A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  At both courses, we played up against washed-out cave walls, through gaps between little buttes and mesas, past gorges and over crags. There was something almost Paleolithic about the courses as we golfed through these tiny Scottish grand canyons. If Fred Flintstone had golfed, these would have been his home fairways.

  Cullen was clearly the more established of the two—it dated to 1870, and its original nine was another Old Tom layout (he and Braid were veritable Johnny Appleseeds of UK golf courses). Cullen had a cozy clubhouse and a busy course, and while one might be reluctant to play a track where one was required to buy insurance in the pro shop before teeing off—the standing-room-only layout brought plenty of other golfers’ noggins into play—fifty pence was a bargain for the sigh of relief Garth exhaled when he looked down at his Cullen proof of insurance card and said, “Finally.”

  A half hour west of Cullen, the Covesea course put the hidden back in hidden gem. We drove past the entrance twice before turning onto a long gravel descent that we inched down as if pulling our mules—You sure this is the way?—relieved to at last see golf holes planted between cliffs and beach. Covesea was a recently reborn nine-holer with a modest charm that won me over in every way, from the hand-drawn course map on a homemade scorecard to the sandy greens shaped like skinny amoebas to the fact that on the 238-yard sixth, I hit a tee ball that would sustain my confidence for a good two weeks, rocketing my hybrid through a canyon chute and sticking the ball to two feet (I followed the formality of my playing partner and holed it out properly). But the most charismatic part of Covesea was the welcome from the caretaker of the pro shop, a woman named Angela who was married to the course’s designer. She apologized for her muddy boots and offered us candy bars and scorecards stamped with unpretentious advice for visiting golfers: Don’t forget to stop and smell the roses! We asked about the origins of this links hideout, and she shared with us the story of her husband, Andy Burnett, who was living a golf dream to which this golf dreamer could only aspire.

  Andy had built other parkland courses in the region, places I was sorry I hadn’t heard of, but it was his vision to own his own track, so he and Angela put together all their pounds and purchased what used to be twelve holes by the sea. They opened a restaurant beside the first tee, a place called the Tee Shack that was busy with locals and tourists at lunchtime. More people came for coffee with a view than for golf, but after a few years of restaurant success, the Tee Shack burned to the ground in the middle of the night. Andy and Angela were left operating the course out of a trailer without the income from their diners, and Covesea suffered from a steep drop-off in play. They worried that people assumed they were closed after the fire, but let the golfing world know that Covesea is open and is a must-play, not just for the vistas and its exuberant golf holes but for the chance to celebrate a course built by the hands of a man who decided he wanted a golf course, grabbed a shovel, and, over the course of a decade of back-busting labor, built himself a damn good one (Angela said that Andy’s brother chipped in to help, too).

  I didn’t meet Andy during our visit, and that was fine, because I wanted to admire him like a kid in awe of an unmet hero. I loved that he risked and toiled and battled the rains and fire for his own slice of links heaven, and in so doing created and sustained a gift for every golfer fortunate enough to stop and smell the roses at Covesea. There were legions of unknown, frontline fighters who risked their finances and their futures to keep a first tee open. I was glad to know the name of one of them now, and I told Angela I would be back someday to meet him. Hopefully the Tee Shack would be back in business by then, and I could raise a cup to Andy Burnett.

  • • •

  On the drive home from dinner that evening, I remembered that I had neglected a duty of genuine importance and hustled back to my laptop for a phone number. My daughter Maggie’s ballet recital was the next morning. Her class practiced all year to present four minutes of semiorganized twirling, and when I had first proposed my two months abroad, this was the sole conflict Allyson had mentioned. For a moment, it was enough to sink the whole trip—you have to have a daughter to understand—until the necessary amount of self-righteous rationalizing kicked in, along with a promise that I would send flowers.

  One promise, and I had properly fumbled it. I thought my campaign for Father of the Year had to be suspended yet again until I got hold of a 1-800-Somebody who could get flowers to my house in the next ten hours. I judiciously selected the bouquet (What kind of flowers would you like to send? How about the fifty-dollar kind) and carefully dictated my note to the salesman on the phone:

  “I want it to say, ‘Dear Maggie, have a wonderful time dancing in the show today,’ ” I recited. “ ‘I am so sorry for missing it, and I love you very much. I wish I could be there.’ ” I stopped myself. This guy on the other end must think I’m shit.

  “I’m not a bad dad or anything,” I protested to the anonymous flower man. “I’m just away traveling right now . . .”

  “I’m sure you’re not,” he said, uninterested and unconvinced.

  My girls couldn’t know what I was up to or after; as far as they understood it, Daddy was away golfing, and to them, golf was just the thing they wanted turned off the television. Maybe they would someday play and understand, perhaps visiting these courses on some occasion and being happy that they were following their father’s footsteps. And even if they didn’t and never took to the game, if they at least read these pages, they would know that they were in every word and every step. Sorry about the recital when you were five, Maggie, but I watched the video, and of all the twirling tulips, no petals spun as beautifully as yours.

  • • •

  “Guess what, Tom? We get to golf today.”

  It was with real pleasure that, at Nairn, I got to add a phrase to Garth’s morning refrain, words I’d never heard spoken on a golf course before: “With the World Speedgolf Champion.”

  As Garth’s week in Scotland drew to a close, the list in my journal had grown crowded with happy memories of extraordinary feats of golf:

  Shit Garth Hit

  1. Flagpole

  2. Parking lot

  3. Practice green

  4. Road

  5. Practice facility (Garth knocked the metal siding at Fraserburgh’s driving range with a triumphant GONG!)

  6. Beach (At Nairn, Garth outsourced his drive to the beach at low tide, then took my dare and went out and played it from eighty yards off the golf course; the picture I took of him in his follow-through on a vast strand without a golf course in sight captured the spirit of golfer versus nature in its purest form.)

  7. Ocean

  8. Wrong green (On the eighteenth at Buckpool, Garth confessed to fist-pumping as his ball rolled onto the putting surface from 200 yards out, only to look up and find me chipping to a green forty paces to the left.)

  Human beings was nearly added to the list when a threesome at Inverallochy came close to getting a physical from Dr. Mulligans, but in fairness to Garth, he also found a lot of fairways and hit every single green. Eventually.

  You traveled with golf clubs to play shots and bring home stories, and Garth had been something of a genius in his ability to combine the two goals, hitting more story-worthy golf shots than I might hope to in all my Scottish rounds. Add to his list eighteen holes with a petite young blonde who was in all ways the opposite of every golfer I expected to join me in Scotland and Garth’s trip went from memorable to unmatched.

  Among my prearranged playing partners, the average age was forty-eight, average weight was Why are you asking?, average ability level was Two sleeves should be enough, and average playing pace was What time is dinner? Gretchen was twentysomething, weighed less than her set of Nike irons, played off near-scratch, and liked to go around eighteen holes in less than an hour.

  A friend of a friend put us in touch, knowing she would be golfing her way around the UK that summer, and when the women’s World Speedgolf Champion emails you, you write back
. I couldn’t decline golf with a world champion, even if I didn’t know what speedgolf was (it’s hit-and-run golf, where your time and total strokes make a cumulative total). Gretchen compared the test of speedgolf to that of the biathlon, that kid-friendly Olympic sport that combines guns and skiing, where the challenge is combining a breathless pace with a precision skill, sprinting your way to a four-foot putt.

  I should have expected a speedgolfer to beat us to the tee at Nairn, and Gretchen did. She greeted me with a huggy friendliness that affirmed her West Coast roots—born and raised in Oregon, she now worked for Nike in Amsterdam. She spoke to both of us with an ease that suggested any worries we might have had about uptight golf with a champion were misplaced. Garth warned her that he was relatively new to golf, but as Gretchen planted her tee in the first box, she was nothing but reassuring. “Hey, man, it’s all good,” she said. “I’m just trying to hit it where the lawnmowers go.”

  The lawnmowers would need trim only a thin strip down the center of the Nairn links that day for Gretchen. I expected her to go running after her first tee shot, but she casually strolled the fairways beside us on what was one of the most classic-feeling links I had played since the Old Course—an authentic beach-tied, nine-out, nine-in routing unprotected from the sea, teeming with Ice Age–crafted kinks, with the ocean haunting every swing. A detour into the woods held two of the toughest holes in the Highlands, Nairn’s thirteenth and fourteenth, a par 4 and a par 3 draped up and down a hillside. It was an unobstructed sort of links where you could see the rest of the course around you and up ahead. I once thought the mark of a great course was being able to see only the hole on which you were playing (an attribute for which golfers commonly praise Pine Valley), but there’s something powerful about a view that gives you a sense of a course’s whole size and shape and your place upon it. You become aware of your movement through its geography as you consider what lies ahead. Nairn didn’t hide from you. It seemed to dare you to fight your way across it, to touch that wall out there on the far end—there literally was an old barn wall at the end of the outward nine—and golf your ball back home.

  Gretchen belted it for a golfer of slight stature, a true athlete who annoyingly had taken up golf in her college years and was now considering a run at the turtle’s-pace pro circuit, and I surmised that her easy demeanor and true golf addiction would serve her well in that career path. She hopped planes most weekends from Amsterdam, seeking out cheap airfares to golf in the UK, where she played sunup to sundown, often alone—a genuine golf-chaser. She was fiery on her rare mishits; she expected good shots and nearly always produced them, but was otherwise a laid-back playing partner who taught me a Cali-vibe golf expression that I doubted I would ever reuse but had to appreciate for its novelty. As Garth blasted a drive toward the seals, Gretchen called out, “AMF!”

  “AMF?”

  She smiled and shouldered her bag. “Adios, motherfucker.”

  She joined us for dinner at a bright place called the Classroom, a spot that proved Nairn to be a bit of a gourmet hub. The dishes were all products of the owner’s nearby farm, and my steak and chips was the best steak and chips of the thirty-seven protein-and-potato entrées I had ordered in Scotland to date. Gretchen brought a breath of fresh air to our dining routine, and her energy was a shot of enthusiasm into the trip—she was young and curious, and after a pint of lager, she peppered Garth and me with questions about not just golf but life. What were our best decisions? Our biggest regrets? What did we want to accomplish in life? Be remembered for?

  I felt like a worn wanderer speaking to a hopeful wunderkind, my experience meeting her optimism. It was nice to be looked up to for some wisdom, though I had little to offer. I volunteered some hackneyed advice about living without regret and seizing opportunities. Truth was, I learned more from my day with young Gretchen than she probably did from the day with the author whose book she had finished the evening before. On the course, she explained how speedgolf made her regular game sharper. It didn’t allow for doubt and pondering—see it, hit it, get on with it. Target and go: it was golf as a sport, and it sounded brilliant. For all the time I’d spent trying to outthink golf, maybe it was the thinking that had to be un-thought. It was a tall ask for a player who lived between his ears, but I could at least aspire to play more like this athlete, reacting rather than overplanning and hoping.

  Toward the end of our evening, Gretchen confided that she was coming off a breakup and felt a bit disconnected living abroad. She was happy to have had the brief company. I invited her to come back and join me anywhere along the remainder of my trip; she said she would, and I didn’t doubt it. Garth and I both left that dinner feeling like we had a new little sister who was searching but couldn’t possibly know how fortunate she was for her youth, her talent, and the troubles that, in hindsight, she would come to see as passing breezes.

  Gretchen’s weekend drop-in had me recalling the things I was doing at her age, how nothing about my life today matched my plans from that time—thank god—and how life had given me so much of something for which I was almost never grateful: experience. I didn’t care for calling myself forty, but forty years of experience was valuable. Priceless, really; and forty-one and fifty-one would bring more. I wasn’t able to explain to Gretchen that this was why I lived without regret, why I wouldn’t trade in any former days, because the good ones were good and the bad ones made them so. She would see it in time. We all get a transcript full of experience, whether we sign up for the classes or not.

  • • •

  In case I doubted the value of experience or the blessings born of our trials, Garth offered proof of both the next day. Strathlene on Buckie was another solid locals’ course where the holes were not quite as memorable as the views or the wind or the climbs. It wasn’t a long walk at a par of 69, but heading into a wind that felt as though we had found the tippity-top of Scotland, it felt like hard labor.

  Gretchen’s inspiration vanished in the amount of time it took to make a double bogey, which was all of two holes. Not even Strathlene’s resonant club motto posted above its door—Far and Sure—could inspire me to fight for my scorecard. As we slogged along, we were reminded that if you want it to rain in Scotland, simply take off your rain gear. It had yet to fail me, as if I were some sort of weather shaman who could bring water to the crops by zipping off my rain paints. It was a bad morning to be playing the one course in Scotland that perfectly mimicked that moment in a distance race when the half-marathoners finish and split off from the marathoners, crushing the hearts of the latter. Strathlene’s fourteenth played right back down to the clubhouse, telling your mind it was time to shake hands and sign cards, but then it sent you back out across the street for four more up a hill. We played them. I think.

  Stinging from a heartless morning 77, I sat in my car in the parking lot at Buckpool, the final course of Garth’s visit to Scotland, and looked up at the skies and demanded sunshine. I wasn’t fucking around—if you want me to keep going, fine, but I’d been wet for a month, and a month was enough. “Enough!” I said aloud to the windshield. Then I stepped out of the car into a rain aimed directly at my earhole. If Garth says, “We get to golf today,” I thought, I’m going to lock him in the trunk and drive us both to the airport.

  Jones had been kind enough to send me one of their Sunday golf bags, which I kept rolled up like a snail shell in the backseat. I’d almost left it at home, but was grateful I didn’t on this day when a few ounces off my shoulder might be the lift I needed to reach for another ball. I dropped nine clubs into the bag and headed out onto the Buckpool course, another clifftop links, this one designed by five-time Open champion John Henry Taylor. I couldn’t have cared less if the course had been designed by Spongebob Squarepants; I wanted off the links before my feet had even touched it.

  I played on, because the edict of golf’s ebb and flow, of links’ peaks and valleys, was a natural law of the game that I had never seen denied. It worked on its own timetable,
and it often broke your spirit as you waited for it to turn, but in my golfing life, the game always found its balance. Front nine 50s followed by back nine 36s. Bogeys begat birdies begat bogeys. Aces followed doubles, sun followed rain, and by the second hole at Buckpool we were warm in our rain pants but didn’t dare take them off. Nor did we reach for the sunscreen; I would rather risk a future scalpel than tempt that beaming yellow thing above us to disappear again.

  I knew that Garth was playing better, but it was a quiet and warm round at Buckpool where we were happy to soak up the weather in silence, so there was no talk of our scores as we went. Garth had Sharpied a large G on all his golf balls as an identifier, and he left plenty around Scotland that week. If you happen to find one, know that what you are holding is not a joke but a trophy. Hold that ball, and recall and revere the 39 handicapper who, after fourteen rounds in six days, through so many soul-testing trials, never quit, and found his number. As he bent down to pluck his final G ball out of the final hole—no putts conceded from beginning to end—he wasn’t yet upright before he said, “That’s ninety-nine.”

  He texted his wife from the parking lot. A 99 meant more to Garth than most; in some families, the in-laws wanted a suitor to have a career path or a mouth full of teeth, but Garth had married into a family where his father-in-law played 235 rounds a year and his brother-in-law boasted a 2 handicap, so breaking 100 was an initiation beyond the rote stuff of wedding ceremonies. It was a validation for which he had worked hard, so I wasn’t surprised when his wife let the whole family know of the 99 via a group text. His brother-in-law’s replies were insistent as he demanded to know what Garth shot on the back nine.

  On the drive home, sports radio was abuzz with news of Rory’s firing an 80 in the Irish Open at Royal County Down, a tournament he was hosting in his home country and was favored to win. Golf was hard. I never delighted in another golfer’s struggles, but the news did make me feel a little brighter about the 72 I’d shot with nine clubs. It would be no consolation to Rory, but his 80 wasn’t the biggest story in golf that day—99 at Buckpool should have been grabbing the headlines. At the start of Garth’s trip, I would have bet money I didn’t have on his not sniffing 100 on a Scottish links. So 99 was a reminder: Garth’s never quitting, his carding a 130 in competition, his coming on this trip at all—they were all reminders of the idea that had gotten me over here in the first place.