A Course Called Scotland

by Tom Coyne

  We made it home that evening from the best meal either of us had ever consumed, so happy, and even alive. We were blood-bonded by the travails and triumphs of travel; in thirty-six hours, Penn and I had been through and seen more than I shared with people I called dear friends. He emailed the waitress in Georgia and said the happiness of her reply sounded as though she had been in tears while writing it. By listening to her and finding that place that meant so much to her, Penn had made her month. I imagined he did that for people from time to time. Penn knew the good things and lived his life expecting them. And so they came.

  • • •

  I had anticipated the toughest opening drive on this trip to exist in a place called Birkdale or Muirfield or Turnberry; never could I have imagined it would be found a few steps from the lobby of the Skeabost Hotel in Skye. Under renovation by its new owners, the Skeabost was a handsome hunting lodge converted into fourteen guest rooms, but the owner informed me that they also had a golf course, even though no Skeabost golf course had popped up on my map. Penn and I endeavored to sample it that morning, but when the girl at the front desk wasn’t entirely sure how to find the first tee—she pointed us in the general direction of the parking lot—I wondered what could possibly await us. We were either about to play the hidden-est of hidden Scottish gems or we were about to go get lost in the woods with our clubs.

  Across the parking lot and through some overgrown branches we found a path that led to a wet and tattered green mat. We looked outward toward a small opening in the trees fifty yards ahead and saw what looked like a field that might even hold a flag or two. We hit irons through an opening slightly narrower than the aisle on an Airbus, and in a few paces discovered the golf course. It was a sort of accidental track, seven flags spread around a field with turf mats for tee boxes that some locals played from time to time. The new owner asked my opinion on it and whether I thought the course might be developed into something for the guests. The final two holes had me feeling that it might. The wee par 3s wrapped around the hotel and played along a loch’s edge, which could be fun for families or golfers passing through. Penn and I enjoyed our little morning appetizer of a golf course, if for no other reason than we might never meet another golfer who, no matter the miles logged by their club carriers, could say they had played Skeabost. Thousands could brag that they had played Muirfield. Ours was a far more exclusive club, those of us who had found the mat in the woods.

  Skeabost hardly cost us an hour, so it was an early start down to the Isle of Skye nine-holer where our caravan would go from one car in my rearview to one and a half. Poor Penn—I was making an effort to drive more leisurely, but the pull of my final rounds down in Ayrshire kept weighing down my foot. Now with the addition of a third car to our train, Penn was stuck in the middle, trying to keep up with me while keeping Scott and his Florida cruise control in view.

  A life in and around golf had taught me a few things about dealing with people: don’t trust anyone with iron covers; don’t prejudge folks with ball retrievers or karma will have you asking them to borrow one; and when the director of golf at a five-star resort that you desperately want to visit emails you out of the blue and says he wants to join you in Scotland, you say Hell yes to your new best friend.

  Scott was in his late forties, with a clean haircut, a pressed collar, a big smile, and a kind manner; he exuded the positive vibe of a guy who, as a lifetime PGA club pro, had mastered the skill of being nice all the time, or at least faking it. He’d heard me promoting my quest on the radio a few months before and decided I sounded normal enough to spend a few days with on the road. The Florida resort where he was director of golf, Streamsong, was relatively quiet in the summer months, so he could get some time away and add some unusual names to his life’s list of golf courses—he literally maintained a spreadsheet of the thousands of tracks he had played since childhood. He even signed up to play in the Open qualifier at Bruntsfield, and for this I was exceedingly grateful. My partners had brought with them camaraderie and jokes and more golf balls, but not all of them brought serious game. Playing beside a PGA pro headed for the same tournament was a real gift to my chances; I knew well from my Paper Tiger days that if you want to play good golf, you have to hang around it. All the time.

  Like that of most longtime PGA pros, Scott’s swing was gorgeous to look at, but not always as perfect in practice; his game had a little office rust, but you could tell there was a real player in his move. It’s a common refrain among those in the business that if you want to play a lot of golf, don’t make it your living; the life of the club pro is one of long hours near the course but rarely on it—and who wants to spend their rare free hours back at the range where they work? So the next two weeks were about to be the most golf Scott had played since getting his PGA card. We were both the longest of Open long shots, but I felt a little less crazy in my quest with another hopeful around. Here was proof of my sanity, in pro slacks and a Streamsong sweater. I wasn’t the only one who thought golf might owe me a miracle.

  Isle of Skye Golf Club (called Sconser by locals, after the town) was its own wee miracle, another nine-green course with eighteen tee boxes where our approach shots were framed as beautifully as any of the work by the designers at Scott’s resort. The outward holes pointed us to greens on the water’s edge, where hills across the bay were our target. Coming in, we worked our way back up a craig and teed off toward a dark stone peak. Out to the water or into a wall of rock, there were shots at the little Skye layout that felt like hitting into forever. I silently kept track of Scott’s score as I tallied my own; we traded pars and birdies until he lost a ball on the home stretch, and I birdied the last and nipped him with a score of one under. A little competition from home was quickly paying dividends with my first round under par since Aberdeen.

  That afternoon, three men in three cars arrived safely at the ferry port in Armadale, where we saved a day’s drive by crossing from Skye down to Mallaig. Ferries were a way of life on this fractured edge of Scotland where it was all isles and firths, and they would become our routine, with six crossings scheduled in the next five days. They were larger than the boats I’d crossed on up in Whalsay. Some were the size of cruise ships with pubs and cafeterias, and the process was as simple as stepping onto an escalator—drive on, pay the man, snap some selfies on the observation deck, drive off. Reservations were recommended in the summer, and timetables were accurate down to the second. It was all impressively efficient and more fun than driving over a bridge as we slowly watched our next stretch of golfing coastline come into view. We couldn’t quite make out Traigh from the ferry deck, but even if we could have, we never would have guessed what it held.

  We caravanned down the coast between blue water and green hills and pulled into an ocean cove where tidal pools shimmered and families walked the sand. The Scotsman newspaper called Traigh (pronounced Try) “the most beautifully sited nine-hole golf course in the world,” and it was clear why. We almost forgot to take our eyes off the blissful little beach to find the golf course, which was waiting at our backs.

  A one-room white cottage beside the sea seemed an idyllic clubhouse for a nine-holer, and from its door emerged a man with a handful of hats. Roddy, the club captain, introduced himself and told us to put these TRAIGH GC hats on, explaining that ours didn’t work here. A stout Scotsman with a sharp wit, Roddy was a welcome guide as we hit from one summit to the next, relying on his wisdom for our lines. When he told me to hit one left and the ball went right, he turned to me and asked, “Did I put you off when I told you to hit it left? I’ll be more clear next time.”

  Traigh’s aged dunes sagged and soared through nooks and over valleys to greens sunk into bowls and cratered atop hillsides. Views of the beach followed us as we climbed from one vista to the next, and Scott couldn’t help but tell Roddy it was one of the most beautiful little courses he had ever seen.

  “We think so, too. God had a trial run with England. Then he got it right with Scotland and p
ut it on top.”

  Penn’s imported sunshine soaked the fairways as we golfed our way back down toward the beach cove of black rocks and sand. I imagined that we were all picturing a life in which we lived in that little cottage by the sea with these holes for our backyard. Some courses impressed you so much that you couldn’t wait to return, but the peace and joy of Traigh made it feel like a place you wanted to remain, to drop your anchor and live in simple bliss for a very long time.

  We were famished from the day’s three-course hustle, and Roddy pointed us toward a restaurant down the road, where I began to wonder if Scottish servers played a running joke on Americans—inexplicably, they were out of the burrito as well. We settled for steaks and burgers, and with our twosome now a group of three, the conversation was light and easy. Penn and Scott quickly began trading stories of courses played and golfing friends in common.

  It was unusual to be dining with someone whose golf résumé so dwarfed my own, but in Scott’s case, I was sitting next to one of the rarest traveling golfers on the planet. There could be only a handful like him, I imagined; he had played ninety-nine of the tracks on Golf Digest’s list of the top one hundred courses in America. The lone holdout? Scott smiled at Penn from Georgia when he said, “Augusta. I’ve been trying forever, and I haven’t been able to make it happen.”

  Penn looked down at his plate and shook his head, then quietly confessed that he had played Augusta National. His miracle had taken place years before on his company’s jet, when a former boss and member at Augusta asked the bank vice president sitting next to Penn if he’d ever played the National. The man replied that he had, and Penn tried to sit still as the CEO’s glance turned to him. When asked the same question, Penn replied as calmly as he could, “No, sir, I have not.” And with that, the childhood dream of a man who’d attended the Masters for thirty consecutive years came to life in green and gold.

  It was the fantasy of every golfer to ever watch a color television, and one I had long ago abandoned. In all my travels, I’d never encountered an Augusta member (at least, none who would admit to it; their membership list is famously unpublished), and while I’d once pitched a magazine story where I would hop the fence in the middle of the night and play the course wearing night-vision goggles (the golf magazines passed; turns out they frowned on commissioning crimes from their freelancers), my days of courting arrest were behind me. I’d accepted that my visits to the Masters practice rounds were as close as I would ever get to the greens at Augusta. I was lucky that I could say I’d been there at all, because as much as Ballybunion and St. Andrews fire the goosebumps, there is no rival to wandering the fields of Augusta National, where the ground feels like clouds underfoot. There might be better golf courses, but there is no golf dream bigger than Augusta, and we golfers need our dreams, especially the unreachable ones. Stalking my perfect round had taken me to so many uncommon places, like Traigh and the Isle of Skye; if I ever got that Augusta rabbit in my teeth, I might stop chasing.

  I was sorry to hear that number one hundred was Augusta for Scott’s sake, knowing that unless he someday ran the whole PGA, his list was likely to remain incomplete. Unless, of course, Penn proved to have all the Wonka bars.

  “I do know a guy,” Penn said, in as reserved a tone as I had yet heard from my Georgian friend. He looked down at his empty tumbler in thought, almost afraid to complete his sentence. “He’s a good friend. I’ve known him since high school. It’s been years, but . . .”

  I looked over at Scott. He was staring at Penn as though he were the one who got that last burrito.

  “I could ask,” Penn said. I watched as he struggled to swallow all enthusiasm—it didn’t suit his persona, but he understood that you don’t mess around with Augusta. You don’t tease with I know a guy unless you really, really know a guy. “I can’t imagine how often he gets asked, and it would be a long shot,” he continued. “But he’s a special guy. He might like to hear what you two have been doing, and you never know.”

  “That would be . . . great?” I said with emotional confusion. It was as if he had told me half the winning lottery numbers. It could be nothing. It could be whisky-induced bluster. Or we might have met our miracle in Penn. Scott and I both thanked him for taking a shot on our behalf at some point down the road, then changed the subject to a less delicate topic. We tried to put his offer in the far back of our minds, discounting it as a pub promise to protect our golfing hearts. Expect to hear nothing back, we told ourselves, but in the meantime, be really nice to Penn.

  After dinner, Scott set off for a few rounds in St. Andrews—we would rendezvous in Machrihanish—while Penn and I headed for the You Must Be Taking the Morning Ferry If You’re Staying Here Hotel, which was mostly a pub with rooms upstairs where the bartender couldn’t find my reservation. A guy who smelled as though he’d spent much of the spring drinking pints beside the snooker table put down his stick and shuffled over to help us, finding keys for Penn and me. My room came complete with free access to the Internet signal from the neighbors across the street and a complimentary bottle of the previous guest’s dandruff shampoo. I felt badly for putting Penn up in such meager and overpriced quarters, but it was the closest bed to our dawn ferry, and not even pillows that felt and smelled like laundry bags could dampen our traveling spirits after the twenty-seven holes we’d just ticked off the list.

  We skipped breakfast and were on the Isle of Mull by 8:00 a.m. the next morning to sample a late addition to my list. A woman at the hotel reception in Shetland had told me that my Scottish island-hopping wouldn’t be complete without a visit to Mull and the links of Tobermory. She was biased, as it was her hometown course, but Tom Watson himself had signed the guest book, so if I was looking to follow the path of Open greats in search of their answers, I needed to detour through this small western isle on my way down to Kintyre.

  The clubhouse was empty at Tobermory when we arrived, so I quickly looked for Watson’s name in the guest book (didn’t find it; must have been in safekeeping) before signing Penn’s and my own and heading out to a first tee that pointed us at a hill of gorse. We trusted the marker post atop the hill, then went scrambling to the top of a plateau in search of our drives. We found neither, but we did find a valley of varying levels that felt like a staircase of fairways, dipping down and back up to a hoisted green. Tobermory’s nine holes were crammed with happy quirks and meaty carries over a landscape that shadowed the harbor. There was a theme to the northwestern courses—nine holes, relatively wee, hilltop, rocky, and breathtaking, both for the scenery and the exercise. Tobermory felt like an eighteen-holer for the hauls up and down a hillside where you could imagine county-sized glaciers squeezing these wrinkles into shape.

  Penn won our match with a birdie on the closing par 3, nine holes that would henceforth become known as the Tobermory Open when Penn retold the tale of his comeback birdie to Scott, to me, to the waiter at dinner, and to the ticket taker on the ferry that brought us back to Oban and mainland Scotland. We stopped just long enough for Penn to buy some of Oban’s namesake whisky, and I tried to take my time on the road down to Machrihanish. The scenery along the edges of Argyll (where the Campbell clan’s tartan gave name to your socks) and Loch Fyne was worth a slow drive, but the prospect of dropping anchor for three whole nights had me racing the one-lane leading to the tip of the Kintyre peninsula. As we wound through valleys and around lakes and harbors, I felt my first case of self-induced car sickness coming on, but three hours of coughing back my Snickers breakfast was worth every minute when we arrived at the Ugadale.

  When I learned that the Machrie links had been sold and were currently undergoing a rebuild, I was disappointed to miss a course so beloved by links purists and writers like Jim Finegan, one of the great men of the golf writing game, god rest his soul. I wasn’t as disappointed to skip a long ferry ride out to Machrie and the Isle of Islay, nor was I too worried about the two free days that dropped into my schedule at precisely a time when I needed to play mo
re and hustle less.

  Our accidental Beatles tour continued as we worked our way down to the end of Kintyre along the “Long and Winding Road” that inspired the Beatles tune from Let It Be to where Paul McCartney had owned a farm since the 1960s. His 1977 hit with Wings, “Mull of Kintyre,” was the bestselling single in UK history at the time, and I have yet to meet an American who’s heard it. Our respite couldn’t have landed on a more ideal block of my itinerary. A charmed blend of Scottish golf and American hospitality awaited us in Kintyre, and it felt like a retreat from the compromises of life on the road. Our two nights in the Ugadale Hotel, plus an evening in nearby Campbeltown’s Royal Hotel, were a trip within a trip where every minute felt like a reward. Menus on which we wanted everything (Penn’s experience of Scottish cuisine had been wonderfully skewed; he had eaten better than if he were reviewing restaurants in NYC) and suites that had me choking back tears at the width of my room and the height of my mattress—this was the first place since Skibo where I felt that highest bar being surpassed: It was a place I wanted Allyson to see. There were courses and towns I hoped to revisit, but it was a different thing to walk around a village and plot your return with your family, to sit in the Old Clubhouse pub sharing a plate of haggis nachos and know you would be here doing this a handful more times during the course of your life.

  Machrihanish had been special for a long time, since Old Tom had visited to design the original Mach Links that ranked among the best tracks in the world. A local caddie claimed Kintyre’s golf legacy reached back centuries further, and that Machrihanish was the true Home of Golf, well predating wool traders and St. Andrews. He described to me a disappeared news story by Scottish golf writing legend S. L. McKinlay in which the origin of golf was credited to ancient Irish monks in Machrihanish who played the Gaelic game of shinty (a predecessor of field hockey, and still beloved in Ireland as the sport of hurling). Shinty sticks did look a lot like early golf clubs, and missionary monks were poking around Scotland’s islands well before any suggestion of golf in Scotland was recorded, so we stepped upon Machrihanish’s first tee with added reverence for what might have been ground zero for golf on our planet.