A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  As we soldiered through the eighteenth, our scorecards turned to pulp in our pockets, we were greeted by a young Scottish lass in a tartan kilt standing beside the green. She held a wide umbrella in one hand and a silver tray of hot whiskies on the other. Where the hell were you five years ago? I thought to myself. The starter welcomed us into the clubhouse like weary refugees, ushering us into the locker room and insisting we hand over our rain gear—right into the dryer it went while we waited, happily, in no hurry to leave Skibo.

  It was a few minutes of another world, a glimpse of life not so much lived as mastered. Every detail sorted, every whim satisfied. I suppose there are more thoughtful, useful ways to spend forty-five thousand dollars than on an annual golf retreat, and the Carnegie name recalled some of them, the philanthropist having once opined, “The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.” I could handle such disgrace, I decided. If it meant I could come back and soak in both of those bathtubs (I would have them draw me one hot, and the other one really hot), I would take disgrace with an extra scoop of infamy on top.

  • • •

  Dornoch was the name that drew golfers this far north into Scotland. Tain and Nairn and Castle Stuart were spangled lures, but Royal Dornoch’s four hundred years of golf history and its Golf Digest ranking as number five in the world pulled the tour busses northward to the hometown of Donald Ross and the course where America’s great architect learned his trade. After Lindsay joyfully reunited with his golf shoes (he and Sean had already started plans to market a new invention, the Shoe Leash, to save other travelers from sitting in the pub in socks), we headed out to play Dornoch’s Struie course beside the destination championship links. Originally opened 125 years ago as a ladies’ course, Struie was its own destination track with a top-fifty UK ranking, fun and fair with some plain holes, but a bright three-hour walk beside the Dornoch Firth. It was vastly overshadowed—and rightly so—by its neighbor course, which, on the next morning, Brian and I would come to know as an uncommon chain of golf holes squeezed along a ridge of dunes between the town and the water.

  Royal Dornoch’s opening eight played outward along an upper ridge of the dunes, and golfing them downwind, Brian and I felt our muscles expanding beneath our waterproofs. This four-hundred-year-old lion of the North was gorgeous but kind of easy, our balls taking an express on the wind and leaving us short pitches onto the greens. Old Tom laid out nine of the holes, and you didn’t have to be a golf-head to notice the inspiration Donald Ross had taken from the crowned greens—his Pinehurst inverted saucers are straight out of Dornoch. From the end of the upper eight holes, the view back along the crescent strand of ribbons of fairway and swirling beach grasses and the spire of Dornoch cathedral—it rivaled Royal County Down’s ninth for the best view in golf. It brought chills, which was good preparation for the back nine, where the holes dropped us down along the sand and water and the wind punched us in our souls.

  Our day at Dornoch was the best of times and the not-so-best of times. We felt a pull in our guts between the golfer’s impulse to cherish one of the game’s best walks and the survival instinct to find shelter and higher ground. Above all other subjects—the recent referendum on independence, the upcoming Open at St. Andrews, Liverpool’s piss-poor play—weather dominated the conversation as Scotland collectively lamented that their summer had been a week back in April. The country had been beleaguered by a plague of squalls, and smaller clubs were feeling the pinch of diminished rounds. I didn’t want to whine about the wind, trying instead to accept the golfing gods’ challenge and embrace the kinks in the path laid before me. But this shit was unnatural, even by Scottish standards—by Himalayan standards, these were days to remain indoors. We could see the proof up the road as we pulled into the parking lot of the Golspie Links on a bright Saturday afternoon and found it completely void of cars, and the course entirely empty of golfers.

  A lone pro shop employee at Golspie had remained to open the door and check us in for our tee time. Anne didn’t know us very well, but she quickly became protective of us as we informed her of our intent to play in the forty-mile-per-hour breezes. She assured us that some of the Golspie course played parkland style, with a few holes ducking into the trees for cover, but commiserated over the conditions. She explained that they had recently lost their fifth green again. It had been washed away in a storm that old-time members called a once-in-a-century weather event, but after they’d rebuilt it, a twice-in-three-years hurricane came along and slid it back into the ocean. We heard her message but were powerless to heed it. Anne plied us with water bottles and energy bars and logo balls, bidding us a bittersweet farewell as we pushed open the pro shop door against the wind, lowered our eyes, and golfed forth into the hereafter.

  The wind pushed the sound of the nearby racetrack over to the golf course, and against a backdrop of grinding gears and burning tires (the Scots, Irish, and English loved motor racing in a way that made America’s NASCAR devotion feel like a passing interest), we each retreated to gentler places in our minds, far away from the walls of air at Golspie, where four Americans wavered down the fairways like broken kites. Lindsay and Sean imagined two warm stools back at their hotel just over that wall right there, where two hundred bottles of aged warmth danced on the shelves and poured themselves into their glasses. In my head, I was in my office back in Philadelphia with the windows down, dripping from the humidity with a broad smile across my face as my hands shuffled a thick deck of foreign scorecards. And in Brian’s mind, he had gone to the blankness. It was a space I knew well, where you lost all sense of place and purpose and moved forward simply because you were too scared to stop. When we arrived at a tee marked ten, he paused.

  “This is wrong,” he said. “We’re on sixteen.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Dude, this isn’t ten. There is no way this is fucking ten.”

  It was fucking ten, and by fucking sixteen we were all so wind-drunk that we no longer waited for anyone to hit, slapping our balls and leaning ahead into the air. Sean rocketed one from behind Brian that brushed Brian’s sideburns, the ball’s quick zzzzzoom buzzing his ear like a mosquito.

  “That almost killed me!” he laughed without breaking stride or turning around, his eyes wide and delirious.

  We all begged for Golspie to end, yet we could tell it was a course you could play daily without getting bored or battered (maybe not so much the latter). It was a strategic blend of bumpy links holes along the water and tall pines to negotiate on the back, another course on a formidable list of tracks—Fraserburgh, Cullen, Fortrose & Rosemarkie—that locals likely took for granted, but if you dropped it somewhere in the States, golfers would line up and fork over hundreds for a tee time. With so much special seaside golf in Scotland, you could forget how special each hole was, and how you’d never seen anything like it before. I tried to relish the gift of every links hole; in a month’s time, I would be sweating my way around still and soft courses lined with conifers, returned to level greens and forced carries and balls hopping backward in flat fairways. Scotland was ruining me for golf, but the wind was ruining me for Scotland. I couldn’t wait for my track back home; bring on the boredom. After the marathon, how nice it would feel to jog around the block.

  On our way back to town that evening, we again passed a hilltop statue that we had asked Anne about back in the pro shop.

  “It’s a part of our history. Some people want it gone—a few—but the majority would say that it happened, and we shouldn’t forget,” she told us. “History isn’t all happiness.”

  Through granite eyes, George Granville Leveson-Gower had gazed down upon his county of Sutherland from the peak of Beinn a’Bhragaidh since 1837. The first Duke of Sutherland (a county name dating to the Vikings, when this tip of Scotland was actually southern land from their perspective in the Orkneys), Granville Leveson-Gower was wealthy enough for three last names, a British MP who, by marrying a Sutherland, came into control of the largest estate in Europe. H
is hundred-foot-tall likeness took four years to build, and the locals call it the Mannie, an oddly affectionate label for a monument to an individual who unleashed an ethnic cleansing upon Highland Scots. The Clearances—a term that today still echoes with bitterness and simmers quietly at the root of the independence movement—were most brutal in this region. The Duke’s plan was to save subsistence farmers from overcrowding and poverty by forcing them off the land and burning their homes as they went, leaving families to starve and freeze or escape to the coasts and exile abroad. The acres were cleared for more profitable, edible tenants—mainly sheep and deer—and in the matter of a few years, the Highlands went from near overpopulation to being one of the most thinly inhabited corners of Europe.

  The Clearances changed everything about Scotland, extinguishing an agrarian way of life, triggering a diaspora of emigrants that lasted generations, muting the native Gaelic tongue, and crushing the remains of the clan system of local governance. Some suggest that the latter was the true driving force behind the mass displacement; the clans had supported the Catholic Stuarts’ attempts to regain the throne in the failed Jacobite Risings, and landlords made them pay dearly for backing the wrong side. And for all this, they gave the Duke a statue.

  An attempt had been made in 1994 to dynamite the monument and get the last word on the Duke, and from time to time kids would chip away a stone from its base, but the statue stood pat. I admired the perspective of Anne’s explanation as to why many of the area residents didn’t mind it remaining. The past had power over you only if you hid from it. But the part of me that subsisted upon righteous indignation—that is, all of me—couldn’t help but think the Duke deserved a far worse view of the valleys he emptied.

  I couldn’t fathom a statue of Oliver Cromwell smiling down upon Dublin; if this were that other Celtic isle, the Duke would have been reduced to rubble without protest or surprise. Both countries had been brutalized by English campaigns over the centuries, but Scotland felt more resigned to that past, while portions of Ireland didn’t seem quite ready to quit wrestling history. I wondered who had it right. However they handled the past, as an American, I admired them for having it, for their birthright to long memories and ancient acts to either accept or bemoan. Truth was, most of the folks here probably didn’t even notice the statue, or saw it as welcome signal that they had returned home to Golspie, or used it as a place marker—When you see the Mannie on the hill, turn right for the golf course. Leave it to the visitor to wonder while the people who lived here just got on with their day.

  • • •

  Dornoch is the northern post where many Scotland golf trips touch the wall and turn back home, but some golf explorers who have been this far north will tell you to push on a bit farther. James Braid once did, and what he created has become a shared secret among those who know, who nod and listen as you tell them about your days at Muirfield and Turnberry and Royal Dornoch, then look you in the eye, stare deep into your golfing soul, and ask, But do you know Brora?

  Home to the headquarters of the international society of Braid’s devotees, Brora remains his unaltered vision, where the five-time Open champion popularized a hole shape we take for granted today, the ubiquitous dogleg. You need not know Braid’s name to know Brora’s class; like all of the most soulful courses, it transcends its architect and hides any hints of being designed at all. I wasn’t thinking about James Braid as I hiked its inclines and guessed at what lay behind its sandy bluffs. Rather, I was thinking that if I had to make a case for what made golf along the edges of the British Isles great, Brora would be exhibit A.

  Compact at 6,211 yards, Brora possessed everything a course required to top my flight scale: it felt authentically local and pleasantly remote, and its tee times were available and affordable and not booked in blocks by buses of golfers who shared my accent. It was unfussy and undisturbed, a course that found its way through the landscape and let nature create new shots for you. It was tough enough—the beach grasses were cranky at Brora, and the back nine clung to the bends of the strand—but it was scoreable and made for a brisk walk. It had design lineage and homegrown pride and, perhaps most important, it had something you absolutely would not find at home, no matter how randomly you roamed: car batteries. Beside each green, a charger was hooked up to electric wires that surrounded the putting surfaces, protecting them from the resident beasts.

  I’d heard that the livestock might join us on this bit of shared pasture, but I cheered in the parking lot when I saw a bull slowly stride his way across the practice green by the clubhouse. Brora was squeezed between the bay and stretches of crofts, which were parcels of land doled out to crofters by way of an ancient Highland system of dividing property among tenants for grazing and farming. It predated the Clearances, and the grazing rights of crofters were fiercely protected and handed down through generations. Portions of the Brora course were on land regarded as common pasture for crofters to share, so sheep and cattle commingled with golfers, just as they had on golf’s original layouts, where sheep laid into hillsides against the wind, wearing grass pits down to their sandy bottoms and sculpting golf’s original bunkers. If you ever wonder why links sand traps are so deep, remember that they were originally designed not as punishment but protection; imagine what the wind would do to the bunkers’ sands if their walls weren’t so upright.

  The breezes were just as bold in Brora as they had been in Dornoch, yet I felt the urge to go around the course again; 77 hadn’t felt like so much fun in a long time. But the trip was changing again, and ahead of us we each had long miles in different directions. I said good-bye to the group in the parking lot at Brora and watched Sean and Lindsay hop into a taxi back to Inverness. Amanda picked up Brian, who would be a father the next time I saw him. They wished me good fortune and said they would be following me in the qualifier. Lindsay offered to leave his shoes for luck, but I declined the added baggage.

  My car turned north as the gang headed south, and while I expected their exit to come with a bit of worry—I would be alone again on the remote edges of Scotland, before ten days of golf with a reader whom I had never met—I felt at peace as I drove up to Wick, the northernmost of Scotland’s east-coast links.

  The course was quiet and empty and bathed in blessed yellow light when I reached it that afternoon. I met a lone husband and wife drinking tea in the clubhouse who welcomed me and sent me off with a scorecard and some directions to get me around, though it would have been impossible to get lost. Wick was a nine-out, nine-back links, a four-mile avenue of fairway with a towering ridge of dunes serving as the median. Another solid test amid the sand hills; if it were on the way to Dornoch instead of an hour above it, Wick might have seen more visitors, but the place being empty was fine with me. Alone again, I had the chance to get golf-fixated, to stop thinking about where we were all going to get a table for dinner or whether my friends were getting a discount on their tee time. I practiced my shortened swing. I tried new things. I relaxed my hands on my putter, and the ball began releasing dead down its intended line. Relaxed hands—I tried it with the rest of my clubs and could feel a rhythm clicking, my swing slower, smoother, and unpressured—no weather to escape, and nowhere to be but a nearby hotel before dark.

  On the back nine at Wick, I started letting it go. My hands, my arms, my shoulders, my head. I stopped forcing. I let the club and my muscles do what they wanted to, which, when I stopped interfering with them, was hit a golf ball toward a target. Birdie, birdie, birdie. Golf was so simple when I stopped telling it what I wanted it to be and just enjoyed it as something I could do.

  And I could do it at Wick. I was four under on the back nine, sitting dead center of eighteen when I began to worry about whether there would be enough rooms in St. Andrews for my family and friends and so many fans come to witness my miracle; we would need half the beds in town, and the Open was just a month away. I proceeded to knuckle one into a bunker by the green, where I climbed in and had a boxing match with my ball that I
lost in a unanimous decision.

  I carried a custom gap wedge that had been engraved with a reminder on the back of the clubface: BE PRESENT. If I was going to find answers in Scotland, I figured I should start by noticing the ones in my own bag.

  I wrote for a long time that night in my hotel in the town of Wick, animated by an unusual shot of evening energy. Something about reaching the top of the island had me feeling hopeful and focused; there were many days to go, but the turn toward the finish line made a once interminable quest feel finite. Suddenly, the trip had an end, and I wished I had budgeted for two loops around Scotland, or maybe ten. This life of chase, of heading out every day set on being better, on becoming my best golfing self; there was just not enough time. I regretted ever complaining about the weather or my scorecard, and since I was never doing this again, I told myself to slow down and take it easy. Remember Covesea—stop. Smell the roses, no matter if all I saw was yellow budding gorse. They were roses if I looked at them the right way. I had to at least try, because it was all downhill from here.

  Promise

  Fourteen days until the qualifier, and the Colonel was still heavy on my back.

  I had imagined this homestretch for months, praying that by now, after so many holes in the home of golf, I would have been shaken by a white-light conversion somewhere along the coastline of Scotland, a golfer who dodged bogeys suddenly reborn as a player who binged on birdies. It had yet to happen. There had been glimpses, but I was still very much my pretty-good golfing self, always looking over my shoulder for traces of Colonel Bogey.