The club secretary, Arthur Jones, made my visit a most comfortable one. In the years before the Second World War, the secretaries at most of the leading golf clubs in the United Kingdom were retired military men—fussy old boys who, in spirit, had never left the plains of Luck-now. Some of them are still around, but nowadays they are decidedly in the minority. Arthur Jones is typical of the hospitable, relaxed new breed, although he has a military background. A Gloucestershire man who was a squadron leader in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, Jones got his first taste of golf administration during the occupation of Germany, when he was assigned to run the RAF golf club at Brüggen. He liked the work, and, upon his retirement from the service, in 1957, became the secretary at County Down. Before I went out onto the course to bring it to its knees, Jones and I met in the club bar. (It was early afternoon, and the bar was deserted; in fact, the only interruption was provided by an area representative of the Guinness Company, straight from Central Casting, who came in to check with the bartender on how the new stout-dispensing machine was behaving.) Jones became as nearly rhapsodic as a calm man can when he talked about the course: the rambunctiousness of the terrain, the fineness of the fairway turf, the trueness of the greens. “I’m afraid, though, that you won’t find County Down at its best,” he went on. “We’ve gone three straight weeks without a real rain, and we’ve had to let the grass grow up a bit to keep the greens and fairways from burning out. Too much sun doesn’t agree with our grass: it’s fescue and Poa annua on the greens, Poa annua on the fairways. Some fairways have been burned almost bare in spots, but, oddly enough, the older members seem to like that. They can remember when the course was nothing but sand covered by a thin layer of turf, and that’s how they think a golf course should be—hard as a bone and fast as lightning. Five more sunny, rainless days like this and we will be back to a primeval links.” Jones handed me a scorecard and suggested that since it was such a warm, breezeless day, I might find the course more of a challenge if I played the extreme back tee on the second and ninth holes. He had noted on the scorecard that, with that added yardage, County Down, par 72, would measure 6,952 yards.
I soon discovered that there were a few things Jones had neglected to tell me about the course. To begin with, the fairways are the tightest I have ever seen—only thirty yards wide on the average and at many points less than twenty. Moreover, the rough that edges them graduates within the space of a couple of yards from nice, normal, civilized rough into a dense growth of heather and bracken. On top of this, on several holes the golfer must fly his tee shot over a distant rough-bearded sand hill to reach the start of the fairway. Faced with just such a carry from the back tee on the second hole (where I foolishly took Jones’s tip and passed up the regular tee), I hit the ball so far off line to the right that it almost kicked onto the sandy bathing beach along Dundrum Bay. On the third hole, I hit an even worse push-slice, which may or may not have made the beach—we never did find the ball. While my caddie and I were searching for it, my gaze traveled to the beach and then to the girls lolling on the sand in their Presbyterian bikinis, and I longed to be lolling sensibly on the sand myself instead of fighting a golf course that was patently going to be more than I could handle. Errors of the kind I had been making usually result when one attempts to steer his shots, rather than swinging freely, but, confronted by one stringbean fairway after another and a succession of very small greens, I found it quite impossible to stop trying to steer them. Consequently, my recollection of the first nine holes is blurred, the individual ones all mixed up together in my mind like a stew. Somewhere on that first nine, I can remember, there is an especially dramatic green tucked close to an open-faced sand hill, which towers fifty feet above it; somewhere else, on a long par 4, the second shot must be rifled through a narrow passageway between two massive hummocks; and somewhere else the correct line off the tee on a dogleg par 4 is over a long ridge of gorse studded with bunkers. I managed to play the second nine more creditably, and so was able to appreciate somewhat better the masterly way the linksland’s natural features had been incorporated into the strategic design of the holes—which, when you come right down to it, is what golf architecture is all about. On the final holes, as the long Irish evening came on, rabbits began to appear in great numbers, and the sight of them munching in the rough was strangely soothing.
When I finished my round, I met Jones in the bar. How had I found County Down? My answers came fast. It was the most difficult test of driving I had ever encountered. It was, in fact, the sternest examination in golf I had ever taken. Since it was well beyond my abilities on a comparatively bland day, I could not imagine how even an expert player could cope with it in a ripping wind. “Whenever any of my American friends thinks he’s playing terrific golf, I’d love to fly him straight to this course,” I concluded. “He’d soon find out just how good he was!”
“Yes, it’s a fine test,” Jones said with an easy, consular smile. “I personally think it’s the best course I’ve ever seen. Granted, I could be prejudiced. We get lots of suggestions, however. People are always coming to me and pointing out that if we did x or y it would improve this hole or that hole tremendously. I tend to discount these suggestions. I think that the men who came before us at the club did an awfully good job, and I respect them for it. I think the course is right just as it is.”
I followed the secretary over to a table, where he had a date to play cards with two members, also retired military men—a dapper little colonel in his late seventies and a heavyset captain a few years the colonel’s senior. I didn’t recognize the game, so I declined their invitation to join in. In a break between hands, the old captain asked me what I thought of the fourteenth hole, a 216-yard par 3 that is a waste of sand almost all the way to the green area, where the land falls off quickly toward a small pond on the left, and a stout bunker protects the high, right-hand side of the green. I replied that I thought it a first-rate hole. After all, I had escaped with a 4 there.
“Know what one visitor told me?” the old captain said, laughing heartily. “He said the hole was fit only for the natives.”
This drew long corroborative chuckles and a poke in the ribs from his friend the colonel. A minute or two later, when the colonel had calmed down, he said to the secretary, “Arthur, I have a suggestion to make.”
“Here it comes,” Jones said to me with a wink.
“The fourteenth hole is too damned far from the bar,” the colonel went on. “You should do something about that.”
This in turn broke the old captain up completely.
Jones had thoughtfully asked me to stay on for dinner, but a few hands later I decided that it was time to head for the local hotel, where he had booked a room for me. I retired at ten. Trudging for miles through bracken, gorse, and heather makes a man weary.
This early-to-bed proved to be a wise move, for the next day—the day when I visited the Royal Portrush Golf Club—was a long one. It began with a three-hour drive to the north coast along a route that, bypassing Belfast, ran through Ballynahinch, Ballymena, and Ballymoney. (Bally is the Gaelic word for town.) It was another sunny day, and all along the road portly women in bright-colored sweaters were out walking their dogs. Portrush, like Newcastle, is an old fishing village that has burgeoned into a holiday resort. The links have had a great deal to do with its growth, but for the hardy there is also good ocean bathing, and only seven miles to the east, just offshore, is one of the country’s outstanding tourist attractions—the Giant’s Causeway, a fantastic procession of basalt pillars. The links are about a mile outside town in the direction of the Causeway, with the sea behind them and the clubhouse in front, off the shore road. The clubhouse is an ungraceful white stucco building with the blank stare of a roadhouse, and the secretary, Tom Beveridge, told me that it had been a minor resort hotel before the club acquired it, in 1946. Beveridge, a businessman from Banffshire, in Scotland, who had only recently taken the post at Portrush, showed me around the clubhous
e. Its interior far exceeded my expectations. For example, the locker room, a new addition, proved to be an airy place with commodious wooden lockers, and the washroom and the shower room, faced with yellow and blue tiles, have a bright, Stateside gleam. But what struck me most about the clubhouse was its animated atmosphere. Though this was a weekday, the dining room and the bar were jammed, and there was an appealing low-key cordiality among the members, as if they knew one another well. Portrush is a large club, however, with a total membership of over a thousand, counting the members of a separate club for ladies and of one other affiliate, the Rathmore Golf Club, which, like the Mourne Golf Club, at Newcastle, serves the local residents who cannot afford to join the main club. (In the old days, the Rathmore men and the Mourne men would have been called artisan golfers, but that term is considered to be in poor taste nowadays, and it is customary to refer to them as town golfers and to their club as the town club.)
Portrush’s championship course, which I played in the afternoon, is something like the clubhouse in that there is a lot more to it than first meets the eye. The opening hole is a good par 4 and the second a good par 5, but there is nothing special about them. A short uphill walk takes you to the third tee, and from that high ground a wide vista opens. To the east you can see the Giant’s Causeway; to the north, a group of rocky islets, the Skerries; in the far distance, past the Skerries but easily visible on a clear day, two of the inner Hebrides—Jura and Islay. If you are a golfer, however, the most impressive part of the view is the vast extent of the links themselves, which constitute the largest single tract of golfable duneland in the world—480 undulating acres dominated by three ridges of high sand hills, each parallel to the sea. The land between the ridge nearest the water and the second ridge is a sheltered, swaybacked valley about a quarter of a mile wide. Stretching between the second and third ridges is a higher plateau. Nongolfers who scanned this treeless acreage before it was converted into fairways and greens may well have found it grim and perhaps forbidding, but it is the kind of land that stirs a man with a golfer’s eye, and it quite overwhelmed Harry Colt, the celebrated English golf architect, when the club brought him in, shortly before the First World War, to look things over. At that time, Portrush’s original eighteen holes, completed in 1889 on a flattish strip on the inland side of the third ridge of sand hills, had been only cautiously extended toward the sea here and there. What excited Colt was, of course, the enormous possibilities of the still unused duneland. In reporting to the club officials that there was room enough and more to lay out thirty-six fine holes, he estimated that designing and constructing them would cost about seventeen thousand dollars. (This is about what it costs today to build one good golf hole in the United States.) This proposal was turned down as more than Portrush could afford, whereupon Colt, dismayed at the thought of losing the chance to work with that wonderful terrain, found a way to pare down his figure by several thousand dollars: He volunteered to supervise the construction personally, without pay, if the club would arrange to put him up during this period and to take care of his basic expenses. This was agreeable to the board of governors, and Colt, whose many credits include the Worplesdon and Swinley Forest courses in England, and the New Course at St. Andrews, plus an assist on Pine Valley in New Jersey, got down to work on what many golf critics consider his chef-d’œuvre. He began by routing the opening holes of a championship-length course over the high ground beyond the second ridge of dunes, then swung the course down to the edge of the shore, looped it inland and then out to the shore again, and, finally, brought it back to the high ground. This is the Dunluce course, named after Dunluce Castle, a nearby medieval ruin that overlooks the sea. In the valley between the first and second ridges, Colt built the Valley course. Only 6,207 yards long from the regular tee but extendible to 6,641 yards, the Valley is less exacting than the Dunluce, which measures 6,809 yards, but there is a lot of golf on it. It has marvelous turf, which dries out quickly, and this, combined with its protected position, makes it a particular favorite in winter, when the wet winds prowl in off the ocean. As for the Dunluce, or championship, course, its supreme merit is that golfers of all degrees of skill can play it with equal pleasure; like the Augusta National, it puts the expert on his mettle but does not crush the average player. The fairways have a generous width, and although the holes are separated from one another by dense tangles of gorse, bracken, and wild dwarf rosebushes, the rough directly adjoining the fairways is humane. Besides, there are only thirty-eight bunkers on the course, counting the double bunkers as singles. In my case, which I think might be quite typical, I hit a couple of wayward shots on the opening holes but was given a chance to recover adequately both times. This had the effect of bolstering my confidence—a pretty shaky thing after my assault on County Down—and in no time I was playing “my game,” which means that I was hitting the ball far better than I normally do. This enabled me to see the subtler side of Colt’s handiwork, for the better you are playing, the more Portrush asks you to do. On the first nine, for example, there are two beautifully designed dogleg par 4s on which length off the tee can be a substantial asset, but only if it is controlled length. Similarly, the hazards in the green area tend to be quiescent except when a golfer attempts to play a too ambitious approach to the pin itself instead of settling for the center of the green.
Since the artist, even in golf, frequently goes unappreciated, I found it heartwarming to learn that when Colt unveiled his championship course the club members instantly realized what a superb job he had done. In the British Isles, it is a common practice to give each hole a name as well as a number, and the sixth at Portrush, a 196-yard par 3 that invites a nicely cut-up 4-wood shot or a long iron, was named Harry Colt’s, in honor of the architect. Farther along, there is another memorable short hole, the 211-yard fourteenth. Here the fairway swings off to the left, and the direct line to the pin is over a steep-sided gully of rough that starts just beyond the tee and runs lengthwise almost to the green; a shot that catches the top edge of the downslope usually tumbles all the way to the bottom of the gully, thirty feet below the level of the green. This hole is called Calamity Corner, and more often than not the members use the name rather than the number in referring to it. In our country, some clubs have gone through the motions of bestowing names on individual holes, but if any of them have really caught on I can’t remember them. The trouble is that the names we give our holes are, with few exceptions, either unimaginative or irrelevant. On an American course, Calamity Corner would probably have emerged as Trouble Spot, Ravine, Grand Canyon, or, say, plain Ernest R. Hall, after a wealthy member who once sprained his ankle on the hole when disembarking from his golf cart.
To enjoy a course, a golfer must play it relatively well, for him, and while the acceptable golf I managed to produce was undoubtedly the principal reason I thought so highly of Portrush, a contributing factor should be mentioned: I couldn’t have played in a more pleasant foursome. I was paired with a young university-educated plumber in a four-ball match against a left-hander whose company painted the center stripe down highways and a middle-aged building contractor, a former captain of the club. It is one of the charms of the game that even when you are in a foreign land you can become quickly and honestly at home with your fellow golfers, and by the end of our round I felt that I had known my Irish companions for years. The man who had arranged the foursome was the captain of the club—Robin Wray, a lawyer of about fifty, whose office is in the neighboring town of Coleraine. At golf clubs in the British Isles and on the Continent, two men carry the load: the secretary, who is a paid employee, and the captain, a member who has displayed a sincere and active interest in the club’s welfare. The secretary handles the administrative chores and maintains liaison with the head steward, the professional, and the greenkeeper to see to it that their provinces are in good order. He also works closely with the captain, whose chief concerns are the club’s tournaments and other matters relating to the smooth operation of the golf activ
ities, such as the condition of the course. The captain serves for either one or two years. At the end of his term, he is generally a somewhat poorer man, for it is a definite honor to be appointed or elected to the office, and it carries a few social burdens, among them entertaining the members (at his own expense) at the annual Captain’s Dinner, picking up unreached-for bar checks with genial alacrity, and donating the prizes for the club’s biggest annual competition—the Captain’s Day tournament. For some reason, seven or eight years ago a number of exceptionally well-heeled captains of Irish golf clubs began to engage in a private competition to see who could put up the most lavish Captain’s Prize. Finally, after one grandee had announced that his members would be shooting for a brand-new giant-screen television set, the Golfing Union decided that things had gone too far, and stipulated that thenceforward no Captain’s Prize could exceed $150 in value. The Portrush members I talked with felt that Wray had struck just the right balance the previous year by putting up a set of matched luggage as first prize. A polished, convivial man, Wray had come over from Coleraine at noon to meet me and see me through lunch and the inevitable rounds of drinks that preceded it. A business appointment prevented his playing golf that afternoon, but when our foursome got in he was waiting to take me in hand again. Because the local hotels turned out to be filled up, he was kind enough to invite me to spend the night at his home. Our evening was a full one: more whiskey at the club, of course; home for a restorative stroll through Mrs. Wray’s gardens, which featured an astonishing variety of roses and the biggest pansies I have ever seen; dinner at a restaurant on the shore road, and, subsequently, a stop at the Rathmore clubhouse, filled with friendly young men from the town who welcomed the captain warmly; then back to the Wrays’ for a long discussion of British and American golf, for Wray has twice visited our country and knows our golfing mores well. It was past two when we called it a day. As I headed for my room, Mrs. Wray, carrying coals to Newcastle (County Down), handed me a bedside book, Patrick Campbell’s How to Become a Scratch Golfer, and pointed out one chapter she felt was “super.” Why I read it at that hour I do not know, but I did, and it was super.
The Only Game in Town Page 45