by Tom Coyne
As I eyed Old Tom’s Prestwick masterpiece from the green of Himalayas, I saw a scattering of pins squeezed into a few acres of lumpy sand between the town and the sea; the place seemed an impossible venue for a major championship, and Prestwick’s last Open, in 1925, had indeed been a chaotic affair, with players jostling the crowds for room to swing. It had been a while since I’d seen my playing partner on number five—we found his ball below the green before I headed up to the putting surface—but suddenly I heard a loud pop, quick and hard as a gunshot. I hustled over to the front edge, where a wall of railroad ties propped up the green like a cake top. I spotted Duff standing tilted on a wall of fescue, his face ashen. On the next tee, he would show me the black tar on his ball from where he had drilled a wedge into the sleepers and sent his Titleist ricocheting back past his ear.
“I almost killed myself,” he said, gasping for breath as he reached the green. “I could be dead down there, and nobody would know.” I assured Duff that I would have come to look for him—I had a long look at birdie and needed someone to tend the pin.
Duff’s Prestwick score ballooned from the day before at Turnberry, and he blamed his struggles, perhaps rightly, on having to golf with me. He was convinced my company brought out the worst in his game; as the blood dried beneath his bandages, he bled golf balls from his bag’s deepest pockets. On eighteen, he was rewarded for persevering through our pairing when he found a drive that had been hit farther right than his politics, whacked it toward a hilltop with a 5-iron, and crested the peak to find his ball sitting twenty feet from a pin. I watched as he lifted his fists like a punch-drunk champion, slowly pumping his weary arms at the sky, until he looked left and saw me standing by another pin sixty yards away. He stopped, dropped his bag, and thought for a minute.
I could read the Fuck it on his lips as he putted out on a hole we had played half an hour ago, making par on his eighteenth, which was number fourteen on the card, and perhaps becoming the first player in Prestwick’s unrivaled history to card a score for seventeen and three-quarters of the golf course.
Duff swore off my company at nearby Prestwick St. Nicholas, where we discovered a cracker of a course that counted Tom Morris as one of its former members. Originally called the Prestwick Mechanics Club, it may have been golf’s first effort to grow the game beyond the gentry and the caddying classes; Old Tom had helped found the club as an outlet for working-class golfers, and its members originally shared fairways with his Prestwick links. But playing in the group behind me at St. Nicholas was not enough to cure Duff’s allergy to my presence; the mere sight of me standing by the eighteenth green was enough to coax him into the shot golfers fear more than hitting their own forehead. I couldn’t help but hang back and watch his final drive toward the clubhouse, his ball peeling right, right—
“Oh no . . .”
And more right.
“Cars.”
BA-DING. I couldn’t tell which made the BA and which the DING, the Mercedes or the asphalt, but they had both met Duff’s golf ball in an intimate and potentially expensive way.
“Dude,” Duff said as he approached, pulling his trolley up into the parking lot, “I saw your ginger head and I knew that shot was coming.” His mouth was trying to smile, but his eyes looked like he wanted to stuff his driver down my throat. I put two hands over my mouth—it took both hands to cover the grin overtaking my face. Hitting a parked car with your golf ball is not funny, not at all, yet watching your friend hit a parked car with his golf ball is somehow the height of comedy. What a strange game.
I shot a well-framed and carefully edited video of Duff leaning over the car’s hood with its owner, sure to capture the hot crimson of Duff’s forehead reflecting off the sedan’s yellow finish. I covered the incident like a would-be newsman, establishing the scene and then focusing on the suspect and catching the poignant moment of relief when the gentleman shook Duff’s hand, no worries about a thin white smudge he could surely buff out.
“Do not post that,” Duff said as we walked back to the clubhouse.
“I think it’s too late.”
He sighed. “You want to know the secret to golf?” he said. “Here it is: Don’t play.”
Penn left us after Prestwick St. Nicholas for a drive back to the Edinburgh airport, and though I’d known him for all of nine days, we had bonded like passengers in a lifeboat. Golf made easy friends of most folks, but add wild miles and late dinners and shared scenery that had us both contemplating our insignificance in some grander plan, and we were linked for the long haul. Somehow, a stranger who took the time to email me had taken up a large and welcome residence in my life.
Five years ago, I wouldn’t have shared a cup of coffee with Penn from Georgia. I was too bundled up in fear and bravado, a dumbass of unrivaled genius. And I hated coffee. I had spent those intervening years flip-flopping my habits and preconceptions, trying to live as if I didn’t know absolutely everything. It had been a scary free fall, but it landed in a generous place. I never felt wiser than when I learned how to not know. Living life without a Scooby was, finally, what I suspected life was supposed to feel like all along: overwhelming, ecstatic, and so fucking vast.
I abhorred golf-is-life aphorisms, but a muscle-pumped lash never sent the ball as far as a breezy pass. Who would have guessed that all the power came from no longer trying to power through life? A mystery, for sure, but embracing mystery had lessened my freight by a load. I had no idea why a person named Penn needed to be on this trip, but something did know why—and it revealed as much when I got an email that evening in Prestwick.
Evening all,
In my room @ the lovely EDI Hilton, rental car turned in, wake-up call for 3:30 tomorrow morning (ugh), already missing my new best friends. I’m sure Paddy will keep you boys & girls in line. I made it here safely even though I was not doing a 24 Hour of Le Mans thing behind a blue BMW station wagon, which I admit felt strange (I love you, Man!).
Anyway, here is my submission for the you-know-what:
1. Never, ever quit.
2. Never let what other people say about you or your game get you down.
3. Forget about the shot you just hit, good or bad; focus on the next one.
4. And when you think you’ve found The Secret, think again . . . it will be different tomorrow than it was today.
Unbelievable 9 days. Unbelievable! Still trying to digest and take in what we just did. Un-fucking-believable. I’m not sure anyone has ever done that before.
Tom, it was an honor being by your side. Get some rest and get in the zone. Pulling for you, man—but you’re already a winner.
Your friend,
Penn
Don’t quit. That was it—don’t give up. So unsatisfyingly simple, yet perfectly irrefutable. It was a long bed of relief in which I curled up and laid, because not quitting was something I could do. The slings and arrows of eighteen holes had wracked my psyche since grade school, but I could persevere with the best of them—and if that was my task, consider it won. No more I can’t. That evening, in a room across the street from the Open’s first fairways at Prestwick, I drifted off to sleep on I won’t.
Nowhere in my mind was the other part of Penn’s missive, that bit about thinking twice because today’s answer would not be tomorrow’s. But it should have been.
• • •
I loved G-Money, but our rainy round at Troon was an exercise in opposing molecular properties; her boundless energy seemed to sap life from my every proton. It was a phenomenon I knew well from battling two-year-olds. When they were on the edge of inconsolable, offering positivity and reassurance was guaranteed to push them into arm-flailing fits of snot and scorn. Misery loathes happiness, and Gretchen and I found ourselves on contrary emotional plateaus: while she enthusiastically grilled the assistant pro with whom we were playing with questions about course strategies and life lessons from the golf business, I sank deeper into a blank and isolated funk. Don’t quit was somehow a distant cliché, powerles
s against the reality of another morning’s rain dripping down my back.
I walked at twice their pace, barely pausing to swing the club, racing for the exit before Gretchen’s golf zeal pushed my golf weariness into an outburst I couldn’t take back, something along the lines of Nobody cares if you hit eight or feathered seven because it never stops raining on this godforsaken shingle that millions of happier bastards escaped centuries ago! I finished up and shook everyone’s hand and decided it would be better if I skipped lunch with the gang in the clubhouse. I needed a break, I said, and left without telling them where I was going.
It was not easy escaping golf in Ayrshire. I headed back to our B&B and walked the rainy main street in Prestwick past takeaway curry shops and pale smokers outside the pubs at midday, wondering what my kids were doing right now—probably just waking up and watching cartoons.
I found a barber shop and went inside and sat down. It felt like a small taste of regular life, and reminded me that I would be home soon and wouldn’t want to look like a soap-dodger (a favorite bit of British slang I had co-opted) when I got there, so I better get the sideburns tidied up. I had gotten my hair cut abroad before; in Paris, I just sort of pointed to my head and the stylist figured it out, but French was easier to parse than the accent of my Prestwick barber, who must have asked me if I wanted the worst haircut in Scottish history, to which I enthusiastically nodded yes. I left the shop looking like an Amish kid who got invited to a rock show, sides shaved tight with a stiffened poof on top. Give me a Liverpool jersey and a bacon roll, I thought, and I’ll cease to be a Yank.
The haircut did nothing to help the fact that the rest of me looked like I had been locked outside in a storm. For a month. I was shocked by the image looking back at me when I Facetimed the kids, gullies beneath half-shut eyes and bony cheeks and skin flaking off my forehead. I had transformed myself from an Open aspirant into a golfing vagabond. I’d set out to find my best self and force-fill some sort of void, but I ventured too far over the golfing edge. I looked like a clown from a bankrupt circus, and as I drove toward my afternoon tee time, I felt like one. I was the futility of the useless performer.
Bolstered solely by a waning sense of duty to my itinerary and that poster, I sped toward my final eighteen in Ayrshire, hopeful that I would arrive before Paddy and Scott and Gretchen and might play alone. I’d heard Western Gailes described as the genuine hidden gem of this stretch of Scotland. It was a wild and breathtaking links that Scott and G-Money would claim as their favorite of the trip, but I would never know that for myself.
I jogged out to the first tee at Western Gailes, where the starter told me to slow down and catch my breath; I saw a dozen Americans mulling about that first tee and was desperate to get out in front of them. They let me tee off, and I half sprinted to my ball, knocked it onto the green, and raked in a par. I hit my drive down the second, hurried after it, and found a foursome lining up their putts on the green. On the third tee, I could see that half the golf course was clogged with trolleys and rain suits; there was nowhere for a single to go.
Never quit. No matter if the golf is slow and the rain is sideways. Never, ever give up. If the putts are all lips and you’re running low on bullets—don’t quit. Forget how much you don’t want to be there; millions would trade places with you right now and think themselves the luckiest fools on the planet. You do not quit.
I hopped the fence to my right and walked along train tracks back to the parking lot. The walk back in without pausing to hit a shot felt so much longer than the walk out. I put my clubs in the trunk and laid my wet waterproofs on top of them, and my car passed Paddy’s as I left Western Gailes and quit.
Askernishing
In a small airport on one of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides islands, I listened to the loudspeaker and learned of the role fog played in the lives of traveling islanders. Some days you got off the island, and some days you didn’t. On this day, the clouds were too low for a landing at the Benbecula Airport, where they turned on the lights for the one daily flight, and then shut them off when told the plane wasn’t coming. It wasn’t unusual, I was told, and there was a chance I might be fogged in tomorrow as well, which meant I would miss my Open qualifier altogether. A year ago, I would have expected such news to have me selecting five clubs from my bag and swimming for the mainland, but for some reason, that wasn’t the case now. I sat in the dark airport contemplating my next move. It only took a moment. I knew precisely where I was headed.
I thought this trip had begun with a text from Julian or a phone call with Robert, but when I arrived in South Uist (pronounced Oo-ist, sort of), I remembered that it more likely started six years before, when I read an article in the New Yorker that had sent a lot of golf soul-searchers to this same airport in the Outer Hebrides. David Owen’s “The Ghost Course” told the story of Gordon Irvine, a course consultant who visited South Uist on a fishing excursion and made a courtesy trip to the island’s meager nine-hole golf course. Locals claimed it was a Tom Morris design, pointing to a newspaper clipping in which Old Tom said his South Uist course was “second to none.” The accounts of how Morris got to South Uist and what he would have been doing there were dubious. The place was home to a small pocket of Gaelic-speaking crofters, and it was best known to the world for the whisky cargo ship that wrecked on its shores in 1941 and kept the island drunk for weeks, a history celebrated in a black-and-white classic called Tight Little Island.
The notion that Morris would have had anything to do with South Uist’s cow pasture of a golf course (literally; it was a pasture for livestock) struck Irvine as the stuff of tall island tales. But as he inspected the course, he peeked over the dunes at the southern end and discovered what must have looked like lumps of gold in a muddy pan. Hulking dunes framed overgrown fairways that stretched toward inconspicuous putting surfaces. There was a golf course there, and, judging by the corridors winding through mountains of grassy sand, an extraordinary one at that. Morris had designed the links on South Uist; it had just been misplaced by a few hundred yards.
Irvine and the club chairman, Ralph Thompson, enlisted links virtuoso Martin Ebert’s help in restoring the course, and it opened in 2008 after numerous battles with local farmers (a legacy of the Clearances was the fact that there was nothing so contentious in Scotland as the usage and potential seizure of land). But eighteen years before that, my friend John Garrity discovered the course for himself on a trip to South Uist. He was poking around Scotland on assignment for Sports Illustrated, looking for untold golf stories, and figured a trip to South Uist’s nine-holer would yield some quirky adventure. When he went looking for a tee box at the edge of the course, he likewise discovered the unmistakable markings of a meaty links on the other side of the dunes, and with the grass short enough in May, he decided to go play it.
Like the game’s original golfers, he hunted for passage between the dunes, putting to rabbit holes and finding tees and greens that convinced him Morris had indeed been there, and had done his greatest work on the isle of South Uist. It was John Garrity who dubbed it “The Ghost Course,” and years later he would playfully place it atop his top-fifty list of courses for Golf.com. A phone call reached him in the press tent at the US Open at Oakmont in 2007—it was Ralph Thompson, ecstatic about the top ranking and confused as to how he knew about their golf course when it hadn’t even opened to the public yet. Garrity was confused as well—someone else had found it? And it was being restored? Thompson invited Garrity back to be one of the first to play it. When I arrived myself, I recalled Owen’s story and looked up Garrity’s tale of South Uist, and it occurred to me that I had been looking all over Scotland for golf’s secret, and here might be the game’s last and greatest one, in a place called Askernish.
A direct flight from Glasgow to Benbecula, just north of the Askernish links, made getting there easier than it was in Morris’s day, but I wanted my pilgrimage to feel more earned, to mimic the taxing travels of Old Tom, so I flew into the tiny isle of Ba
rra, a short ferry ride away from South Uist. The flight schedule was contingent on the tides—our fat-tired prop plane was going to land on the sand, the only commercial beach landing in the world. I felt myself earning my Askernish epiphany when the pilot strapped himself into our soda can with wings and turned around with a smile, like he was going to tell us a bedtime story. “Welcome, everyone. You know the routine. Exits are here, there. Weather in Barra is, well, it’s not great. Buckle up, please.” I surmised that there weren’t going to be any pretzels, unless I could fly the plane while he served. Pilots had missed runways before, but it would be hard to miss the whole beach, I told myself as the propellers groaned in my ears.
It was a surprisingly safe and soft landing. Perhaps it was gratitude for surviving my first beach landing, but the rain was cool and soft in Barra, and I felt my Ayrshire hangover washing away. I wasn’t worried about the qualifier or lamenting walking off Western Gailes, nor was I berating myself for the quick good-byes I made that morning as I hurried off to the airport. Sore feet and self-pity felt far behind me now, and everything seemed interesting again. It was the traveler’s revival: I can’t possibly go another foot, but show me something I haven’t seen before and I’m two steps ahead of you.
We walked along a path through the dunes and into an airport terminal so small that it would be impossible to leave one’s bag unattended, and I found the keys to Barra’s rental car waiting for me at a desk. “Just leave the keys in the visor,” I was told by the woman at a café that was surprisingly crowded with people who didn’t look like they were traveling anywhere. The one-room airport doubled as an island hangout, it seemed, with old ladies sharing tea and men in muddy boots sitting and reading the paper. I drove away from the airport without any worries about getting lost; there was essentially one road around the island, so I was confident I would eventually find the little Barra nine-holer I wanted to sample before sailing for South Uist tomorrow. I was struck by the courtesy of all the drivers on the one-lane road; whenever I approached, they graciously pulled over and waved. It might have been island hospitality, or they might have known—Here comes the rental car.