by John McPhee
Rand Jerris, who grew up in northern New Jersey and went to Williams College, was a graduate student in my writing class in 1997. He was an art historian with a lifelong passion for golf, and before long became the director of the museum and archives of the United States Golf Association, in Far Hills. Thirty miles apart, we kept up over the years, and one spring day, in 2007, he invited me to observe with him the U.S. Open Championship, at Oakmont, near Pittsburgh. I had completely quit playing golf fifty years earlier, but I went, gratefully, and with no intention of writing anything until I had been on the scene half an hour and found myself scribbling notes and more notes. Walking the course with Rand was about the same as walking the course with a golf encyclopedia—the setting and the history no less immediate than the fact that Angel Cabrera was outshooting Tiger Woods in the year that Tiger won nearly eleven million dollars on the tour. I wrote a piece calling myself Rip Van Golfer, and in a private thank-you note to Rand said, “No Rand, no Rip.” Four years later, Rand mentioned St. Andrews, where he had never been, and where, in the rotational migration of the British championship, the 2010 Open would be played. If ever there was a scene where setting and history marched side by side with the current event, this was the scene, the backdrop to the victory of a young South African farmer.
Linksland and Bottle
When championship golf courses had no grandstands, spectators came with folding stepladders in order to see over the mass of heads blocking their view. To the U.S. Open at Winged Foot in 1929, a lady in a flapper dress and a wide-brimmed hat brought a bamboo pole and two guys, who held the pole three feet off the ground while she stood on it between them for an unimpeded view of Al Espinosa and Bobby Jones. She kept her balance by placing a hand on each porter’s head.
By 1947, when I was spending the summer caddying in Wisconsin and happened to visit the All-American Open at the Tam O’Shanter Country Club in Niles, Illinois, cardboard periscopes were on sale, and I bought one. Long square columns with angled mirrors, they had become so popular that they gave the compressed galleries an agronomic look, as if they were a growing crop. Through my periscope, I watched Arthur D’Arcy (Bobby) Locke, of South Africa, in his white shoes and plus-fours, tracking long winning putts with his hickory-shafted gooseneck putter. Although I couldn’t actually see him, just his twice-caromed image, he became my instant golfing hero, and he did not disappoint. He went on to win the British Open four times.
I also periscoped Ben Hogan in an early round of the U.S. Open at Merion in 1950, but not long thereafter I abandoned golf in all forms except television, and did not actually go to a tournament until the U.S. Open at Oakmont, in 2007. In the twenty-first century, this is what had become of the periscopes and the stepladders: loaned to the press was a TwitterPod sort of thing called myLeaderboard. It was tied into the United States Golf Association’s central real-time scoring system. You could choose any player in the field and learn what he was doing at any time; you could store certain groups, and the device would follow them. TV screens in countless places—some of them outdoors and in size reminiscent of drive-in movies—gave spectators carrying myLeaderboard the visual assistance necessary for a complete championship experience; myLeaderboard lacked a future, however. Spectators at subsequent U.S. Opens have been commercially encouraged to carry in their hands the four-inch screens of Kangaroo TV, a Canadian company that covers many sports through various on-site feeds and “allows fans attending live events to see and hear all of the action.”
And now, in 2010 at St. Andrews, on the sesquicentennial of the British Open, no one was feeding anything to handheld TV, but neither was the technology of the spectator experience a hundred and fifty years old. For eight pounds sterling, you could buy an “on-course radio” that hung around your neck like a medal while half a dozen commentators described the action through plugs in your ears. On this hallowed Scottish golf course—the Old Course, closely surrounded by five other golf courses—the radio was something like an Acoustiguide in the Victoria and Albert Museum, with the difference that you might not be seeing what you were hearing. While—as described into your ears—a bunker shot beside the fourteenth green made a high tight parabola that stopped within a foot of the flagstick, you would be watching, say, Angel Cabrera driving on the first into the Swilken Burn. “Up and down like an Otis lift!” said Radio Free Fife, whose services were nonetheless valuable.
And pedagogical: “‘British Open’ is an Americanism,” the radio intoned. In Great Britain, yes, it is known simply as the Open, in the way that the Oxford-Cambridge annual eight-oared crew competition is known as the Boat Race, in the way that the apex of American baseball is known as the World Series, and in the way that the revival of Jesus Christ is known as the Resurrection. From Angus to Ayrshire, Fife to Kent, the rota, as it is called, moves currently among nine golf courses. Wars had shut down the championship, and this was actually the hundred-and-thirty-ninth playing of it, the twenty-eighth at St. Andrews, and there was not a lot of dramatic tension in the 2010 Open unless you found it dramatic that a twenty-seven-year-old who had missed three cuts in recent weeks (including the cut at the U.S. Open in Pebble Beach) and ranked fifty-fourth in the world started off as a flash in the pan and then went on flashing and—on the third and fourth days, when he was supposed to go dark—flashed brighter and finished one stroke short of a record set ten years before by Tiger Woods. Leaving far behind the likes of Woods (twenty-third) and Phil Mickelson (forty-eighth), Lodewicus Theodorus Oosthuizen collected a prize of eight hundred and fifty thousand pounds and bought a tractor for his farm in the Western Cape of South Africa, where he was born.
“I won’t talk to them if they call me that.” He answers to Louis now.
After a visit in London, I was joined at St. Andrews before the tournament by Rand Jerris, director of communications and director of the museum and archives of the United States Golf Association, shepherd of the press and post-round interviewer of golfers at U.S. Opens, who had never been to Scotland or seen a British Open. On the evening he arrived, he was so stirred just by being there that we walked the unpopulated course from one end to the other and back in a dense and darkening fog. It is not a long walk—maybe three miles round-trip—because when golf was first played there, on the linksland beside the North Sea, the golfers, speaking Middle English, knocked the ball north to a dunish point over water, then turned around and knocked the ball south on the same path, using the same holes. Grazing animals had eaten away the secondary rough, and there were patches of open sand. The Old Course contains its original self and has evolved at less than Darwinian speed. Jerris is a living textbook of golf and golf-course architecture, and one of the first remarks he made was that he could see Augusta National in that fog. He said that Alister MacKenzie, a Boer War surgeon, English, born in Yorkshire of Scottish parents, had surveyed and mapped the Old Course in the early nineteen-twenties for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. Having dropped surgery, MacKenzie went on to be a golf-course architect and designed, among many courses in the world, Cypress Point, Royal Melbourne, and Augusta National (with Bobby Jones). In this treeless and littoral terrain, the waters beside it did not suggest to me the Savannah River, but Jerris’s concentration was on the swales, hollows, and longitudinal mounds of the fairways.
I had known Jerris since the nineteen-nineties, when he was a graduate student at Princeton. After Williams College, he had entered the Ph.D. program in geology at Duke, but had become uncomfortable in the Duke curriculum and had eventually landed in Princeton’s Ph.D. program in art history. Recently I asked Lincoln Hollister, a Princeton professor of petrology, how many people he thought could bring off such a move. Hollister said, “One.” Jerris wrote his dissertation on sixth-century to tenth-century churches in the Swiss valley of the Engadine. Absorbed from childhood by golf, he also did an art-history paper on golf courses and the picturesque movement in landscape architecture—golf courses fitting landscapes and not altering them. In Scotland, the natural courses c
ome in three main forms: the linksland courses by the sea, the moorland courses everywhere, and the forested parkland courses of the interior, some involving eskers, drumlins, and lateral moraines, but all the result of various glacial effects. In the United States for almost a century land has been shaped with bulldozers to imitate those forms. After we had walked a mile, a grandstand suddenly materialized in a shroud of fog, a uniformed security guard shivering beside it. He told us to be careful if we meant to continue to the far end. The tee and green signage notwithstanding, we could get turned around and lost.
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WE ALSO WALKED THE COURSE, on the second day of play, with the golf historian David Hamilton, a friend of Jerris’s, who lives in St. Andrews and is a member of the R&A, as the Royal and Ancient Golf Club is known to almost everyone in the world who has ever played enough to break 120 and a scattered few who have not. Rory McIlroy, of Northern Ireland, had shot 63 on the first day, writing his name in golf history beside others’ for the lowest score ever made in a major championship. (Johnny Miller’s 63 at Oakmont in the 1973 U.S. Open stands alone as the lowest-ever final-round score by a champion.) Here at St. Andrews, Louis Oosthuizen had begun this Open with a 65, and John Daly, the low American, with a 66. David Hamilton said of Daly that the Scottish galleries really like him, and that Scottish galleries know what they are looking at and are dead silent in the presence of mediocre golf and will have louder applause for strategic high risk—for a certain shot that ends up fifty feet from the flagstick—than for a shot of lower complexity that ends up eighteen inches from the hole. Scottish galleries take to Daly, Hamilton mused, “perhaps because Presbyterians like a sinner.”
He mentioned certain “Presbyterian features” of the course—the Valley of Sin, the Pulpit bunker, the bunker named Hell—pointing them out as we passed them. St. Andrews’s pot bunkers are nothing like the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth—four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater. On the sixteenth, he called attention to a pair of them in mid-fairway, only a yard or two apart, with a mound between them that suggested cartilage. The name of this hazard is the Principal’s Nose. Hamilton told a joke about a local man playing the course, who suffered a seizure at the Principal’s Nose. His playing partner called 999, the U.K. version of 911, and was soon speaking with a person in Bangalore. The playing partner reported the seizure and said that the victim was at the Principal’s Nose bunker on the sixteenth hole on the Old Course at St. Andrews, in Scotland; and Bangalore asked, “Which nostril?”
As the Old Course expanded in the nineteenth century from a single track to a closely paralleled double track, seven of the new pairs of fairways ended in common greens, as they do today. These double greens, each sporting two flagsticks, are even weirder than the pot bunkers. Their cardinal feature is immensity. Putts on them are sometimes described in yards rather than feet. An approach shot blown off course can result in a putt with fifty yards to the hole. Standing beside the expanse shared by the fifth and thirteenth flags, David Hamilton said it was the largest. American football teams could play an exhibition game on this green.
While the greens are outsize, the Old Course, as a unit, is much the opposite. Championship golf courses in the United States typically occupy about a hundred and sixty acres. This ancient links course, with its contiguous fairways and longitudinal economy, fits into a hundred and twenty. It is like a printed circuit with its sibling courses on a linksland peninsula between the estuary of the River Eden and the North Sea. When I was twelve years old, I was so naïve that I thought golf links must be called that because the game was played on a sort of chain of consecutive holes. Jimmy Kahny, also in the eighth grade, introduced me to the term as a result of my telling him that I needed money so I could buy an all-weather basketball and dribble my way to school. He said, “There’s good money at the golf links, caddying.” The good money was one dollar for toting two players’ bags, a service known as doubles eighteen. I got my basketball, but—in those caddying seasons—no hint that links were called links before golf was played. The word comes from Old English and refers to a coastal topography behind a beach, a somewhat dunal and undulating landscape, untillable, under bushes of prickly gorse, scattered heather, and a thin turf of marram and other grasses. Scotland is necklaced by these essentially treeless linkslands, brought up from the deep by the crustal rebounding of a region once depressed by glacial ice, links about as vulnerable to sea surges as Los Angeles is to earthquakes, common grazings good for little else but the invention of public games, where marine whirlwinds could blow out the turf and create ancestral bunkers—for example, Turnberry, Muirfield, Dornoch, Crail, Carnoustie, Prestwick, Royal Troon. Carnoustie, to the north of St. Andrews, was just past the Firth of Tay. “If you can’t see Carnoustie, it’s raining,” David Hamilton said. “If you can see Carnoustie, it’s going to rain.” We could not see Carnoustie. David Hamilton—in moccasins, cotton trousers, a blue shirt, a maroon tie, a beige sweater-vest, and a billed cap that said “The Old Course, St. Andrews Links”—seemed unaware of rain, as befitted the author of Golf—Scotland’s Game (Partick Press, 1998), an attractively written definitive history, amply and informatively illustrated.
Golf links are wherever you call them that. There’s a difference between golf links and links golf. Linksland is where links golf is played. It differs substantially from landlocked, parkland, A to B to C to D golf in this way, among others: it is less linear, and there is greater freedom to select a line from tee to green. For example, on the Old Course players can aim anywhere on the mated fairways. Tiger Woods goes off the first tee to a strategic lie on the eighteenth fairway. Players we watched on the sixteenth were driving up the third to avoid the Principal’s Nose. Never mind the occasional high hedgerows of impenetrable gorse, the rippling hay, the patches of heather; most of this wide and treeless panoramic savannah is a carpet of smooth grass; you could all but use a putter from tee to green. It looks easy until you see John Daly hunting for his ball on the third fairway, which, typifying a links fairway, has the loved-in texture of a rumpled sheet. A ball lost in a fairway! A player has five minutes to locate a lost ball, and Daly and his entourage need it. The third fairway, like nearly every other Old Course fairway, has the pit-and-mound topography of a virgin forest, but it wasn’t made by trees.
Golf-course architecture has tried to imitate linksland in some most unlikely places (Pennsylvania’s Oakmont, on the Appalachian Plateau; California’s so-called Pebble Beach Golf Links, on Salinian granite) and to create parkland so universally that countless acres of artificial biosphere have to be sustained on mined water and synthetic chemicals. Rand Jerris remarked that the U.S.G.A. has embarked on a crusade of “sustainability—more sustainable turf grass, use of less water. The ideal of the lush green course is not so ideal anymore. There’s a trend toward minimalism in golf-course architecture. Courses by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, for example, move as little dirt as possible.” Resonating as this does with the origins of the game itself, golf might do well to get rid of the lush and plush, and go back to the lyrical imprecision of playing over natural country, as the first golfers did on the Old Course, teeing up on wee pyramids of sand and whacking the ball past the sheep toward holes that grew larger by the end of the day. For six hundred years—let alone the Open’s hundred and fifty celebrated this summer—golfers on the Old Course have not been able to see where they are going. Links courses generally are described in the sport as blind—all those dunes and mounds hiding greens from tees and fairways. Going out—away from the university town—the golfers and their caddies use an experiential form of dead reckoning. Turning around, they see a skyline of cathedral spires, crenellated battlement
s, church steeples, and bell towers, and they use them to avoid the invisible bunkers and find the hidden flagsticks on the inward nine.
To one extent or another, an architect can make a simulacrum of all of the above, but what nobody can imitate—you’ve either got it or you haven’t—is wind. Jerris said, “This is not target golf, but more a matter of strategy, choosing your route, so many blind shots. The more you play links golf, the more you understand the subtleties. It takes a lifetime to learn it. Its defense is the wind.” Yesterday, a near absence of wind was the main reason so many golfers scored exceptionally low in Round 1 of this 2010 Open. In the eerie calm and after a night of heavy rain, well-aimed shots would stick like darts in cork. Oosthuizen, his saga scarcely begun, was already seven under par—hitting good, loose shots with his technically flawless swing. Among the A.M. threesomes the average score was 71. The average in the afternoon was 73. The difference was a rising but nonetheless substandard wind.
Now, before Round 2 was half over, winds that had been gusting at thirty miles an hour started running thirty in low gear, gusting to forty and fifty. People in the galleries, ignoring rain, were tilting umbrellas ninety degrees to fend off the wind. In grandstands, they wore umbrellas on their backs like capes. The weather made Jerris happy. He called it “true links conditions.” Lorne Rubenstein, of the Toronto Globe and Mail, the author of This Round’s on Me, once wrote, “The surprise is that so few players, professionals and amateurs, really get it when it comes to playing links golf.” His remark embraced the geometric strategies and all the additional aspects of golf-ball navigation on this trackless green ocean, but it mainly meant coping with the wind. And who might those few players be who really got it? Rubenstein: “Nicklaus, and now Woods, grasp links golf.” If the book goes into another printing, he could be adding Oosthuizen, of whom the English golfer Lee Westwood has said, “He flights the ball very well when it gets windy. Has good penetration on his iron shots, and he has obviously got a lot of bottle.” “Bottle” is English for unflappable demeanor and nerves of steel. According to Jerris, Tom Watson, who grew up in Kansas City, is “a master” in wind, and golfers from Texas have tended to be wind masters, too—Ben Hogan, Ben Crenshaw, Byron Nelson. “They’re good at reading the wind, and at the interaction between wind and topography. A crosswind can put a ball thirty to forty yards off line. Downwind can be even more difficult. Downwind takes spin off the ball. Links golf is more of a ground game than an aerial game like parkland golf. A ball hit lined up with your rear foot has a lower trajectory. The lower they go, the more penetrating the shot is. If they bounce and roll, wind has less effect. If you want to go right or left with the wind, you don’t just leave it to the wind; you apply a fade or a draw, too. Hit a draw up into the wind—a shot that bores into the wind. It’s like tacking. You can tack in three dimensions—distance, trajectory, direction.” Links golf has more than a little in common with regatta sailing. Close hauled. Running before the wind. Jibing over. Luffing. Coming about, hard alee. In irons.