by John McPhee
Phil Mickelson, the 2010 Masters champion, understands links golf perhaps better than he plays it. It is just a matter of “taking more club and swinging easier,” he said in a pre-Open press interview. He finished tied for forty-eighth. Easy doesn’t always do it. Against a stiff wind, you might have to punch hard—a shorter backswing, a shorter follow-through, delofting your club for a lower flight. On the seventh at Pebble Beach, a very short par 3, players have hit 5-irons that would splash in the Pacific if the wind did not blow the ball back. They use, in other words, a hundred-and-ninety-yard club for a hundred-and-ten-yard hole.
Radio Free Fife: “How many pins have the players aimed at this week?”
“Dead aim?”
“Yes.”
“None.”
Where on earth are these guys?
Jerris: “In a trailer somewhere on the course, monitoring their feeds.”
Wind affects putts, too—crosswinds blow them off line, gusts from behind can fatally accelerate a roll downhill. Westwood again: “Everybody thinks when the wind blows it affects the long game most, but it doesn’t. It tends to affect the putting the most. The putter is getting blown all over the place, and the ball gets hit by the wind.” When the force of the wind reaches forty miles an hour and more, balls that have come to rest on greens may move on their own. The wind putts them. More often the motion is no more than an oscillation. A golfer prepares to putt, and his ball wobbles back and forth as if the earth beneath it were quaking. When balls move on greens, play is suspended, and the several dozen playing players leave the course, to return to their exact positions at some unpredictable time. In this second round of the Open, play was suspended for sixty-five minutes in the early afternoon, but Jerris and I and David Hamilton had already suspended ourselves and were lunching in St. Rule, one of the two women’s golf clubs that play on the Old Course.
* * *
ST. RULE is on the public street beside the eighteenth green and fairway—on one side, two hundred and fifty yards of contiguous shops, the houses of clubs like St. Rule, and private homes. Unpaying galleries collect on the street to watch golfers finishing their rounds and others, beyond them, hitting off the first tee. This inboard extremity of the Old Course is a world-class cliché in golfing scenes, likely to be on calendars in McMurdo Sound, which makes it no less impressive—the double fairway three hundred and eighty feet wide, the university buildings, and the Royal and Ancient clubhouse like a monopoly token made over time by six architects working in six idioms and finding the offspring of a moated Highland villa and a Florentine castle.
From upstairs bay windows, ladies of St. Rule are watching, too, decorously yielding the view to one another, while members of the St. Andrews Golf Club, all male and in their own bay window a few doors along the fairway, are marginally less yielding. The golf course under these windows belongs to the town and not to any of the golfing clubs, including the Royal and Ancient one. In Scotland, there are relatively few private courses, and few golfing clubs with clubhouses, but every factory, church, hospital, bank, and insurance company has a golf club without a course, and pays green fees at municipal courses. Among the thousands of “club without clubhouse” golfing societies was the one David Hamilton’s father—a “minister of religion”—belonged to in Glasgow. Ministers’ Monday consisted wholly of clergy who met on Mondays where “they could talk golf and swear.” The name of David’s wife, Jean Hamilton—a slender, supple athlete with quick dark eyes—was up on a wall of St. Rule as a champion, as were, for example, “Lady Baird-Hay, 1896,” and “Lady Anstruther, 1898.” Also, Jean belongs to St. Regulus, and she explained the difference: “St. Rule is a ladies’ club with a golfing component; St. Regulus members are scratch golfers.” Offhandedly, her husband added, “The ladies’ clubs are not clamoring for male members.”
The University of St. Andrews, brooding above those terminal fairways, is led by a principal whose accession to office has traditionally been accompanied by an automatic membership in the Royal and Ancient Golf Club. In 2009, Louise Richardson became the principal of the University of St. Andrews, the first of her gender, and to date she is not a member of the R&A. David Hamilton kindly showed us through the place, with its varieties of panelled hardwood and its central social Big Room full of deep-leather comfort and—through multipaned windows—a floor-to-ceiling view of the course. In a philosophically Scottish manner, the Big Room doubles as a locker room. Actual panelled-wood lockers line the walls. The place is a form of nude bar, a sanctuary for the nude member. The professional golfers are said to dress in an R&A basement locker room, but they don’t. After their rounds, they leave in spikes and go back to their hotels and bed-and-breakfasts. Phil Mickelson leaves in spikes. Louise Richardson does not even arrive in spikes. Born in Ireland, she is a Harvard Ph.D. who was also a Harvard professor before her move to St. Andrews. Her field is political science, and her expertise is in, among other things, terrorism. She plays about as much golf as the Statue of Liberty does. But a tradition is a tradition, an honor can be honorific, and a principle is a principle is a principal.
In real-property terms, the R&A is just an ungainly house on a fragment of an acre between the university and the municipal golf courses, but the R&A is source, arbiter, and guardian of most of the rules of golf, keeper of the political science of golf, and it could use some help. For nearly sixty years, it has shared its world hegemony with the United States Golf Association. No major rule on either side has differed since the R&A gave up the small ball, in 1990. It was about 3.6 per cent smaller than the American ball, and behaved like a bullet in the wind.
Of the three alpha-level all-male clubs in St. Andrews, the two others are the New Golf Club and the St. Andrews Golf Club. Not to put too fine an edge on it, there is class stratigraphy in these organizations. Read up from the St. Andrews Golf Club, which, in a local vulgate, is called the Artisans. Jack Nicklaus is an honorary member. The New Club embraces the middle class. The R&A is a club of “gentlemen.” It has two thousand four hundred members, that fine an edge.
We looked in at the Artisans, a four-story hubbub of men holding pints. At the bottom of its atrial stairwell, a sign on the newel post said, “Members are reminded that the Snooker Room is closed until 19 July.” David Hamilton said he was a member of the Artisans as well as of the R&A, and he described the Artisans as most populous on Thursdays, because it is the club of shopkeepers, and shopkeepers historically have been busy on Saturdays and off on Thursday afternoons.
I said, incredulously, “You’re a shopkeeper?”
He said, “I have a printing shop.”
Off we went for coffee and to see his printing shop at his house on North Street in the middle of town. In a stone shed between house and garden were two hot-metal presses, gleaming with mechanical health in a cluttered space more suitable for potting. In racks overhead were upwards of fifty hickory-shafted golf clubs. This was Partick Press, where he prints what he calls his “short, arcane things.” For example? “A poem on student golf.” When Partick published Golf—Scotland’s Game, in 1998, it was printed in Edinburgh. “All the various studies were headed toward a big book,” he said. “I wanted complete control, so I published it myself.”
Most people in David Hamilton’s profession prefer complete control. He was teaching medicine at Oxford in the nineteen-eighties when he followed an avocational interest and “took instruction in letterpress.” He and Jean had little money, and to finance this two-year “sabbatical” from his work in Glasgow they went for a fortnight every couple of months to Baghdad, where he performed kidney transplants for Iraqis. In the United Kingdom, he was an early practitioner of organ-transplant surgery, the author of classic papers in medical journals. He has written a book called A History of Organ Transplantation (2012). His other books include The Healers: A History of Medicine in Scotland (1981) and The Monkey Gland Affair (1986), which cast something heavier than heavy doubt on the claims of a Russian surgeon to have restored erectile fu
nction in humans by implanting tissue from the testicles of monkeys.
Remarking on his years in Oxford, he said, “It was a midlife escapade. They regarded me as an amiable eccentric.” He was a six-handicap golfer, and back in Glasgow he became an occasional champion of the Western Infirmary Golf Club. Retired from surgery since 2004, he teaches each year about a hundred and fifty future doctors as a lecturer in medicine at the University of St. Andrews.
I asked, “Are they all undergraduates?”
“We say ‘students’ in Scotland,” he replied. “They say ‘undergraduates’ in England.”
On the way to his house, we had passed a university door on which block lettering said in gold: “STUDENT EXPERIENCE OFFICE.”
We had dinner at the New Golf Club with David and Jean Hamilton as guests of their friends and neighbors David and Ruth Malcolm. A St. Andrews native with auld Scotland in his ruddy face and pure Fife in his lilting voice, David Malcolm is the co-author (with Peter E. Crabtree) of Tom Morris of St. Andrews: The Colossus of Golf 1821–1908 (2008). The book is not only a biography of the caddie-player-greenkeeper-clubmaker who was the sport’s most famous figure in the nineteenth century but also, as wider history, the peer of David Hamilton’s Golf—Scotland’s Game. There is a society in St. Andrews called the Literati of the Links whose members meet now and again to talk golf history and discuss one another’s monographs. The two Davids are Literati. At Prestwick, in Ayrshire, Tom Morris won four Opens. Tiger Woods has won three. Tom Morris became Old Tom Morris after his son Tom Morris won four more. In a hundred and fifty years, twenty-two Scottish golfers have won the Open—three since the First World War. This nostalgic macaroon is more than enough to set David Hamilton onto what he calls “the golfing diaspora” of Scottish professional golfers, immigrating a century ago to the United States and Canada. In his words, “It was a black hole in professional golf in Britain. The sudden decline in Open champions was because young men were leaving Scotland in huge numbers. In Scotland, they were working class, treated as inferiors. Working-class kids from Carnoustie and St. Andrews would be immediately pigeonholed in England, but not in North America. In America, they may have been gruff and taciturn, but they were classy.” The Morrises remained autochthonous. In 1902, Old Tom Morris helped found the New Golf Club, on the third floor of which we were dining by windows overlooking the Old Course. In 1908, Old Tom fell down the New Club stairway and did not survive.
Play had resumed, but the wind had not much subsided. If the MetLife blimp were to take off here and now, it would soon be in Yorkshire. Blimps and Scotland are contradictions in terms. The BBC looks down on the golfers from Guinness-record cherry pickers. Even our own altitude, in the New Golf Club dining room, was enough to make particularly evident the contrast between the two sides of the planet’s widest fairway. Below us, the eighteenth-hole side was wrinkled with mounds and deep hollows, including the Valley of Sin—the depressed apron of the eighteenth green, something like a large deep bunker full of sod. The eighteenth side, like nearly all of the Old Course, was an image of its former self—ancestral linksland topography. Beyond the eighteenth and down the eastern side—below the first tee—was a sweep of ground unnaturally smooth. David Malcolm explained that it was “reclaimed” land. Hulls of old herring boats, loaded up with rock, had been positioned there to anchor new ground filled in around them. The project had also roofed a sewer, he said, that ran out from the town. When the sewer flooded, armies of large rats ran into the R&A.
After dinner, in the all but endless summer daylight, Jerris and I return to the course, and to the wind-chilled grandstand over the seventeenth tee, one of three fixed positions from which we have decided to watch things from day to day unfold, another being above the seventeenth green. In the defenseless calm of the first round, as various players have remarked, all but one hole was easy; the seventeenth was, as ever, “impossible.” A dogleg par 4 newly stretched to four hundred and ninety-five yards, it presents an arresting scenario. The tee shot is completely blind and eliminates the bend by going over a large, elongate shed. The golfers confront its north-facing wall and aim across a sign above which nothing is visible but sky. The sign says:
OLD COURSE HOTEL
St. Andrews
Golf Resort & Spa
The shed is a part of the grand hotel, and close on the right are a great many guest-room windows. To the left of the sign is a lion rampant. A pusillanimous shot is a drive hit over the lion rampant. Wind heavily influences the selection of vector, but, generally speaking, a reasonable choice is over the “O” in OLD, and there is high risk and big money in the “O” in HOTEL.
The fairway is scarcely fifteen yards wide at its narrowest. In Jerris’s words, “You are hitting over out of bounds to a fairway you can’t see. The fairway is a right-hand dogleg fade, but if you fade it too much”—as you influence the ball to curl to the right—“you are back on the tee hitting 3.” Psychologically unbalanced by this possibility, golfers “get quick,” roll their hands as they swing, close the club face, and send the ball into too big a draw to the left and into hay that is less suitable for rough than for harvest. Brute strength is needed to get out and reach the green. After Angel Cabrera hits his second shot to some other destination, hay is hanging from his follow-through like Spanish moss. The longest successful drive we see on seventeen is by the American sinner John Daly, wearing slacks meant to resemble the skin of a red-and-black tiger. Daly won the Open at St. Andrews in 1995, ballooned in weight in subsequent years, did some rehab, and now has an implanted turnbuckle around the upper end of his stomach, like a great cormorant on the Yangtze River.
Because an asphalt thoroughfare runs beside the green and some of the fairway, the seventeenth is known as the Road Hole. Small and narrow and shaped like a kidney, the green is one of the four on the Old Course that have only one flagstick. The celebrated Road Hole bunker—straight-walled, cylindrical, five feet deep—fits so snugly into the kidney’s indentation that it can virtually be regarded as a bunker in the middle of a green. From the grandstand above the green, the wider view right to left a hundred and eighty degrees is of the crowds on the public street, the eighteenth green, the university, the R&A clubhouse, the media’s big white tent, the North Sea rolling toward the beach where the British runners ran in the film classic Chariots of Fire, the coast across the water on its way to Dundee, and the shed that makes this hole the blindest on the course. Players on the tee are as invisible to us as we are to them, so we don’t see them hitting. Balls just appear on the fairway, seemingly out of nowhere, or they disappear elsewhere, while we stare at the old shed in anticipation of the players who will come around it next, like scouts coming over a ridge.
A yellow golf ball appears. I ask Jerris whose it might be.
“Hirofumi Miyase’s,” he says.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because he’s playing with Steven Tiley, and there’s no way an Englishman is going to use a yellow ball.”
This is the third round now, and the flag is out straight in the stiff wind. Henrik Stenson, seven under coming into seventeen and tied for the best score of the day, gets into the Road Hole bunker, is compelled by his lie to come out in an ersatz direction, and is no longer tied for the best score of the day. The pin is positioned close to the road, with short steep rough and a cinder path between, and a few feet behind the road is a stone wall that would not look amiss in New England. Watching bogey after double bogey, we see errant balls bump-and-running beside the green and going up against the wall, or bouncing on the asphalt and over the wall. “The wall on seventeen is an immovable obstruction from which you don’t get relief,” Jerris says. “It is not a T.I.O.—a temporary immovable obstruction, like a TV tower or a grandstand. At this stone wall, there’s no relief.”
Comes Mickelson and he is over the road and close to the wall with room barely for a short swing. He smacks a great shot against the short, steep greenside rough; the ball pops up, continues,
and comes to rest near the hole. In Southern California, behind the house he grew up in, Mickelson’s parents installed a golf green with a short-game practice area in the way that other people install swimming pools. But he misses this putt and is down in bogey five. Miguel Ángel Jiménez will soon appear, and go so close to the wall that he has no open swing whatever, so he punches the shot straight into the stone wall, and it ends up behind him on the green.