by Tom Coyne
“This is a nice life here. Little school, little golf course, everybody knows each other. They do life well here,” he said, and I agreed. He knew the place better than the rest of us.
That evening we dined in a pub in Tain where the waitress informed us that they were out of the burrito; I got a polite smile when I sighed and explained that we had come all the way to the Highlands for their burrito. Lindsay ordered curry chicken (a safe bet in the UK), while we all deliberated over ordering the haggis spring rolls. Lindsay said he never touched the stuff. His mother was born and raised in Scotland but had never eaten haggis, and he kept the tradition alive. She didn’t eat it, he explained, because there was a time when people had to eat it, when sheep heart and lung spiced and minced and wrapped in sheep stomach was all they had. It was Scottish Spam, a food now consumed out of ironic nostalgia but shunned by those who recalled it as a meal of last resort (my mother similarly seemed to deeply resent Spam, a pink remembrance of a lean Scranton childhood). Haggis reminded me of Andouille sausage with a touch of cinnamon that was lovely when fried in pastry or sprinkled over pizza.
In nearly every golf town in Scotland, I found a hotel or B&B called the Golf View and had slept in a handful, but the Golf View House in Tain topped them all. While its view of the Tain links was largely theoretical, the Golf View was a tall stone manor house with manicured grounds and high-ceilinged rooms with old charm and fair prices. When the lady of the house saw me hauling golf clubs toward the front door, she asked if we would mind leaving our clubs in the car or in the foyer. There was a time when such a request would have had me searching town for another room after a Jimmy Chitwood–style protest—I stay, clubs stay. They go, I go. But by the time I’d arrived in the Highlands, I was less concerned about my clubs’ well-being. It would be no great tragedy if someone touched or even stole them. Maybe I could leave them in the car for a night. Maybe I could leave them outside on the sidewalk, beneath a lamppost, with a large ribbon wrapped around them and a trail of ten-pound notes leading to the door of the nearest pub. Then I would get not just a day’s break from golf but a handy excuse for my scores. With borrowed clubs, 82 wasn’t a bad number.
Still, I couldn’t bring myself to abandon my silver albatrosses, not with the miles we’d covered and those we had yet to traverse together. Besides, a rental bag might be heavier. I explained to our hostess that I couldn’t sleep without my sticks, and when we agreed to not use her house towels to clean our clubs like her Canadian visitors had last week, she was fine with them coming upstairs. We assured her that we Americans were exemplary guests compared to our scofflaw neighbors, and with a rainbow outside my window pointing to the fairways of Tain below, I snuggled my Mizuno MP-15s and dreamt of pure contact. I don’t often recall my dreams, but I woke the next morning with distinct memories of making a hole in one on a long, links-y par 3—hop, roll, jar. I even recalled the club—my 3-iron hybrid—and my reaction: I threw my club into the sea and walked off the course, hands raised like Rocky, defiant in my triumph.
I liked the Tain links instantly for the unpretentious sign out front that recalled the Highlands of Alaska more than Scotland. Tain Golf Club was carved into three tall amber logs beside the driveway, some sort of unexpected Eskimo art beside another log carving of Old Tom Morris, who had designed Tain’s original fifteen-hole layout. Called “Old Tom’s northern jewel,” the course sparkled with class. The holes ranged from solid to outstanding, with the eleventh itself worthy of a Highland haul. Named Alps, its blind approach required you to play over them, parachuting your ball onto a skinny green cupped between dunes and the ocean. The layout was guarded by a tall pine forest on one side, giving us rare safety from the wind as the breezes softened at Tain and finally gave me a chance—a chance to shoot another 41 on the front and make the turn in a fog of frustrated apathy.
I stepped up to the tenth tee with all the focus of a ten-year-old in a water park and took a quick swipe with my driver, barely watching my ball in flight.
“That was pounded,” I heard as I picked up my tee. And it was. Launched low and unyielding, it bounded over the humps of the tenth fairway with a devil-may-care, golf-is-easy confidence that I hadn’t seen from my ball in a week. It was a ball compressed versus a ball slapped. I knew the small physics behind the titanic difference—a few degrees of swing path, a hundredth of a second of delay in the release of my hands—but as I watched my ball refuse to stop running toward the green, I needed to know what I had done differently, and whether I could do it again. That distracted swing had been shorter for sure, so maybe that would work.
Could it be so simple? Shorten my swing? It seemed an unsatisfying solution; my swing was too profound to be fixed by a back-of-the-cereal-box swing tip. But I tried it on the next hole—boom. And boom again. Boom-bibbity-boom. One shot after another, my ball behaved like a thoroughbred whose jockey had finally let it run.
Golf was neither an impossible game nor a complicated one. It was a simple game for complicated people. And stepping to my ball with one clear idea, no matter whether the notion turned lame tomorrow, I felt hope in my chest. I felt the lift of purpose. There was no purpose without work, and a three-quarter swing was my work for the day at Tain.
And work worked. On the 215-yard seventeenth, a par 3 guarded by a babbling burn that wriggled its way around the green, I didn’t see any water. I didn’t see the barley left or the bottom half of the pin hidden behind a fuzzy hump. I just saw a chance to try my new three-quarter swing, to keep after what was working. I pulled out my hybrid and took a few cuts at the air, focused by the task—shorter swing, shorter swing.
I couldn’t see all of the pin, but as I watched my ball rifle toward the stick, I listened for it. It was going to be close.
“I don’t see it,” Lindsay said. “Dude. I think it went in.”
“Fuck you,” I said. I’m not sure why.
The four of us hustled toward the green, chins up as we peered over the mound guarding the hole. Do I tell them I dreamed this? Can I see the future? Am I not only golf cured but a golf prophet as well?
“I don’t see it,” Lindsay said. “I don’t see it. I still don’t see it.” And then, “Oh, there, I see it.”
No matter that I would three-putt from twelve feet below the hole; releasing my putter could be tomorrow’s work. I knocked a 7-iron to eight feet on eighteen and finished with a birdie. For all the golf I had played, spending an entire summer beside a golf ball, I wanted nothing more than more.
We moved on from Tain with warm memories and pictures of each of us hugging a wooden Tom Morris. As we turned north, Sean and Lindsay were particularly happy about moving up the road to their next stop. While Brian and I had been enjoying our stay at the Golf View, they had made a friend at their hotel in town. At their last three breakfasts, a sweet old lady had inquired as to whether they knew Bob Carpenter, an American whose son was engaged to her daughter and who, according to the stories she would daily repeat to them, was a blend of Arnold Palmer and Bruce Wayne. Each morning, her disbelief at them not knowing Mr. Carpenter grew; she insisted they must be familiar with Bobby C (as we would come to call our unknown luminary), who posted course records at Dornoch and owned homes around the world, who took her to the best restaurants in the UK and rode bareback across the Highlands. Each morning, Sean and Lindsay nodded through their headaches at the legend of Bob Carpenter; it was better than having to hear her story about being locked out of the hotel again. Somebody—we’ll call him Lindsay—had returned from the pub and decided to lock the hotel’s front door, causing this poor woman to wait outside in the rain for an hour. Lindsay shook his head in outrage at her misfortune. Who would do such a thing? The savage.
Escaping their Bobby C breakfast was a welcome reprieve, but moving to the Golf Links Hotel in Golspie was Christmas morning for Lindsay. He and Sean had checked into the modest hotel beside the golf course that looked like little more than a cottage with a vacancy sign, but as he stepped through its doo
rs, Lindsay, a connoisseur of Scottish whisky, found a sight lovelier than the first tee at the Old. The bar in this anonymous inn was a museum to Scotch, with long rows of glimmering glass jars of brown syrup—over two hundred single-malts—perched on the walls. Lindsay had two nights to sample them all and vowed to do his best, trying a few thirty-year-olds before heading for our tee times at Royal Dornoch.
The wind was blowing the doors off our cars that morning, but Lindsay smiled through the breeze, the pellets of rain evaporating on his red cheeks. Uisge-beatha—Scots Gaelic for “water of life” (say uisge fast and you’ll hear the origin of the Anglicized whisky)—ran through his arms and fingers, and while I knew he would be useless by the back nine, I envied his warm stomach and slow-moving glance.
We had arrived in a whisky capital of a whisky country where the word was never spelled with an e; whiskey referred to its Irish and American imitations, and ordering either was a transgression in these parts. Distilleries like Glenmorangie and Glen Ord, Dalmore and Clynelish and Balblair outnumbered the golf courses above Inverness, and I had found myself being offered a dram of the local stuff on a daily basis. I came as close to saying yes to a short glass that evening as I would on any day of the trip, but fortunately for me, that night’s heady residence already had me feeling drunk before I walked through the door.
I’d been warned that there were two or possibly three courses in Scotland where I would not be able to play, no matter how charming my emails to the club secretary were. One of them was a place called Skibo Castle. A confidential lakeside links played by almost a dozen golfers every year, it had been described as a tee time beyond a visitor’s reach, but as I would be passing it on my way up from Tain, I thought a message to the manager was worth the time. A quick reply from their marketing director told me that play was restricted to residents of the estate, and such residency was available only to members of the Carnegie Club. Short the forty-five-thousand-dollar entry fee and annual dues, I felt my chance to play Skibo had vanished, until I opened my last Wonka bar and found a golden ticket: a night’s stay in the castle was miraculously suggested. If I could visit on a quiet weeknight, they might be able to sort me a room and a round, so I juggled my Highland itinerary, told the lads I would see them tomorrow as they headed for the whisky bar (Lindsay left his golf shoes in my car, putting him back into slippers for the next twenty-four hours), and headed to a place where I did not belong, but blissfully so.
You know you’re headed to an enclave of exclusivity when your GPS can’t find an entrance. My nav system piloted me to a green gate with no sign, which I later learned was the maintenance entrance. The gates eventually opened, and I found myself driving a station wagon in the dark through the shaded Skibo golf course. The manor was hard to miss, in the way that the White House is hard to miss from Pennsylvania Avenue, but without a parking lot or any cars in sight, I wondered if I had driven myself into a Victorian vampire noir. After passing through the heavy cathedral doors, I was met by a butler in a kilt who presented me with a silver tray of whisky concoctions, welcoming me to this alternate Skibo universe. That I lamented there being only twelve glasses on his tray and wondered if he might be able to scrounge up some more was a reminder that it was best I take a sparkling water. I was shown to my room by a steward, who was standing by and who greeted me by name.
“My bags, I should go get them from the . . .” I paused, and was told they were being taken to my room.
“But my car, where is the parking . . .” I was told my car would be looked after as well. I was to just hand over the keys and follow him up a set of mahogany stairs wide enough for a light brigade beneath five stained-glass arches befitting a basilica and a bust of Mr. Carnegie on the landing to welcome me to one of the places where they lived, people I had never met but suspected existed, people who ran things—things like companies, countries, earths.
My room—rather, my quarters—was paneled in golden wood with a fireplace, three sitting nooks, and a four-poster bed that required a small ladder. Upon it sat a Skibo teddy bear that I could buy downstairs for my kids, if only the place took cash or credit. Luckily for me, the Carnegie Club was nontransactional; you paid your membership, and when you arrived at the castle, you left your wallet in your fast-vanishing car. I had stayed at places that didn’t take Amex, but this was my first visit to a place that didn’t take money. There was the sort of wealth where you had money, and then there was the sort of wealth where you were above money. This was my first experience of the latter, and I liked it. Very much.
My bathroom was the size of my last hotel’s lobby, and while I didn’t need two claw-foot tubs in the middle of the room, I began to see how having only one could spoil a vacation or disappoint Madonna’s guests—she had married Guy Ritchie here, and a journalist friend told me how the only photog to score wedding shots for the tabloids had hidden out in the bushes at Skibo for a week (he was okay with it; he made enough money to retire). My two dressing tables were covered with silver and jeweled brushes, and my nightstand came with a jar of Skibo Sleeping Pills—ah, so the überwealthy are restless and discontented pill-poppers—that turned out to be gorgeous little bricks of salted vanilla fudge. Nearby I found the guide to Skibo etiquette, a multipage brochure with cartoon renderings of various social situations that advised guests on everything from the use of technology (it was banned in public spaces) to appropriate volume levels in the hallways. I was reluctant to step foot in the hallway lest I be discovered as an imposter and escorted out. I was fine remaining in my chambers; I had eighteen hours of life in Downton Abbey, and I wasn’t going anywhere.
I soon discovered that I had my own hallway with a side door to my butler’s quarters, if only I had remembered to bring him. When I asked the steward for my room key, he couldn’t help but smile.
“There are no keys. Your door doesn’t lock. Don’t worry, it doesn’t need to.”
I ate room service that I ordered from an imaginary menu—Just call down to the kitchen and tell them what you would like—and sat in my room, anxious, wondering if there was such a thing as too much luxury, at least for a golf drifter like me. The sleeping pills lightened my mood, and I was settled by the time turndown service arrived. It took twenty minutes to maneuver the bulk of all the drapes into place, and no, I didn’t need them to run me a bath. Or baths. I didn’t leave any tip for the maid the next morning, as I was told tipping was forbidden, but she wouldn’t mind—I’d never left a hotel room so clean in my life. Aside from an empty jar of fudge, it was like I’d never been there.
The morning spread of smoked fish and pastries and fruit and meats was banquet-sized, though I was the only person who had arrived for breakfast. Butlers in their kilts served me tea while I inquired about the status of my stuff. My bags were already in my car, which was now pulled around front, and my clubs were en route to the golf course. But before golf I was headed off to the spa for a massage; I had been so bold as to ask the marketing director if a massage might be arranged, as eighty rounds of golf had me feeling a bit stiff. I offered to pay any price for it, but soon learned my insistence was unnecessary—there were no prices on the massage menu that I studied under the tutelage of my masseuse, a brunette of Eastern-European accent.
We thoroughly reviewed my health history and aches, after which she administered a comprehensive sniff test in which I inhaled a buffet of aromas from small crystal jars. By identifying my favorite smells, she was able to precisely diagnose my body’s deficiencies. My three preferred aromas pointed to my being tired, exhausted, and weary. I wondered if she was just going to send me back to bed, but ninety deep-tissue minutes later, I felt as though I had been freshly cracked from a golden mold. My limbs tingled with life; my stumps sprang with energy. I weighed myself in the locker room to find that I was down thirty-seven pounds from my starting weight, and I studied my oiled frame in the mirror—there were strange lines pressed into my shoulders and chest and stomach. The backs of my thighs and calves were packed hard
with something; I felt like a drug mule who had been stuffed with muscles instead of cocaìna. I was born anew, a taut, Highland-hardened golfing machine. I was younger. Better. I was Bob Carpenter.
Though my overnight at Skibo was for a party of one, I had been invited to bring a friend along for the golf. Brian’s GPS did a better job of finding the Carnegie estate than mine, and we arrived early at the pro shop, where they definitely did take credit cards, at least until the two of us nearly melted ours. I had rarely golf-shopped on this trip, but at a clandestine course like this, neither of us could resist loading up on brag-garb.
Outside, the Skibo rain was of a different sort. Lochside with links features, it wasn’t a seaside layout, so the wind sat quietly and let the water soak us in a straight and steady shower. The starter insisted on stuffing two bottles of single-malt into our bags before we teed off—Take it, take it, man!—as if it really was the water of life on such a damp, cold morning. Brian took the bottles for his father-in-law, though there was no doubt we both thought about cracking one open by the back nine, where our fingers had turned thin and white as bone.
For all the buildup to our playing an unplayable, my memories of golf at Skibo are a soggy green haze. The course was special, no doubt—as pristine as my room in the castle, with testing lakeside holes and a layout bubbling with contours. It played links-y, even in a downpour. The highest compliment I can pay to Skibo is to say that it was good enough to not stop, even when the routing circled back toward the clubhouse.
At the turn, we found a reminder of why we couldn’t quit. In the unmanned halfway hut (again, no prices, just take what you like) a small display case of metal hooks showed bag tags from around the world, where Carnegie Club members had left calling cards from their other courses—Pine Valley, Cypress, Oakmont, and the like. They reminded us that this wasn’t a course you wimped out on, even if you were racing your way back to shelter. I couldn’t resist adding my own bag tag to the wall, a plastic card stamped with a driver’s license photo of my face, gifted to Skibo from the Augusta of Upper Darby, PA—my dear McCall Country Club, a daunting 4,400 yards from the tips, where the membership process was only slightly more involved than joining Costco. It was a damn good little golf course, and as we walked off toward ten, I hoped for my tag’s chances beside all those bullies. I gave it a week.