by Tom Coyne
Now I blasted soaring shots from the bottom of my feet, the contact all middle and the cups wide and hungry. I didn’t know which hole I was playing. When you’re Askernishing, you’re playing now; soon enough, you’ll be playing next. As I walked in the shadows of the dunes, my world was a golf course, and I was passing through it in peace. I was walking right. There was nothing uncomfortable about this life, not when you did it properly, and for the first time in all my unsure years, I was sure that I was. Maybe seventy-two holes had given me island fever and forced a softened head into accidental epiphany, but as I folded my fourth scorecard of the day into my pocket and looked out at the light going purple along wavy edges of sand, I knew my Askernish state of mind was no accident.
The course was not forced or orchestrated; rather, it was waiting there to be enjoyed. It wasn’t worried about what it was or was not, about where it had been or where it was headed. When I lived my own life that way, it was all answers, and I slept like a child.
So for all my restlessness and roving, I found that the answer was to be present.
Try it.
Present
It takes practice.
Alan is waiting for me in the parking lot. It feels like years since I last saw him, my friend who had played nearly every course in Scotland and joined us at Glen back in North Berwick, but it’s no surprise that he’s kept his promise to caddie for me in the qualifier. With a thick white beard and the sturdy shape of a Scotsman who doesn’t pass on a bacon roll, Alan has a fullness to him that, after months traveling its every corner, looks like Scotland to me. Stout, steady, and unbothered—I’m lucky to have him with me. It’s a morning I’ve dreamt of for years, and I had expected to be too nervous to warm up and to spend the hour before my 11:34 tee time in the bathroom trying to decide if I needed to sit or kneel. I feel the nerves—my hands and feet are numb with them—but it’s not fear as much as it is anticipation. On my drive in, I pulled over to snap a picture of the parking sign for OPEN QUALIFYING on a placard of that distinctive Open gold I knew from the tournament’s scoreboard, and now I photograph the tee markers stamped with the Claret Jug, not worried about looking like a spectator rather than a participant. On the practice tee, I hit a few dozen wedges and 6-irons and drivers off the heart of the clubface, and then we walk to the tee box, where I’m given a sticker with the number 20 on it in British Open font. I stick it on my bag, officially a participant in Game 20. I put an R&A pitch mark tool in my pocket and take a handful of R&A tees, and in a moment I hear, “From the United States, Tom Coyne.”
Nobody applauds. Nary a U-S-A! chant to be heard. There are just a few of us standing around the tee box, and I’m paired with two journeyman pros from London and Edinburgh who have played this qualifier a half dozen times. They know Bruntsfield well, while I missed my practice round the day before. I missed my tee time at the final rota course, Musselburgh, as well.
Three months before, coming up short by one on my checklist of Open venues would have seemed unforgivable, especially when the miss is a course as seminal as Musselburgh, the Guinness Book of World Records designee as oldest golf course on the planet. Its holes were once shared by some of golf’s original clubs, the Honourable Company, Royal Burgess, Royal Musselburgh, and Bruntsfield all playing there before outgrowing the seven-holer stretched to nine situated within a horse track. (Next time you curl a putt off the lip, exclaim Musselburgh!; the hole-cutter was invented there, and the diminutive dimensions of its greenskeeper’s apparatus were adopted as the standard for cup width in 1893.) Skipping Musselburgh seemed antithetical to this entire endeavor, and the idea of playing 109 rounds in preparation for the qualifier and then not even showing up for a practice round on the host track would have made me sick with failure. But it was not a failure. It was fog.
Two days before on South Uist, I left a dark airport after having not traveled anywhere and was forced to put my Askernish epiphany to use. Unless the forecast changed for tomorrow, the flight off the island might be canceled again, and I might miss the qualifier altogether. Three years of my life, lost in the mist.
I considered whom I might call to complain, then briefly contemplated the cost and logistics of commandeering a mackerel boat. And then I decided to settle into my circumstances. Fogged in? Hard lines, I thought. If I missed the qualifier at Bruntsfield, it wasn’t my doing. What was my doing was getting on with now, which meant asking the rental company to bring that car back and calling the hotel for an extra night. It meant not worrying whether the tee sheet was crowded back at the course I was supposed to play that afternoon, because it never was at Askernish.
The skies cleared and I got off the island the next morning and cruised from Glasgow over to Edinburgh and collected the keys to a carefully researched rental beside the Bruntsfield Links. As I circled the block wondering when the golf course would appear, I felt like Harry Potter searching for platform 9 and 3/4, unsure how they had squeezed eighteen holes between a pub and an alleyway. The signs said Bruntsfield Links, but all I found was a small park covered with the short flags of a pitch ’n’ putt. I certainly wouldn’t need my driver tomorrow, I thought, and wondered if those folks at the R&A who’d accepted my application months before were having a laugh, and if tomorrow morning a handful of smartly dressed American golfers would be standing in the middle of a city park as caddies wiped away our tears.
My landlord did have a laugh on the phone when I asked her if the Bruntsfield Golf Club was next door—as it turned out, my apartment would have been teeside accommodation if only I were playing a qualifier in 1815 instead of 2015. The Bruntsfield golfers had moved a hundred years ago to a layout some twenty minutes away, though the name of the grassy space they formerly occupied remained the Bruntsfield Links (same for the Leith Links, now a park a few miles north). Between the fog and the treachery of Google Maps, Scotland was not making my final round a simple one, which seemed entirely appropriate.
I’d adjusted my alarm clock for an earlier wake-up—no walking to the course, it seemed—and on the first tee, I’m relaxed. I make a good swing on the opener, my drive running into the edge of the right rough. I knock a 5-iron short of the green, chip up to six feet, and I’m even par in a qualifier for the Open Championship when that putt drops in. I don’t recall seeing the line or making the stroke; I give all credit to the ball marker Alan gave me on the first tee, a gold US dollar. “Some luck from home,” he told me, and I do feel lucky, even though my limbs feel foreign and I seem to be watching Bruntsfield through someone else’s eyes. I’m not sure who this person is who’s walking toward a tee box with driver in hand, but I hope like hell he’s a stick.
I’m blind to my playing partners and unavailable to distraction. I hand over my scorecard to Alan and ask him to keep the tallies; I want to think of nothing but the next shot, focused and fixed in my present endeavor. I would have done well to soften my concentration a smidge, just enough to notice that my partners, who had each played a practice round, are swinging irons on number two. My drive finds the trees down the right, and I’m in a territory I haven’t seen in my two months of a links-only diet—limbs and leaves between me and the flag. I go for the green and clip a branch, and my ball scrambles into a fairway bunker, cozying up against the lip.
“They’re supposed to be ninety percent air,” I tell Alan.
“What are?”
“Trees. We say that at home. Trees are ninety percent air.”
“Aye,” he says. “And so is a screen door.”
I splash out short of the green, chip well past the hole, and take three strokes to bury my ball, the last of which feels as steady as an old man trying to sip an overfilled cup of tea. My round is racing, and as I pick my ball out of the hole, unable to comprehend triple bogey, I’m unwilling to accept that in the round meant to top so many rounds, I’m three over after two. I’ve taken two of the most spectacular months of my life and, in twelve minutes, turned them into sheep shit. This isn’t how this is supposed to end. G
olf has gotten this all terribly wrong.
I don’t hear Penn’s voice. Instead, I hear my high school football coach blasting Penn’s advice, shouting into my ear as I lay in the August mud. Don’t quit.
It’s all I have. All the swing thoughts and scorecards, all the angles and notebooks, all the lessons and wisdom—don’t quit is all I can do. It’s not an act of courage. If it is, then courage tastes like vomit crawling up your throat. It’s an act of get-on-with-it. Scotland has taught me that there is always, always the next hole. And my caddie is waiting for me there.
I three-putt two more times before I recall that the goal of golf is to put the ball in the hole, and that my putter’s primary function is to assist me in doing so. I wait until the fifth, perhaps the hardest hole yet at 205 yards with a mess of trees and overgrowth guarding the right side of the green, to card another par. Both my partners make bogeys, one of them in spectacular fashion: After hitting into the mess on the right, Calum from Royal Musselburgh hits his provisional tee ball to a foot. It’s the first time in all my golfing life when a partner demands that nobody look for his ball, even barking, Please, do not find it! at one of the spectators following our group. The guy in green wellies can’t understand what he’s doing wrong, unaware that if he found the ball in the bushes, Calum would have to play it, and bogey from that junk was no guarantee. I’ve played with a lot of ball-bashing pros, tight dots worn into the centers of all their 6-irons, but this request to not look for a golf ball makes me feel the presence of a true professional. Calum is not quite six feet tall but is sneaky long, with the edge of a young man who plays for his supper and isn’t impressed by the Open tee markers or the fancy scoreboard; this is his workplace, and he practices his trade with rote and tidy discipline. He taps in for bogey and leaves his other ball to mystery. Total pro move.
I’m exuberantly over par, but I have the honor on the sixth tee. It doesn’t last, as I fail to get up and down, but it feels good to go first, and after a smattering of bogeys and pars, I’m going first again on fourteen after making a birdie three on the previous hole, a 455-yard uphill par 4 and the toughest offering on the card. From the fairway, I can tell my ball is close on the green up above, and Calum asks me if I hit six. I tell him I did.
“Damn. I hit seven,” he says, lamenting his approach, which failed to reach the crest of the green, and for a moment we’re colleagues on a smoke break, commiserating about our daily grind. Alan tells me that last year’s medalist at this qualifier was watching from an adjacent tee box as I dropped my ten-footer for a rare birdie on thirteen.
“He must have been wondering who that player is,” he says.
I smile. “Him and me both.”
I’m even par on the back nine, and a few spectators have joined our group. An old man with a rolled-up copy of the Scotsman under his arm has been following us since the second hole. Alan tells me they had a chat and that the man had read the story in the paper that morning about my long Scottish round coming to an end at Bruntsfield that afternoon. I never get a chance to say hello to him myself, though I nearly kill him on seventeen when I step up to the tee, still holding the honor, and blaze one off the butt of my driver.
As a trick shot, the effort is outstanding—the ball nearly shoots between my own legs. But as a drive on a long par 4, it’s shit, and dangerously so. The elderly man doesn’t move as the ball zips past his feet thirty yards behind me, where he presumed he was standing in a safe position. His expression is blank. He just backs up and doesn’t look at me. I want him to laugh or smile or pat me on the back as I pass, shout me some encouragement about golf being a brutal game that gets us all, but his nonreaction burns. It reminds me that this is serious business, and that my shot was not serious at all. He’s probably just thinking about what he wants for dinner, but in my head, I’ve shamed this man’s homeland and its game. I hack my ball up to the fairway, embarrassed that the newspaper under his arm has column inches about me but nothing about the real players here battling for one of the seven spots out of ninety-six players. Well, ninety-five, really. The Yank here is just having a laugh.
And a few minutes later, I am. In my gut, I’m shaking with laughter. I could finish this round on hands and knees, nudging my ball across Bruntsfield with my forehead, and I would stand up and smile and feel something that not even the medalist that afternoon would know. His 66 was a rare number, and five under was strange math to me, but in my life’s best rounds, on the days when the game felt easy and the course was tilted into the cups, I never felt this.
Six months earlier, back in my shoe box of an office in our row house in Philadelphia, Scottish golf books covering the floor, dolls and My Little Ponies covering the golf books, I stared at a map full of pins without an idea of what they held, knowing only one thing about my plan: I couldn’t do it. I had played two rounds in one day less than five times in my forty years; to do it every day, and add an extra round to some of them, was folly. I would do my best and collect some stories and play a lot of golf; when I came up short, I would want to make sure I had good cause, so I stuffed that map with dates and tee times and wondered which was the pin where it would end. So no wonder that I’m smiling on eighteen at Bruntsfield, where my final drive bounds down the center of the fairway and where I pinch a 9-iron to twenty feet. In front of a small gallery, my birdie putt rolls past the edge by the width of a ball, and I tap in for a final par. In the scorer’s trailer, while Calum shakes his head at missing the cut by two shots, I don’t know whether I should leap or cry or call home. I’m stuffed with this newly acquired emotion, the one I felt at Askernish two days before when I said good-bye to Robert and played on into the dusk. I didn’t think I cared for feelings, unsteady and inaccurate as they often were, but this one seems to work; it fills me up. It feels genuine. It feels like plenty.
Scott is there at the eighteenth to snap pictures of my final putt at Bruntsfield, and I hardly recognize myself in that image of me standing over the ball—the missing paunch, the solid posture, the white belt I’d just bought so that I would look like a player—and I do look like a player, just like one of the gang. And more important, as we leave the course that afternoon, I feel like one, too. A nine-over score of 80 is not going to nab me any equipment deals, but it puts me in the company of a few other pros who have them. Not everybody shoots 66 that afternoon, and while I wish one of my low rounds had moved from May to the end of June, I leave feeling my Game 20 sticker was earned. I had even bested Scott by a few strokes, though I wish he would have made it through. I genuinely wished well for a friend and a fellow competitor—how novel—though I’m happy to know dinner is on him.
While the original course at Bruntsfield was gone, replaced by a thirty-six-hole pitch ’n’ putt course, I did notice that its clubhouse remained. So when Scott asks where we’re going for our celebratory dinner, I know precisely where we’re headed.
Dating to 1456, the Golf Tavern in Edinburgh claims status as the oldest clubhouse in the world. Before golf clubs had proper clubhouses, the Golf Tavern—then the Golf Hotel—was used by the Bruntsfield golfers for socializing before the adjoining fields became overrun by traveling fairs and grazing herds and they had to move out to Musselburgh. (Ardglass in Northern Ireland might take issue with their claim to clubhouse fame—the Ardglass castle-turned-clubhouse dates to 1405, but as a clubhouse that was actually utilized by golfers, the Tavern might have the longer tenure.) The Tavern is as dark and cozy a watering hole as one will find in the UK, a room of walnut and leather with horse racing on flatscreens and a sleek menu, the ideal setting for our last supper of haggis balls and a burger topped with a fried biscuit of mac and cheese (I shall commence restoring my belly overhang immediately).
Dinner is mostly quiet, but not unhappy. We’re deflating from five hours of focus and three hundred minutes of consequence. Besides, there isn’t much left to say. Scott and I have seen it, and we seem to lack the energy to try to recap today and all the days before. I feel strangely im
mobile sitting there, unsure what to do with myself. There is no more golf to play, no more tee times to chase. The world henceforth will feel strange without a golf club in my hand. I feel lighter without my bag and thirty pounds of Moose Tracks under my belt, but I feel stuck, unsure of my next move. I guess I go pack; maybe watch some TV. I suppose I go home and kiss my girls and go be a dad and a husband with things to think about other than the next shot. I’m not sure how I’ll do that, but I’ll try it, and take each moment as it comes. As we exhume ourselves from our chairs, Scott smiles and asks me, now that it’s over, if I found what I was looking for.
I notice a barrelful of old golf clubs by the door of the pub on our way out, presumably for folks who fancy a few holes in the park across the street. Some college students are chipping their balls around the field when we step out of the tavern and into the light, and we go to our cars and bro-hug our good-byes. I know I’ll see Scott soon. Florida friends are easier to keep in touch with than others. He gets into his car and pulls away, while I sit in mine for a moment. I open the door and get out, walk around to the back, and, while I hadn’t expected I would touch the grip end of these clubs again for many a month, I slide out my wedge and my putter and walk across the street.