A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  I knew plenty about bogeys; we had been intimate over the years for sure, but it was in researching my visit to the links of Reay that I finally learned the origin of the word. In Scottish legend, a bogle was a goblin. The term gave birth to the notion of the bogeyman (Americanized to our boogieman), and a golfer who played like the devil would come to be referred to as one. In order to standardize scorekeeping and allow for handicapped golf, courses adopted “bogey scores,” a tally that a good golfer would strive to match. In a game in which match play was the standard, the shift to stroke play was fostered by this idea of “playing against Mr. Bogey” or “chasing the bogeyman.” When playing at a service club (many early clubs in the British Isles were born of battalions looking for a game), the golfers couldn’t invite a Mr. Bogey to golf—they would outrank him—so the name “Colonel Bogey” was used instead. The Colonel even got his own tune after a British bandmaster was inspired by a whistling golfer. The “Colonel Bogey March” is best known as the tune whistled in The Bridge on the River Kwai, but it has been parodied by the likes of Homer Simpson and the students in The Breakfast Club, and it became an anthem of the British people in World War II as the tune for “Hitler Has Only Got One [Titleist].”

  As I read up on my next destination in Reay, I learned of the influence of this sharpshooting officer. Reay Golf Club’s history explained:

  According to records in 1897, based on a card left by Colonel Bogey, it was decided to adopt a bogey score of 54 for the 12 holes (some reports record this as 50). This was in order to assist in a more consistent method of allocating handicaps to the playing membership.

  As the quality of equipment and play increased, the more ambitious American concept of a par score eventually overtook a bogey score (par deriving from the Latin for equal), while the credit for the creation of birdie went to a course in my own backyard: at Atlantic City Country Club, Pine Valley creator George Crump was in a match where a playing partner stuffed an approach, to which another partner replied, “That was a bird of a shot,” forever tagging a ball holed one stroke below par.

  Oh, the sleep I’d lost and the layers of enamel I’d ground away over these words—birdies, pars, bogeys on top of bogeys—that had such accidental provenance, words of no meaning or importance to golf’s original linksmen. They were chance utterances by some golfing forefathers, yet they would come to have such power over not just my mood but my self-worth; birdie, and my world was right. Par, and my world could have been right. Bogey, and the world would never be right again, as I commissioned the Colonel to spoil my sunshiniest afternoons.

  At Reay, my time with the Colonel began and ended with the club’s history page. I went out in some soft, bright air and carded level par over its 5,854 yards. It rivaled Kinghorn for the longest short-course in Scotland, where part of me feels like it’s still playing its fifth hole, accurately dubbed the Sahara for its 581 yards played into a North Atlantic breeze, but I liked Reay’s signature quirk of beginning and ending with a par 3, and its routing was refreshingly circular, adding variety to the wind. A blend of tough shorties and gentle doglegs, it was another course with James Braid heritage (I was beginning to imagine Braid and Old Tom as immortal golfing Santa Clauses, their work uninhibited by the bounds of real time), and as the northernmost Braid design in Scotland, it was a genuine treat for golfers who found themselves on unchartered Highland soil. Far west of the Inverness trail of courses, things started to feel different as I set out from Reay. They started to look different, too.

  Over my years getting to know the links of the world, I’d braved plenty of grumpy correspondence from architecture gurus who disputed my opinion that we lacked genuine links courses in the States. I often humbly conceded to their expertise; I had yet to visit Bandon, Oregon, or the Highland Links nine-holer on Cape Cod, where emails insisted that golf in the dunes was thriving. Before leaving for Scotland, I’d heard that a links had opened on the East Coast of my own continent, and I thought it necessary to investigate before I began receiving complaints from Canada as well. I voyaged northward to Nova Scotia for a forty-eight-hour dunes golf fix, and found everything about the Cabot Links to be as advertised—genuine links set in a far-off town called Inverness, where I wondered if a developer had changed the town’s name as a marketing ploy (a Canadian links in a place called Inverness—too perfect), but Scottish names filled Canada’s easternmost island of Cape Breton, a first stop for settlers exiled in the Clearances who came to this edge of Canada and made it a Nova Scotia—a New Scotland.

  Perhaps it was the remoteness that recalled Cabot, or the talk of Scots’ eviction from these Highlands, but Nova Scotia was on my mind as I set out from my perch atop Scotland and began working my way down its jagged western coast, where the golf courses were far-flung, the roads were medieval, and the scenery grabbed me by the throat.

  I thought I’d been seeing Scotland, that I knew the place—water, soft hills, slate roofs, gorse and dunes and sheep. I thought I’d seen the Highlands, but when I got to Scotland’s western version of them, I felt like I’d been waiting in the queue for the real ride to begin. In the far northwest, it was a new trip in a new country. It was a nova Scotia.

  It was four days of little golf and much driving on my way down from Scotland’s summit through the isles of Skye and Mull to the southern tip of Kintyre, but no stretch of the country was burned more deeply into memory than those ninety hours headed south. The landscape was not just scenic, it was preposterous. I climbed granite peaks in my station wagon, scooted along cliffside roads like a timid pack mule, rolled down hillsides, parachuted my car into soft, green glens, and then snaked my way around lochs whose still surfaces were mirrors beneath cloudless skies. I dodged sheep on one-lane roads and scarcely saw a home or another human being, aside from a black Volkswagen following me at a distance.

  I didn’t know what Penn would bring with him to the Highlands from Georgia. From his emails, I could tell he would be accompanied by wit and good ol’ boy charm, but I couldn’t have guessed that he would contribute ten days of sunshine, wisdom, and long friendship, and the greatest round of golf in my life.

  It started with a thank-you. A person called Penn emailed to say he appreciated my Ireland story, and I thanked him for taking the time to say so. I was surprised when he wrote back and invited me to speak to his golfing buddies on a trip to South Carolina that I regretted not being able to make. I was more surprised when he said he wanted to join me in Scotland, and I was shocked when he actually booked a ticket and forwarded his itinerary. So I don’t know why I was still surprised when I heard the door open downstairs at the Aiden House in Durness, the best—and perhaps only—B&B in Scotland’s most northwesterly town, and heard a Georgia accent fill the hallways. It was more than a drawl, more than a few soft-tongued expressions. Penn’s accent cruised with enthusiasm. His words had colors and shape to them, bright hues and bold configurations.

  I laid in my bed in a room where a sign in the bathroom read NO WASHING SOILED LAUNDRY IN THE SINK—they must have known I was coming—and knew I couldn’t match the energy downstairs. I could only hope to survive it.

  Though he had updated me with texts to tell me he was approaching Durness, I still doubted whether Penn would be able to find me up here. If you were tasked with selecting the least convenient rendezvous point on the planet for a traveler from the States, Durness, Scotland, would make your short list. But here he was, all the way from Valdosta, Georgia, an e-persona come to life. It felt strange to meet a new, American face in this yonder corner of the world, to add fresh feet so far into the expedition; Penn was like the explorer who found Dr. Livingstone. I had become a decent double for the Scottish doctor, blistered and bearded and skinny as I was.

  “Tom Coyne,” he said, embracing me with a big buddy hug. Penn was not tall or fat but he seemed large, a thick frame with paws for hands and brown hair rumpled from a cross-Scotland drive. He was pushing seventy but smiled like a kid; there was literally a sparkle in his eye
s. I thought it might have been tears from the seven hours he’d just spent weaving through the Highlands after an overnight flight, but just as the sun would all week, that glint in his smile remained. It was who he was. It was the look of someone who could look at anything and know the good in it.

  Durness had little, but it had plenty. It had the Aiden B&B, a restaurant and pub, a golf course, and of all the places to find one, a memorial garden to John Lennon. He had spent his childhood summers vacationing on a family farm in Durness, and years later would even bring Yoko and Julian back to this perfectly unspoiled place at the edge of the UK.

  Penn and I headed to the restaurant for a meal shared between two men who knew each other both well and not at all; it was a slightly awkward dinner during which I kept thinking the conversation would be going a lot more smoothly if we took out our phones and started emailing each other. But after two plates of fish and chips, Penn got down to his mission and his charge.

  He admitted that he wasn’t here just to collect photographs and scorecards; this wasn’t a fan’s pilgrimage. He believed in what I was doing and was here to assist. He had come because, rather than reading about the result of my links dream quest, he wanted to witness it and help push it toward its proper conclusion. He was a reader who wanted to participate in the story and help write the ending. As a golfer, it felt like welcome support. As a writer, it felt downright postmodern.

  “I just want you to love the moment,” Penn said, leaning across the table, his eyes gone serious for the first time since we met. “Enjoy it. I’m so excited for you. Everybody is. All of us.”

  It was news to me that there was an us. I’d sent a message to everyone joining me on the trip about what to bring and what to expect, and from that mass email, a separate chain of chatter among Penn, Duff, Brian, Gretchen, Lindsay, Sean, Scott, and Gramma Billy had apparently kicked off without me. Strangers had all become unlikely friends, and my solo quest was suddenly a team endeavor. I would learn that for weeks they had been exchanging thoughts on how to best get me across the finish line, sharing their excitement for Scotland, and Penn inquiring as to who this Gramma Billy was and if she could dance. She replied that she most certainly could, smiley face and a wink.

  I felt a squirm in my gut. There wasn’t supposed to be an us. Us was pressure. In a foursome or a crowd I was carefully alone, and I preferred that comfortable arrangement, because us took guts and energy. Us was vulnerable; maybe that’s why I’d stuck with Robert for so long, a friend without challenge, so safe and staid in his turmoil. It troubled me to think the others weren’t just here for some free golf, that they were invested in our friendship, and that I should invest in them in return. But sitting across from Penn and listening to him give a damn, a proper adult who could give without worry, I thought for a moment that maybe it wasn’t the courses that were meant to dispense the epiphanies but the partners.

  “Don’t think about score, and don’t think about your swing,” Penn said, his drawl thinned by his sincerity. “Just love the moment. Enjoy it. I can’t tell you how great I think what you’re doing is. You just gotta enjoy it, man. The moment. And never—no matter what happens at the qualifier—never, never quit.”

  I asked Penn to tell me all of this again before he left me down in Prestwick, and he promised he would. Prestwick, below Glasgow, felt like it was a continent away from Durness. And in some ways, it was—an audacious land of long drives and short golf, of ferry cruises and shocking meals and odd thrills. As we worked our way down the northwest coast of Scotland in a two-vehicle caravan, Penn and I both confessed to laughing aloud in our cars at what we were seeing through our windshields. It felt as though we were being toyed with; they couldn’t put a road on this mountain’s edge or lay a loch here beside this canopy of trees shading a winding lane guarded by sentries of sheep and silver rock. But it was all real. And all we could do was chuckle at it.

  The northern delights started at the Durness course, where Penn giggled at an opening hole that played like the first stage of an alpine ascent, with a fairway that might have come with carabiners and that breached at a green surrounded by a wire fence. The long winter meant the livestock were still grazing, but they didn’t interfere with the fun of Durness, a blissful youth of a golf course. Built in 1988 by and for the local community, it was a nine-holer with a second set of tees allowing for eighteen-hole rounds, and felt far older than its twenty-five years. Durness was a throwback to courses built by shovels versus software, stuffed with quirks you only find at the low-budget builds, places that were forced to make hay instead of resowing the field. What to do about that mountain at the start of the property? Put a fairway on it! And stick a flag on top. The closing par 3 over ocean spray to a green shelved atop black rocks was a stunning finisher, and making two there sent us down the coast from Durness at a gallop.

  The ride was a long haul of hairpin turns, lamb roadblocks, and one-lane roads bordered by shoulders marked PASSING PLACE should you get stuck behind a tractor, which seemed the only other vehicle sharing our route. Roaring around a wagon with no eyes on what approached felt more like a PASSING-AWAY PLACE, but we white-knuckled our way down to our next golf at Ullapool, where nine holes along Loch Broom were a chance to peel our fingers off our steering wheels before we continued south to another nine-holer called Gairloch. With so many watery crags poking into Scotland’s northwest coast, unless we could find a ferry, my days of straight shots between courses were on hold, giving an area of modest size a feeling of utter vastness.

  Gairloch bested Ullapool on that day’s sampling of nine-holers, a solid ball-marker course on the velvet-goody-bag-from-the-starter/logo-ball/ball-marker/scorecard-on-the-back-of-a-napkin scale of course fanciness. As I left the shop with my souvenir token, Penn told me of his course back home, where a visitor had once asked if they sold ball markers. “Yup. We sell ball markers. One dollar,” the man in the shop said, taking a dollar from the guest and handing him back a dime.

  From the compact lunchroom of a clubhouse, Gairloch looked like a wide and tidy bowl of fairway green beside the water, where holes crisscrossed and tee boxes were pushed up into the woods to squeeze every inch out of the property. We hurried our way around on a day that, as I’d studied the map in my office months before, I had pinpointed as the date the trip might drive off a cliff, in any number of ways.

  Penn was desperate to dine at a particular Highland restaurant he’d heard about from a waitress at a Georgia bistro. I wasn’t surprised to hear that he had gotten to know most of her life story over the course of a dinner—I don’t think there were strangers in Penn’s world—and when he got to talking about his upcoming trip to Scotland, she insisted that he dine at a place called the Three Chimneys on the Isle of Skye. I was all for accommodating Penn’s detour on the itinerary, but shoehorning it into an unforgiving calendar meant we were in for a day that Penn would describe that evening, as we waited for the last table of the night on the Isle of Skye, as golf meets the Le Mans endurance race. Our day had been only slightly more dangerous.

  When we arrived at the Skeabost Hotel on Skye that evening after our quick hike around Gairloch, I watched Penn step out of his car slowly. His face was drawn, and his eyes looked downward. I wondered if he had gotten a call from home delivering dire news. He shook his head as if to cast off a vision. “Tommy Coyne,” he said, “I just about died back there.”

  A pang of guilt landed in my stomach. I wasn’t aware of my speed as I drove; weeks of wrong-side navigating had me comfortable driving left, and the rental insurance emboldened my pace. Not until I had a car following me did I realize that I was racing my BMW around the bends and making it impossible for a newly arrived guest to follow. In my rearview, Penn’s Volkswagen would disappear for a minute, sometimes two, until at one stretch I had to stop and wait for him to catch up. Turned out that while I was zipping ahead, Penn’s left front tire had gotten stuck in a roadside rut, pushing him into the trees as he ripped the wheel back to the right. />
  “I saw how it was going to go,” he said. “Slow-motion—here’s where you turn the car over, here’s where it’s going to roll. . . .” His car had rocked and fishtailed across the road until he wrestled it back under control. “If there was a car coming in the other direction . . .” he said with a shudder in his voice. He looked at a blank space between us and shook his head. “Wow. That is how quick it can go.”

  I owed him a good dinner. Penn insisted on paying for it, but I was going to drive even if it was almost dark when we left with no guarantee of a reservation. I was going to get Penn to his Three Chimneys.

  There were any number of inconceivable things about the Three Chimneys. There was the food (we supped on oysters and scallop tartar and rabbit swimming in heaven sauce and lamb loin and sweetbreads that tasted like dreams melting on my tongue), the fact that we got a table (it took all Penn’s charm and a little bit of my résumé to score us the last seats of the night—the people dining there that evening had made their reservations over six months ago for this Wednesday dinner), the drive to the restaurant (it was as if the sheep, not having seen a car in months, had commandeered the road for themselves, and as I dodged puffs of white in the pitch darkness on our ride back, I asked Penn if I was really here or asleep back at the hotel and counting these little fuzzy bastards), but nothing was more incredible than the fact that it existed at all. On the side of a hill sat a small cottage with another small cottage of guest rooms next to it, and that was it. Not another marker of civilization in sight. This wasn’t the middle of nowhere; we had left the middle of nowhere and driven an hour to get here, where somehow a kitchen had won a Michelin star and was completely booked nearly a year in advance. Where had all these people come from? What was I doing here? How had a waitress in Georgia landed us at some secret gastronomic commune? It was like going to the moon and finding it inhabited by a pack of foodies. I’ve never been more tired at a dinner where I had to use a fork and knife, but I’ve also never been more excited for my next plate. And there were many.