by Tom Coyne
The opening tee shot played directly over a cove of public beach and quickly replaced Skeabost as the most stressful opener in Scotland. On the days we played it, the strand was busy with families pushing baby strollers; we did our best to wave them out of the way before teeing off, each of us silently praying to miss the pram, miss the pram—and we did, by whole inches. Machrihanish was as good as the top-one-hundred ranking it had earned; Old Tom’s layout shot us through tunnels in the dunes and over burns and around corners of sandy purgatory. With each next tee waiting mere paces from the last cratered green, to think the old man found such a routing waiting for him here gave golf at Machrihanish the flavor of the miraculous.
For golfers who had forgotten it was there (as the crow—or the Flybe—flies), it was a short jump over from Glasgow, but the haul up and around and back down to Campbeltown turned a visit into a proper excursion), the area had been made special again by a new neighboring links, the Machrihanish Dunes, plus the addition of the updated Ugadale and Royal hotels, all developed by American David Southworth, whose résumé included Liberty National, the Abaco Club, and Creighton Farms. The new Dunes course had been designed by Scotsman David McLay Kidd of Bandon Dunes fame, making Machrihanish home to courses by both Scotland’s oldest and newest architects. It was a heady combination: historic and neo-links, Scottish character and American attention to detail where you wanted it most—namely, in your giant shower.
We checked into the Ugadale weary from a day of double ferries through Mull plus an afternoon eighteen on Mach Old, but when our best friend at Mach Dunes, Kevin Lewis, director of marketing and an American PGA pro, told us his boss was in town and would like to have dinner with us, we put on smiles and clean shirts and prepared for a meal with someone I expected was golf’s other Donald.
I would later read that Forbes had dubbed David Southworth “The Anti-Trump,” and after an evening in his company, it was clear why. While Trump’s feather ruffling in Aberdeen was legendary enough to turn most of Scotland against him, Southworth’s development in Kintyre was celebrated and subdued. Where Trump’s ego was unrivaled among our species, Southworth confessed to me as we made our way into the Royal Hotel’s handsome restaurant, with its walls of soft wood and exposed brick, that he often expected someone at his own resorts to tap him on the shoulder and tell him he didn’t belong. He was tall, with a quiet countenance; if someone asked you to pick out the millionaire developer at our dinner table, you would have chosen Penn twice before looking to David. He seemed too modest for a man behind PGA Tour venues and golf communities around the world; he asked us questions and listened thoughtfully to our stories and told his own tales of the trials of bringing Mach Dunes to life. He asked if I liked the layout of my suite upstairs, as he had arranged each room himself. By the time dessert arrived, David had changed my entire outlook on deep-pocketed developers and the überwealthy in general, and his links in Machrihanish altered my perspective on the future of golf courses around the world.
Machrihanish Dunes was the first links to be built on Scotland’s west coast in a hundred years, and the only course ever built on SSSI—a Site of Special Scientific Interest—as the Kintyre dunes are home to rare and endangered varieties of orchids. Course developers and environmentalists at loggerheads is a familiar headline in the golf biz, and it’s the crisis of golf’s future: When we force green into our grass via deluges of chemicals and water and jam courses into places where said water does not exist, we’re turning what could be environmental sanctuaries into ecological burdens. It’s an untenable circumstance for golf, but it doesn’t have to be this way—the environmentalist versus developer story had been rewritten at Mach Dunes, a links that, to me, was one of the most important golf courses I’d ever visited.
The key to constructing a course on such fragile soil was that it wasn’t actually constructed. The Dunes was a track of nuanced routing and sudden turns and hulking dunes, but more than that, it was a model for golf’s future. Kidd took a cue from Morris’s course next door. Rather than fighting the powers, he worked with Scottish Natural Heritage to create that rare setting where both conservationists and golfers could raise a toast. Without so much as sticking a shovel into the soil, Kidd identified twenty-three holes already existing in the dunes and picked his eighteen to route for a golf course. No machinery was used in shaping fairways or forcing carries. Tees and greens were hand-cut with push mowers, and sandy patches were left as bunkers, just as they had been on golf’s original links. With chemicals banned on the property, greenskeepers composted seaweed from the beach for homemade top-dressing, and they weeded the entire property by hand to control the livestock-poisonous ragwort. While tees and greens were hand-cut, black Orkney sheep were welcomed onto the property to handle the rest of the trimming. Mach Dunes had dug into the past to find its future, and as a reward for doing so, a six-year-old course felt like it had been there for a century.
I heard from a friend who said he didn’t care for Machrihanish Dunes’s wild layout and untamed greens—too many bad bounces and guessing shots; the place felt too raw to him. I used his missive as an opportunity to grow my character and practice tolerance by saying nothing in response. What a pity: he went around the place entirely unaware of its significance, more interested in safe pars than the gift of golf on an unspoiled yet modern links. As a links devotee, the place was hope and a sort of clemency. When done right, it was okay to want to golf through geography that scientists deemed off-limits. It was a reprieve from the sort of guilt I felt playing Trump Aberdeen, where the landscape and neighbors had so suffered. It was a relief to think that, while great links were washing away, we could find more. Because we didn’t need to make them; we could just uncover them, like Morris at Machrihanish and Kidd in the Dunes.
I had a chance to speak with David Kidd some months later about what the Dunes meant to him, as a designer and as a Scotsman with local roots. It was a thrill, he said, to build a golf course here, on hills he had climbed as a child on holiday with his grandparents. They’d told him that the white hotel over there, the Ugadale, was for the rich folks, and Kidd never set foot inside its doors during the summers of his youth. That the Ugadale now boasted a David McLay Kidd suite was something of an American dream come true in Scotland, but the bigger victory for Kidd was that his golf course would preserve the fragile dunes. As he explained to me:
The most important thing, the thing that I kept driving into anyone who would listen, is that the dunes need purpose, and that purpose is their protection. No one was looking out for those dunes, because they didn’t see them having any real purpose. But once you figured out how to golf across them, now they go from being almost worthless to the crown jewel. If you said now we want to take a bulldozer in there, bulldoze some areas flat to make a feed yard for some cattle this winter, people would scream, yet the farmer could have easily done that once. Not now.
We set out to explore the dunes’ new purpose, and enlisted some help for our tour. The Dunes was a good course for a caddie, and after our first time around it, when Penn and I played the holes out of order—the routing is a tad confusing in one spot, and in keeping with its natural vibe, the course is clean of placards and direction posts—I sprang for a looper named Willie, who showed us where gulls had built a nest in front of the sixth tee and spoke of the days when our Navy SEALs would practice their maneuvers on this beach and then have their tea in the abandoned barracks at the edge of the course. Surely Willie was having a laugh. US Navy SEALs were here? US Navy SEALs drink tea? But our caddie spoke the truth—Machrihanish Dunes sat beside a former Royal Air Force base (if you feel like you’re lost and have just pulled into Area 51, you haven’t—the first tee is around the corner) where the SEALs maintained a commando unit, and where the nearby runway was the longest in Europe and had been certified for emergency space shuttle landings.
Willie was thin as broth and thirty years my senior, and I felt guilty for dropping my bag on his shoulder until I struggled to ke
ep up with him. He told us he was the longtime greenskeeper at the nearby Dunaverty links (no resemblance to groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons, aside from the accent), just as his father had been. He encouraged us to fit a round in there, and to also make time for a nine-holer up the coast, Carradale, on our way to our next ferry. Both suggestions transformed Kintyre from a squeeze-in before you played Turnberry and Troon into its own destination where you flew, ferried, or caravanned over from Glasgow and stayed a week, driving little and wanting for nothing.
Scott rejoined us in time for Dunaverty at the southern tip of Kintyre, in a town aptly named Southend. Its course dated to 1889, built by local farmers atop a rock that had once sheltered Robert the Bruce; its jagged headland had been home to Dunaverty Castle, where in 1647, three hundred men, women, and children were slaughtered when the castle was overrun by an army of Presbyterian Covenanters. The golf course that took the castle’s place bore none of those scars; it was an exuberant cliff ride, and an ideal complement to the beefier, stingier courses up in Machrihanish. With a congenial par of 66 stretched over 4,799 wavy yards, it was a tall stroll of deep breaths and unthinkable views. Far in the distance, we could make out the coast of Northern Ireland. I eyed a waterside path I had walked years before and recalled looking at this shard of land on the horizon from a golf course over in Ballycastle, wondering who was there and what the place held. Now I was there—here—a former vision now beneath my feet, and I felt more gratitude at Dunaverty than I thought I possessed.
The American-style hospitality at the Ugadale was nearly outdone by our Scottish welcome at Carradale, where we arrived without a tee time to find the nine-holer packed for a Texas scramble. Meeting Texas in Kintyre had us all smiling with traveler’s irony, and the members embraced us like old pals and insisted we enter the tournament. With tee boxes pushed back onto outcroppings and greens tucked into craggy corners, Carradale was all joy as we fumbled our way through the tournament. A PGA pro alongside a scratch handicap not placing in their scramble was a humbling nod to local knowledge; we claimed distraction as our excuse, too taken by harbor views of a peaceful little town shadowed by tall hills of purple rhododendrons. Clocking us as visitors, a woman greeted Penn as he looked for his ball on her fairway and welcomed him to Carradale. When he noted the overwhelming beauty of the place and the color of the hills, she paused from beating us in her scramble and recited a song to him—“The Rhodies of Carradale”—while our groups waited for the two of them up on our greens.
Penn was a romantic with a poet’s soul, and the west coast of Scotland had him writing long passages in his own journal at night, trying to capture each day’s surprises for his golf buddies at home. But what we had discovered in Kintyre was almost too much for him to put into perspective. He just kept telling me, “I love you, man!” I told him I loved him, too. In his hit song about Kintyre, Paul McCartney sang about wanting to remain here forever. We didn’t know the words or the tune, but in our hearts, we were singing right along.
• • •
After weeks spent designing the map of my trip that I was gifting to each course, Tom Young from Ballpark Blueprints decided he couldn’t help but explore some of the map firsthand. He had signed up to join us for a day in Machrihanish and then would meet me for eighteen at Askernish, a golf seeker’s dying-wish sort of pilgrimage on the far western Hebrides islands. Tom was another partner with whom I had emailed a hundred times yet never met in person, but we seemed bound by our passions for books and beautiful golf, even if Tom’s approach to the game felt plucked from the 1950s.
He was easy to identify beside the first tee at Machrihanish Old in billowing blue slacks and a crisp white shirt. He looked like a young Ben Hogan, and wouldn’t carry anything in his bag that didn’t have Hogan’s name stamped on it. I didn’t know Hogan made golf balls anymore, but Tom found a way to get his company’s logo printed on his. He carried seven clubs, persimmon woods and some hickory shafts, and was so aesthetically obsessed that he eschewed the scorecard and didn’t have a handicap. Rather, he wandered the holes with a journal, and on each tee box he jotted his reflections while we scribbled down our scores.
Our foursome of Philadelphia writer, Florida golf pro, Georgia extrovert, and Chicago designer blended like a reunion of college accomplices. Maybe it was the co-conspiratorial nature of this trip’s mission, or just the travel itself. I had once read that Mike Keiser of Bandon Dunes in Oregon believed that the remoteness of his courses was an asset instead of a hindrance, that the effort involved in arriving there invested visitors in the experience, and that had felt true since I turned north from Inverness. If getting there was work, then one was predisposed to view there as a reward, and we all felt rewarded and invested, old pals pulling for one another and busting chops from that first tee shot at Machrihanish Old.
“You want my driver?” I had to ask as Tom teed up his museum-quality 3-wood, its head slightly smaller than his golf ball. A crowded beach separated Tom’s ball from the first fairway. “Don’t worry about the stroller,” I told him. “Or the baby. That baby is ninety percent air.”
The baby survived by whole yards that afternoon—we hoped the family assumed that overhead whoosh was a white, round, dimpled dragonfly—and we were off in grand spirits. Our four-ball was accompanied by Tom’s wife, Tracy, a hero of a partner whose summer trip to Ireland had been hijacked by her husband’s email buddy. Dublin had been swapped out for some place called Askernish, and a long and winding road to Kintyre had made her throw up in the car (curious, there’s no mention of gut-sweating motion sickness in the Beatles song about said thruway), but still, she took pictures as we golfed thirty-six and plied us with Kit Kats and cheered Tom’s persimmon bunts while we wondered how he made contact with clubheads that looked like they had been shrunken by some sort of Haitian voodoo.
Seeing the station wagon sitting fallow in the Ugadale parking lot as we walked off Machrihanish was like a sublime mirage; my car had collected a glorious sheen of neglect. No driving meant we had time for more haggis nachos and a soccer match on the pub TV. It was the first time this trip felt like a vacation, with time to breathe and talk and relax. We dined in the hotel, where we were joined by the Mach Dunes greenskeepers and our friend Kevin and his wife; we laughed and ate haggis-stuffed chicken and sampled cheeses made in Kintyre, and at meal’s end we all made a pact to return here in two years’ time to relive the place. It was a strange feeling to make such a plan and believe it would happen. Real friends, toward whom I acted sincerely and in whose presence I felt genuine, were a new addition to my life, and to make three of them in three days’ time was Kintyre’s gift. We would be back, and I would see them again. I knew well the dubious nature of late-night pub promises. This wasn’t one of those.
Lessons
I had identified four or five golf hubs around Scotland that I looked forward to recommending to travelers in search of advice. St. Andrews and East Fife were obvious pockets for a week’s trip, not to be outdone by the Golf Coast east of Edinburgh. Aberdeen was another good spot for golfers to rent a flat, and a trip around Inverness and Dornoch held a dozen links within an hour’s drive. But the big corner still called to us—Penn, Scott, and I left Machrihanish and caravanned up to the next ferry port, where we sailed for what might be Scotland’s preeminent golf belt. Home to Troon and Turnberry and Prestwick and Western Gailes and Dundonald and more, Ayrshire, west of Glasgow, should have had us all tingly with expectation, but I left Kintyre braced for a letdown. After Machrihanish and the Dunes, I expected that Scotland’s next chapter could rank as only a mild denouement.
Our route back to the mainland took us through the Isle of Arran to Shiskine Golf and Tennis Club, where Scotland slapped the sour puss off my face. By the third hole, called “Crow’s Nest,” a tiny par 3 that felt as if we were tossing our balls up into a volcanic crater, I was proclaiming Shiskine the perfect golf course. It was part sporting roller coaster, part geological wonder; it felt like the golfing gods h
ad pounded the place into existence with fire and hammer. I recalled my hike around the Giant’s Causeway, there over my shoulder in Northern Ireland—if you laid a golf course across those inexplicable hexagonal rocks, you would get Shiskine, where walls of igneous sills shadowed the greens like the pipes of a giant stone organ.
Three golfers-turned-spelunkers could hardly believe the landscape we were golfing, but Shiskine’s real perfection lay in the number of slots on its scorecard. It was my life’s first twelve-holer, with a back and front six that seemed the Goldilocks ideal for a round of golf. Nine holes always felt unfinished, but fewer and fewer golfers had time for a full eighteen. Twelve felt just right, and I left with a bag from the pro shop full of my new favorite logo in golf, a simple 1 bisecting a 2, celebrating Shiskine’s rare routing. Scott and Penn and I all agreed that we were still on for our two-year rendezvous at Machrihanish but that we would arrive there via the Crow’s Nest and the Isle of Arran.
When we arrived at Turnberry, I coughed back my peanut lunch at the site of the fountain in front of the clubhouse. Far more vomitous than any of our ferry trips that morning was the faux-Roman relic plopped onto these hallowed grounds by the new owner. I imagine he could have chosen a statue less relevant to golf and Scotland (Abraham Lincoln? Crazy Horse? Tony the Tiger?), but I couldn’t conjure one as I pitied the four stone lions spitting water at a Roman centurion. There were plans for a bigger Roman monolith up at the Turnberry hotel, and I wondered if Trump had read somewhere that Caesar played off scratch. But in fairness to savvy Donald and his second venture in Scotland, wherein he scooped up the Turnberry resort at a fraction of what the previous owners had paid six years before, he had committed to an eagerly anticipated overhaul of Turnberry’s championship Ailsa course. As host to four Opens, most famously Nicklaus and Watson’s 1977 “Duel in the Sun,” Turnberry was a name that needed no adornment, but we couldn’t find so much as a ball marker that didn’t have TRUMP stamped on it in letters twice the size of those in Turnberry. Such was the cost of a failing resort’s salvation. To the victors go the naming rights.