoric bits of their mass remained, interrupting the fairways with stunning stone sculptures. The same was the case up the road at Covesea, where the turf wasn’t as tidy as Cullen’s but the quirks spun us around a ravine of heroic golf holes.