by James Dodson
—
The next day we drove up the Ayrshire coast to Prestwick, where I convinced a hesitant pro-shop attendant to permit us onto the ancient links for a few holes—the day being gray, cold, and windy and the old course where the first twelve British Opens were contested being virtually empty of souls. Prestwick is a good illustration of how the game has outgrown many great golf courses. It’s short (6,740 yards), sweet, and eccentric. The first hole goes off hard by a busy commuter rail track. There are blind holes the likes of which no modern club membership would tolerate. Parking space is nil. The early Opens were played here over twelve rather than eighteen holes. But the place is a monument to the game’s glorious history.
My favorite Prestwick hole is the famous blind par-three fifth, called the Himalayas. A bogey there, I’ve found, is a good score. We played to the fifth hole, achieved bogeys, then stopped and walked back to warm up in the Omega.
We drove up the road to Royal Troon and each had a pint of wallop in the empty members’ bar. I would have loved to take a crack at Royal Troon, a ruggedly difficult layout that has been unusually kind to Americans in the six Open championships the club has hosted. Four were captured by Americans, including Palmer’s brilliant Open title defense in 1962, Tom Weiskopf in ’73, Watson in ’82, and Mark Calcavecchia in ’89. Unfortunately, I hadn’t written ahead to make any arrangements with the club secretary and the afternoon was too cold and blustery for golf anyway.
Next day, we pushed on to Bridge of Wier, where we hooked up with Kate Bennie, my mother-in-law, and her longtime friends Tom and Elizabeth, for lunch at a place called the Fox and Hounds. Kate was making her annual pilgrimage home to Glasgow, and she asked my father if I was behaving properly. “Depends on what your definition of proper is,” he replied. “He’s made the staff at every hotel deliriously happy at the sight of our departure.”
“The boy can be a devil boy,” she said, giving me a look she usually reserves for her fourteen-year-old scholars caught excavating their noses. I wondered if she was still holding a grudge about the window I’d recently knocked out of her house. It was a brilliant sand-wedge shot, fired through the window of her two-hundred-year-old farmhouse from 180 yards across the pond in front. Mum had been reading a book in her favorite chair by the window when the ball crashed through the glass and came miraculously to rest on the table next to her tea. As I’d told her, I’d never come close to hitting a sand wedge that well.
Mum ordered haggis, neeps, and tatties, so I ordered them, too. Despite what you hear in Scotland, nobody on earth really likes haggis—a dish made from sheep guts, dishrags, and old Glasgow daily papers—and I reminded everyone at the table about Chateaubriand’s famous quote about Scottish haggis—I thought it merely smelled like shit until I tasted it.
Tom and Elizabeth laughed, and Mum, heroically suppressing a smile, would have laughed, too, but this would have granted me the haggis high ground, and no self-respecting Scot ever yields the high ground on haggis or any other subject pertaining to civilization as we know it.
The neeps and tatties (turnips and potatoes) were excellent, but the haggis was dry and tasteless, which may have been a culinary break. “The only way to fix a bad haggis,” my mother-in-law rose brilliantly to the moment, “is to order a nice extra sauce made of Drambuie. You drink the sauce and throw out the haggis.” Mum was suddenly in lively spirits, and I asked Tom and Elizabeth if she was behaving properly.
“Well,” said Elizabeth, “she seems to have grown a wee bit more American with each passing year.”
I assured them Mum’s full assimilation was utterly impossible. For one thing, she’d been on American shores for thirty-five years and stubbornly refused to eat peanut butter or charcoal-grilled steak, or to drink Pepsi. She had never watched a Super Bowl, given the finger to an umpire, or voted for a Republican. She was to true American citizenship, I pointed out, what a tropical heat wave is to Olympic bobsledding.
Somehow, the subject got around to golf. Tom suggested that my father and I play a club he was thinking of joining called Ranfurley Castle, with a man named Big Jim Patterson, a “crack player” whom he graciously offered to phone up on our behalf.
My father begged off, saying he needed to rest for Carnoustie, but I was eager to play a match against anybody named Big Jim. Foolish me. The next day, while Dad poked around Glasgow, I played Ranfurley Castle with Big Jim Patterson through a driving mist storm, which Patterson insisted on calling “a nice Scotch mist.”
Patterson was a true Scottish patriot, and a heck of a golfer. As we played up and down the picturesque hilly track, he beat my brains out and talked endlessly about all the swell things Scots had given the world—the steam engine, scotch whiskey, asphalt roads, the Macintosh raincoat (one of those, I kept thinking, sure would be handy), and something about the world’s first self-service restaurant. Even Neil Armstrong, the first man to visit the moon, Big Jim said, was part Scottish—which explained why he’d played golf there.
Struggling to find either my game or my dignity, I decided not to break the news to my host that it was Alan Shepard who played golf on the moon. But I did let slip that I’d heard that Texas has more people claiming to be real Scots than Scotland does, and I idly wondered if there were any truth to the rumor that Scotland used the guillotine two hundred years before the French. I could have pointed out that Scotland also has the highest rates of lung cancer and alcoholism in Europe—not to mention the most statistically unsafe roads. But, hey, who wants to be an ugly American when you’re playing as somebody’s guest?
In the end I found neither my game nor much of my dignity at Ranfurley, though I did scare up a hare big enough to have given Jimmy Carter a lethal coronary. After the proper thrashing, Jim and I shook hands and had a beer to balm the pain and wet down any body parts that had somehow avoided getting soaked in the Scottish mist. Big Jim and Little Jim parted friends, more or less.
“How’d it go?” Dad asked pleasantly as I slogged into the hotel room, dumping my drenched golf bag on the floor. He’d had his feet up for much of the afternoon, browsing an anthology of British poetry he’d picked up somewhere, sipping ginger ale and watching Ricki Lake. A guy who looked as if he couldn’t wait to get offstage to stick a heroin needle in his arm was saying he lived to have sex with overweight women. He was surrounded by overweight women. The audience shouted gleefully at him, and Ricki Lake, leering, announced a commercial break. A perky spot for dish detergent came on. The British send us The Mayor of Casterbridge, I thought, and we send them Ricki Lake. My attention came back to Dad’s question.
“Remember what happened to the English troops at Bannockburn?”
“Think so. The Scots wiped ’em out entirely.”
“Correct. Let’s just say they had an easier afternoon than me.”
—
We went on to Cameron House, by the southern shore of Loch Lomond, to have dinner with Douglas Dagleish and his son Colin. Douglas was president of the Scottish Golf Union and Colin a former Scottish amateur champ and Walker Cupper who now operated a successful golf tour company called Perry Golf, with his Atlanta-based brother Gordon. They brought thousands of Americans like my father and me to Scotland and Ireland every year, pumped us full of good real ale and links golf, and sent us home soggy but contented customers.
The Dagleishes had an interesting family golf story. “None of us played golf till we moved into a house across the street from the course at Helensburgh,” Douglas explained, as we settled into overstuffed chairs near a crackling fire in the drawing room, after supper. I couldn’t recall what we’d just eaten, but it was highly tasty. A waiter brought us all single malt whiskeys.
“The boys were small when they wandered across the street and started to play the game. Next their mother went across the street and took it up. I was forced to go join them finally—just to keep the family together, you realize. My wife became the club champion, the boys went on to become very fine players and attend school in the Sta
tes, and I became captain of the golf club, then president of the county golf association, then the Scottish Golf Union…all because the boys wandered across the street. Most sons follow their fathers into the professions. I followed my sons across the street to an entire new kind of life.”
“That’s a charming story,” Dad said, and began rattling off one of his own about his hopeless efforts to give my mother golf lessons. She’d been playing now forty years and wasn’t any better at it than the first day she swung a club. “But at least she’s very consistent.”
There was much laughter.
My eye kept drifting to the window, my attention drifting, too. A cold autumn night was pressing against the darkened windows, and the shore of Loch Lomond was less than a full wedge shot down the hill.
All this family talk got me thinking about Sam Bennie, my late father-in-law. As a boy, Sam had grown up fishing this end of Loch Lomond with his favorite uncle. On an entrance wall of my home there was a rather mystical-looking framed photograph of Sam, who was called Campbell by his family, taken at about age eighteen, just after the war, standing beside his uncle’s boat, looking at once innocent and canny, on the south shore of the famous lake.
Sam grew up to roam the world. After completing his military service and leaving the Black Watch in the late 1950s, he and Kate emigrated to Canada and then to New York, where Sam, a brilliant electrical engineer, went to work for ITT. A romantic posting to Alaska followed. He worked on the Distant Early Warning System, sometimes called the DEWline, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by now the father of three small kids—Fiona, Alison, and Ian. The family lived in Anchorage and flew a pontoon plane out to a cabin on a wilderness lake on weekends.
Sam and Kate hungered for a bit of Scotland and found it, after an intense search of rural New England, in the highlands of Maine, a village called Harmony, population 800. They purchased a three-hundred-acre farm overlooking sprawling Moosehead Pond and moved into the ramshackle farmhouse one snowy day in March. In summer, the view from the house’s porch eerily recalled Loch Lomond’s southern shore.
I was thinking about the last time Sam came home to the farm, just a few years before. He’d been traveling the world for more than a decade, keeping apartments in places like Dallas, Istanbul, Sri Lanka, and Papua, New Guinea, but always coming home for a few months each year to Kate and the farm. And always for Hogmanay, the Scottish new year.
The family ritual called for tuning the shortwave radio to the BBC live broadcast of Big Ben striking the new year, followed by lots of eating and hopping about to traditional highland reels. When Sam came home for good, Maggie, his first grandchild, was approaching her first birthday. While Maggie was still in her mother’s womb, Sam had nicknamed her Stardust and brought her a collection of stuffed animals plucked from junk stores and jumble sales all over the world. He dubbed this ragtag collection the Stardust Fan Club.
It turned out to be Sam’s last gift. He was gravely ill with throat cancer that final Hogmanay. We’d known this for only a matter of months. In weeks he was gone. One snowy March morning, with the sun coming up over the highlands of Maine, Sam passed away. We were all with him.
Finding myself now by the shores of Loch Lomond made me think of Sam, and that made me think of my own father, and that made me veer off dangerously into the bogs of my own impending sadness. Fortunately, Opti was there to bring me back.
“You all right?” he asked, picking up vibes from my uncharacteristic quietness. The Dagleishes were looking at me, too.
“Yes,” I said. “Just thinking.”
“About golf courses, I should imagine,” said Douglas affectionately. The words rolled off his tongue as if he were an ancient clan chieftain.
“That’s right.”
The Dagleishes gave us a list of their favorite hidden gems of Scottish golf, places off the beaten path where Americans seldom ventured—Boat o’ Garten, Bridge of Allan, Golspie, Tain, Brora, Oban. It was good information to have. I’d actually visited a couple of the courses they mentioned. Douglas described them aptly as “lovely wee places you truly ought to see.”
“By the way, have you ever been to Islay?” asked Colin.
As a matter of fact, I explained, we were thinking of going out to Islay because Kate Bennie’s people, the Sinclairs, hailed from Islay, and she’d sprinkled her father’s ashes on a hill overlooking some golf course out there. He’d worked for the Linen Bank and belonged to an old club in Glasgow called Williamwood. I hoped to check out Williamwood, too.
“The course on Islay is called the Machrie. It’s excellent—very rough and original. Lots of blind holes and complicated terrain. You won’t find much in Britain to compare it to. You must look up my good friend Murdo Macpherson. A complete character. Runs a small hotel and manages the links. He’s kind of a one-man show on Islay. But I saw in yesterday’s Herald that Nick Faldo was just out there. The rumor is he’s out to buy the place.”
“A lovely wee place indeed, that,” rumbled Douglas. “Better go before Nicky gets his hands on it.”
I promised we would try and visit the Machrie, perhaps after St. Andrews. I glanced at Dad and smiled. Would we make it that far? He smiled and nodded. Maybe so.
“I’ll give old Murdo a ring tomorrow,” said Colin.
“So where’s your next stop?” Douglas wanted to know.
“Carnoustie.”
“Ah, Carnoustie.” The name rolled solemnly off his tongue as if it were an oath. His smile broadened again.
“We’re all sons of Carnoustie, you know.”
NINE
The Game Within Us
There were smiles all over Links Parade Road. A woman passed me, led by a prancing boxer dog. She smiled engagingly. The dog glanced up but didn’t smile, although it’s always difficult to tell with a boxer.
“Isn’t it simply the greatest news?” she trilled to me, a stranger with a golf bag slung on his back, which could accurately describe about every third person you met on the street on a mild autumn morning in Carnoustie.
“Yes, ma’am. Long overdue. Congratulations.”
“Thank you very much indeed.”
We passed without even breaking stride. The great news, heralded in the morning edition of The Scotsman, was summarized by the headline “Open to Finally Return to Carnoustie.”
Five British Opens have been decided at Carnoustie, a fairly gray and nondescript village by the Firth of Tay that has probably done more to foster the growth of golf outside of Scotland’s borders than even St. Andrews, its principal rival an hour to the south. One of the great mysteries of recent times, however, was the fact that there had been no Open championship held at Carnoustie (the sternest test in all of Britain, some feel) for two decades.
Such decisions, made by the longbeards of the Royal and Ancient based at St. Andrews, flew in the face of Carnoustie’s evangelical pedigree. Around the turn of the century, a couple hundred of Carnoustie’s sons left their native land to teach golf to the world, effectively becoming the Johnny Appleseeds of the game. A proportionately high number of them settled in America, including Stuart Maiden, who taught the game to Bobby Jones, and the brothers Smith, Willie, Alex, and Macdonald, two of whom (Willie and Alex) became early champions of America’s national open championship. Macdonald Smith, whom Herbert Warren Wind called one of the great ball-strikers of all time, also came within a hair of winning the American championship. Not surprisingly, several of the men who helped found the fledgling United States Golf Association were Carnoustie sons.
Carnoustie’s most famous native son, Tommy Armour, who supposedly once threw his clubs in disgust out the window of a train crossing the Forth Rail Bridge, won the first British Open held in his hometown in 1931, followed by Henry Cotton in ’37, Ben Hogan in ’53, Gary Player in ’68, and Tom Watson in ’75. Each win possessed significance larger than almost anyone could properly fathom at the time.
Armour, blind in one eye from mustard gas in World War I, captured his last m
ajor title here before shoving off to America to become the preeminent teacher of his day, and Cotton, the well-born suave scrambler who elevated the status of lowly club pros everywhere and first advocated pupils hone their swings by hitting against an old car tire, collected his second Open title at a moment when Americans Snead, Nelson, and Sarazen dominated the game and British hopes for a home victory were at an all-time low. His finalround 71, on a day when torrential rains and swirling winds blew most of the other scores over 80, stands as one of the most heroic finishes in Open history. Cotton needed only twenty-six putts to salvage Britain’s pride and earn the adoration of his countrymen.
Ben Hogan’s feat in ’53 came on the heels of his miraculous U.S. Open comeback victory in 1951 but stands mighty in the game’s folklore because of the shot-making clinic the Wee Ice Mon put on before the gallery at Carnoustie. Gene Sarazen persuaded Hogan to enter his first and only British Open that year, and Hogan arrived two weeks early to perform his customary thorough preparation for battle. He practiced with the smaller British ball, studied Carnoustie’s windswept undulations, and concentrated his work on fairway woods and low irons, feeling they would be the key to victory. On the first day, watched by a throng of eight thousand that included singer Frank Sinatra, Hogan fired a 73 in a stiff westerly breeze. He followed up with a 71 on Thursday, ending two shots out of the lead. On Friday morning, he missed the course record 69 by one shot and broke the record that afternoon with a five-under-par 68. It was peerless golf—rounds that got better as the tournament progressed. Carnoustie was the climax of Hogan’s career and possibly the greatest tournament he ever played. He promised the locals he would come back, but he never did, one explanation goes, because he had nothing further to prove.
When Gary Player, who once slept as an unknown on the beach at St. Andrews, came here in ’68, he was a full-blown star in search of his second Open title—and Carnoustie boosted him to the marquee level of a Palmer and Nicklaus. In weather he called “absolute rubbish,” Player held off Billy Casper, Bob Charles, and a charging Nicklaus to capture the Open on a links he called “the toughest course in the world.” No one rushed to dispute the opinion.