by Tom Coyne
I took 68 swings (three over) to get around the empty Stromness layout, and for playing quickly, I was rewarded with a rare bounty on this trip: time. So I set off to be a tourist for a few hours before my jump back to Inverness. Whereas Shetland had felt vast and subdued, Orkney was a bustling little destination, its central town of Kirkwall full of bright shops and a busy main street closed to traffic for pedestrians. Perhaps its proximity to the mainland of Scotland made the island a more popular getaway; I was surprised to find backpackers roaming stores whose windows were full of T-shirts and stuffed puffins, all bursting with Orkney pride. It was a place I wanted to return to with the family, with its bright vibe and easy parking. Braver souls might have taken off to cruise the coastline, but once I safely planted my latest stick-shift in town, I opted to rest the clutch and shop for the girls.
I landed back in Inverness late that afternoon, and though I had been gone less than forty-eight hours, I could scarcely recall where I left my car. It felt as though I’d been puddle-jumping for weeks. I located the station wagon and loaded up my island souvenirs, and later, in my Inverness hotel, I looked at my journal but couldn’t bring myself to lift the pen. I was unsure of what I had to say about my northern pilgrimage, other than that I had made a handful of good golf swings on a bumpy island race that had likely sidetracked a focused golf progression.
There was a tee in my pocket sticking into my hip. I took it out and held it in my fingers. It had almost remained in Orkney, but that afternoon, as I sat in the corner of the silent one-room airport, hiding behind my golf bag, the car rental agent approached. I was expecting to hear that I now owned an immobilized Skoda in Kirkwall, but instead he smiled and showed me the tee.
“Glad you’re still here. You left this in the car,” he explained, handing the tee over to me. And that was it. His inspection of the rental had yielded no issues other than a rogue peg I didn’t need. I knew that tees were not throwaways over here, but still—there’s honesty and hospitality, and then there’s a car rental agent chasing after you to return a tiny white stick.
I think I laughed a little. Where in the world was I? Where did these people come from? Maybe it was my weariness, but I paused at the unnecessary yet undeniable symbolism, as if he were handing off a baton or returning my sword. Onward, the insignificant twig in my hand told me. Carry on. I was a golfer, and I needed my tee.
We chatted for a moment, and it turned out that he was a golfer as well and played the Stromness course regularly.
“How was your golf?” he asked.
“It was good,” I told him. “Really good. A lot different than home.”
“That’s what you came for, isn’t it?” he said.
And it was.
Perspective
She was not a she. She was a he. And he left his footprints—rather, he left his shoes—across the Scottish Highlands.
When I graduated high school, Cheers had just wrapped up its long television run, and our valedictorian referenced the final show in his graduation speech, the episode wherein Cliff Clavin divulges to Sam the meaning of life: “Comfortable shoes. If you’re not wearing comfortable shoes, life is just chaos.”
My FootJoy Casuals had been worthy companions for the six hundred or so miles I had hoofed to that point, keeping me blister-free with a spring in my arches. But Lindsay chose his footwear with a discerning eye for comfort. When I met him in the northeast town of Tain, I was first surprised to find that he was a man. He was the brother-in-law of a college buddy, Sean, and while we had met years before at Sean’s Connecticut wedding, that encounter had gone adrift in my long-term memory (truthfully, my recollection of Sean’s Connecticut wedding was beer, a stack of red chips at Mohegan Sun casino, and some beer). So when Sean told me he would be joining me in Scotland and was bringing Lindsay with him, I quietly mourned Sean’s marriage to Heather and hoped this Lindsay character was treating him well. It turned out that Lindsay was a ruddy-faced, ginger-hair-going-gray golfing dad in slippers—or at least that’s how he first appeared to me outside the hotel in Tain as we met for the drive out to Tarbat.
Lindsay’s parents had emigrated from Scotland, and he had been married in a Scottish castle north of Dundee, so I wondered if he wore slippers to showcase his comfort on native soil. Or maybe he was pajama-hungover, unable to locate his clothes or bear to dress in full. Turned out he was neither; on the train up to Tain, Lindsay had donned his slippers for the long, jet-lagged ride, and left his sneakers above him in the luggage rack. They were currently headed back to Edinburgh, so it would be a week of golf shoes and slippers for my new friend, from whom I learned that, when spelled with an a in Scotland, Lindsay is a man’s name.
As soon as I saw the slippers, I recalled that high school speech. Here I was, searching for a secret, and there it was: comfortable shoes. Being comfortable—on a train, in your slippers, in our own skin—was a key I coveted and knew I lacked. I thought about high school a lot during that week with the lads in the Highlands. The humor was sophomoric, the giggles abundant, and, like those four years, I wanted it to be over without knowing how much I would miss it when it was gone.
My temples throbbed with a heavy island hangover as I made my way north from Inverness. My golf had regressed to a weary, ball-wiping swing and an unwelcome game of approaches played from alternative fairways. My solo trip north had stirred a loneliness that I hadn’t felt since the trip’s first week. A shrink would diagnose me as an extroverted isolator; I craved attention and approval, but really just wanted to be left the hell alone. Something about being alone at the top of the planet had brought out the latter in me, and I would have been happy to play the next fifty rounds by myself. It was a grace that I was quickly joined by a pack of friends who pulled me out of that little universe and plugged me back into the wide world I was traveling.
Brian and his so-pregnant-our-baby-might-get-Scottish-citizenship wife had arrived the day before Sean and Lindsay. Brian was a year older than me and a close friend from home who, next to Robert, knew my story better than anyone. He was fit and had a good head of brown hair, a decent golfer with a dedication to very short hiking shorts. His wife, Amanda, knew me well, too; she was a pretty triathlete who six months ago had biceps to shame my own but was now training for motherhood. Brian and I had both suggested to/pleaded with her to stay home to be closer to her doctor in her third trimester, but like any good marathoner, she had no ear for apprehension. She got the green light from her doctor and packed her bags. I witnessed pregnancy tension only once during their week in Scotland, when Amanda tried to squeeze herself into the back of their two-door rental as she insisted I have the front seat. Brian had to raise his voice as she climbed in like a tunnel rat, lying sideways across their luggage and propping her belly atop two sets of golf clubs. “Amanda!” was all that needed to be said as we helped pull her back out, her lone concession to the idea that a pregnant woman can’t do absolutely everything.
I wanted them to have a memorable week, to make this time in Scotland worth the effort of so much travel to a remote corner of the UK at the most inconvenient of times, and I worried about blending two groups of friends. College and contemporary pals—would they get one another? Would I be myself? Would I divide my attention equally and effectively? Damn—my ego had its own ego. I was convinced that I was the key to the happiness of every cognizant life form. I was relieved and perhaps a bit disappointed to find that this wasn’t the case when, three holes into the nine-holer at Tarbat, Lindsay and Brian started exchanging lines from Family Guy and laughing like old roommates. At some point on this trip, or maybe years after, I would finally accept that I was being my best when I wasn’t trying to be at all.
Brian had received a proper introduction to heavyweight links golf the day before, when we played both Fortrose and Rosemarkie (one course with two names, I was relieved to find) and the esteemed Scottish Open venue Castle Stuart. Situated on a peninsula above Inverness known as the Black Isle, Fortrose & Rosemarkie trac
ed its golfing heritage to 1793—early for the Highlands—and the peninsula took its foreboding name from the fact that snow never stuck there, giving the land a dark appearance while the rest of the Highlands shone white. Concrete posts beside some of the fairways recalled its closings during the World Wars, when it served as a guardhouse during the first and a practice ground for the D-Day invasion during the second. It was a two-way avenue of a course laid along a finger of sand sticking out into Rosemarkie Bay, the holes roaming outward toward a small lighthouse at the turn. With waves left and right, you couldn’t find a more wonderfully exposed setting for golf. You felt its age and confidence in the earth it sat upon; it didn’t tease or tickle with surprises, but it was a soulful links fit for golf pilgrims in search of a classic.
Across the water, we could see the course we were heading to in the afternoon. If only we’d had a boat, we could have cut an hour off our commute around the Moray Firth and back down to Castle Stuart, a course that was an ideal first-day complement to Brian’s morning round. While Fortrose & Rosemarkie was old, natural, and subdued, Castle Stuart tossed us into new, crafted, and audacious. The place glimmered with visitor-friendly luxury, from the flawless fairways and the five-tiered clubhouse meant to look like the helm of an ocean liner cresting over the firth to the dreamy vistas that extended all the way to the men’s room—above the urinals, set perfectly at eye level, was a long, thin window with a view of fairways pouring off the property. I felt awkward standing there with camera in hand as I relieved myself—Please let that door stay shut—but I needed to capture this proof that when it came to details, Castle Stuart had mastered them all.
I’d met a golf photographer back at Kingsbarns, a lad named Kevin whose new company, Recounter, specialized in nostalgic albums of buddy trips and golf outings, where 20-handicappers were transformed into photo-balanced pros. His pictures made golfers into movie stars, so I invited him along to Castle Stuart to see if he could capture my better golfing self. Plus, I needed a new headshot: my black-and-white photo from age twenty-six was beginning to feel dishonest. The kid in that shot was so full of hope and confidence; what a silly prat.
Kevin’s camera worked its magic, but so did Castle Stuart, where the holes slanted sideways along the water’s edge, leading you over hills and pushing you down into valleys on a relentless routing of expertly molded drama. The place was pristine and manicured for the eyes of deep-pocketed tourists, and while it looked like an unfair fight at first blush, behind the dunes and beside the water were benevolent fairways and wide greens. The course feigned punishment but offered playability, even if I was still struggling to find the approximate middle of my clubface. Kevin made it all look good as I carded a sloppy 79, capturing me in long follow-through poses, my eyes fixed on an imaginary rocket drive while my actual ball took flight for the firth. I played to the camera and made bad shots look like all-timers. At last, the secret to my best golf: pretending.
The bar at Castle Stuart felt like a pilothouse with 180 degrees of water and fairways hugging us in our booth. As we awaited our lunch before heading out to suck in our guts for the camera, Kevin reminded me that what felt like a never-ending trail of golf holes was actually a very small country. He knew half the faces at Castle Stuart, and our waitress turned out to be an old pal from Edinburgh. I understood roughly a third of their quickly accented conversation, and even learned some local slang: When Kevin said things went Pete Tong, it meant they went tits up, which meant they went poorly. I felt for this DJ I had never heard of, his name adopted as a rhyming substitute for a bit wrong, and was relieved that my last name was rhyme-averse, lest it become slang for shooting 94 in a qualifier for which you had dedicated two years of your life.
I noticed a young man outside stalking a fairway in the distance, snapping photographs and hardly bothering to golf his ball at all. When I inquired about what he was up to, I learned that he was a “shaper,” and that such a vocation was an actual thing. Later that afternoon he would let us play through, explaining to us that he worked for Tom Doak and was studying the Castle Stuart contours, an apprentice doing his research.
Perhaps it was the soft state of my game or the fact that our chicken chili didn’t arrive in time for our appointment at the first tee, but I took umbrage at this man’s occupation. Shapers manufactured a new course’s humps and bumps and runoffs, icing a lumpy cake and bulldozing intrigue into the fairways, or they gave facelifts to older courses by pushing earth around—either way, this hands-on notion that a golf course required shaping left me disappointed, even if the courses I loved were the product of their diesel-fueled designs.
For someone who considered himself golf-forward in his thinking and balked at golf’s stuffy superciliousness, I could be a curmudgeon when it came to modern design. I preferred course finders versus course designers. Braid, Morris, and, more recently, Eddie Hackett in Ireland—they didn’t force layouts onto the landscape. They studied the topography and imagined golf holes and routed them according to the suggestions not of owners or course raters but of the land itself. Hackett’s design method was to walk a wild corner of coastline for a few weeks, often taking a daily bus to get there in the days before designers could afford helicopters. Eventually he would emerge from the dunes to tell his clients he had located their golf course (his legendarily meager design fees barely covered all the bus trips). Links were meant to be organic discoveries gifted by nature; that such rare soil now required shaping by people—by us temporary and temperamental people—sucked the soul right out of a golf hole for me.
As precious as rain forest and as rare as the Rockies, links land is a geological miracle shaped by shifting glaciers and receding tides. As the early earth’s mantle cooled and ocean floors sank, the waters pulled back to reveal things like, say, Europe, and as seas continued to retreat, they cut valleys and rivulets into coastlines that had once been submerged. The droppings of seabirds fertilized sands that sprouted grasses, and sheep, rabbits, and wool traders did the rest to bring golf to these acres, where a game would help preserve fragile landscapes from holiday cottages. Golf in the dunes was a walk through our primordial past, so the thought of pushing it around to get par up to 72 left me conflicted. I loved these golf courses, new and old, and if I wasn’t a golf writer, sculpting fairways from the seat of a bulldozer would be my dream gig. But I was once told that the difference between happiness and joy is the presence of the divine; I can be damn happy on a man-made golf course, but it’s on the discovered ones shaped by a mystery that I feel golf joy.
• • •
Fortrose and Castle Stuart were the entrées to wee Tarbat’s side dish, but as so often happens on a golf trip, memory more fondly recalled the nine-hole layout (with ten greens) of Tarbat for its unexpected fun and quirky authenticity. When we arrived at the cottage-sized clubhouse—some of us in slippers—we found the place empty aside from a few long tables under plastic tablecloths, where a gray-haired man in paint-splattered jeans leaned over a tool box. He looked up at us without so much as a nod.
“Excuse us. Is the manager here?”
He went back to shuffling a small pile of lumber beside the wall. “Better be soon,” he said. “He’s bringing my breakfast.”
We laughed. He didn’t. We tried to look natural, four Americans not sure whether they should golf or stay or wait or leave, looking around the Spartan room as if we were genuinely interested in the results from last week’s Texas scramble or the condition of the emergency exit sign. Then came a deep rumbling to shake the floor, and—BANG!
Brian jumped. Lindsay almost leapt out of his moccasins. Sean shuddered, and I covered my head. BANG! BANG! Our hungry friend fired nails into two-by-fours as I followed the boys outside with our ears covered.
“We’re going to go play!” I called back to the man over the hum of his compressor. We had wanted to make a proper introduction before teeing it up, but the course felt safer than the clubhouse. At least it did until the manager caught up with us on the fir
st fairway, bouncing down the cart path in a blue pickup truck.
“I’m Tom Coyne, the American . . .” I leaned toward his window, then wondered if we should have waited a little longer to get the green light. He wore sunglasses, and his broad shoulders made the truck’s cab look small. The dark steel of a rifle barrel lay across his lap.
“I know who you are,” he said, and shook my hand through the truck window. “Sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived. Had to get Johnny his breakfast.”
He stepped out of his truck and met our foursome, welcoming us to Tarbat with excitement and inquiries about our hometowns. He handed each of us a Tarbat ball marker and pointed out a few spots where the routing got tricky. We were welcome to go around as many times as we liked, he told us, and thanked us for taking the time to visit his course. When he hopped back in his truck, he apologized for being in a rush. “Have to go shoot some rabbits,” he said before driving off. We headed back down the fairway, trying to recall where our opening drives had landed and hoping the rabbits were on the back nine. If only there were a back nine.
The schedule decreed we go around Tarbat only once, but we enjoyed it so much that we risked a pellet in the arse and played it again, its short but wavy layout perfect for a foursome of buddies who wanted fun, unbothered golf. Blind shots across twisted slopes on a course enveloped by a charming Scottish village—Tarbat was refreshingly playable. The seventh tee box had us backed up against a cemetery where the yardage was painted on the graveyard wall, and next door I watched schoolchildren play at recess while the group teed off. Lindsay looked over at the children kicking a soccer ball.