by James Dodson
Baird paused, took another breath, and peered at us somewhat skeptically. “I can go on for hours and hours about this stuff. Are you sure you’re up for it?”
I nodded. “Fascinating,” said my father.
Archie Baird, former R.A.F. fighter pilot, retired fourth-generation small-animal vet, golf collector par excellence, and Muirfield’s redoubtable archivist, gave us a small proprietary grin. I’d heard about Archie and his dog Niblick for years from friends and always intended to look them up. Among other things, Baird’s wife Sheila’s great-grandfather was Willie Park, the famous club-maker who won the first British Open at Prestwick the year before the outbreak of the American Civil War. But more interesting to me was the fact that Baird operated the best private golf museum in the world.
Archie was a ruggedly fit seventy-year-old with rawly barbered hair and a brisk no-nonsense manner. Niblick was a small wiry-haired Border terrier whose face uncannily resembled Clement Atlee’s, the former prime minister. We were standing in Archie’s little museum, a small, damp, chilly room of artifacts housed in a former cart shed near the pro shop of Gullane Golf Club, on the west end of Main Street in the sleepy East Lothian village of the same name.
We’d been in town two days, and thanks to Archie, I’d already had a match I’d never forget. In fact, I was having difficulty devoting my proper attention to Archie’s history lesson because I was still thinking about it. The day before, while Dad rested and wrote some cards at Greywalls, the fine coaching inn located just off Muirfield’s tenth tee, I’d played Gullane Number I, at the opposite end of the town, with a charming rogue named Sandy Williamson.
Archie had arranged the match as a prelude to a trip around Muirfield with Dad, but he warned me to watch out for Sandy Williamson. “Sandy’s a sly one. His age is a bit advanced, but so’s his game. Best play with one hand firmly attached to your billfold.” I quickly learned why. A large, stoop-shouldered, white-haired man in his seventies, dressed in a frayed navy parka and baby-blue socks, there was nothing the least bit elderly about Sandy’s game. He’d been Gullane’s perennial club champion in the 1950s and 1960s and had me four holes down before we’d even reached, huffing and puffing, the brow of Gullane Hill at hole seven, a famous spot writer Jim Finegan says is one of the half-dozen “most enthralling spots in all the world of golf,” a spectacular rise from where you can see fourteen counties on a clear day, distant Edinburgh, the Forth Bridge, the Kingdom of Fife across the gray waters of the Forth, and the green fairways of Muirfield nestling against the village less than a mile away.
Gullane Golf Club, founded in 1882, offers its four hundred members three eighteens, not to mention a fine little six-hole children’s course in the center of the village that pretty well summarizes the place’s raison d’être. British golf architect Donald Steel is on record as saying that of all the world’s golfing centers, Gullane may be the most influential and natural. Among other things, the village environs are a leading bird sanctuary, though most of the birds you’ll see on the narrow main drag are golfers. On a high summer day, it’s said with great affection, there are more golfers than inhabitants in Gullane. The place is golf mad.
Sandy Williamson was clearly afflicted. He told me he managed only seven or eight rounds a week nowadays, which was nowhere near the pace he had maintained as a younger man. Playing as if he owned the place, Sandy had the peculiar casual habit of dropping his bag on the green, no matter where he happened to be putting from. Sandy’s putting routine was even brisker than my father’s, and I watched him spank several balls almost nonchalantly into the depths of the cup, including one forty-footer. Congratulating him on his birdie at the eleventh, aptly called Maggie’s Loup (so named after the legend of a brokenhearted local lass who tossed herself onto the rocks far below, perhaps during a mixed singles match with Sandy Williamson), I admitted I was a bit in awe of my elderly opponent’s game. He touched his flatcap and nodded. “It’s a fine combination—to be lucky and good, but I used to be quite a sensational putter back when I was the only bald Boys Open champion.”
Bald Boys Open champion? I swallowed the bait.
Sandy explained that he first won the Boys title in 1939, just before the war. No photos were taken of the winner that year, and the Boys champions were not rounded up again for a group photograph until 1946. “By then it was too late for me,” Sandy remembered solemnly, removing his wool flatcap with immaculate timing, revealing a bald dome surrounded by shaggy gray locks. “I was the only bald Boys champion Scotland ever produced.”
He gave me his first smile of the day, and I managed to give Gullane’s former Boys champ a decent game on the back side, somehow managing to draw the match even by sixteen, at which point Sandy fired off two consecutive birdies to dash my foolish hopes. My father joined us by the eighteenth green, and I introduced him to Britain’s only bald Boys Open champion. They shook hands, and Sandy invited us to come back for a rematch before he lost the rest of his hair.
—
“Very well,” Archie resumed his museum spiel. “Here we go again. A word or two, then, on historical golf equipment. We must mention the featherie ball. It took one man an entire day, and two top hats full of feathers, to make just two featherie golf balls. The ball would fly about 150 yards. It cost more to produce than a club. The first club heads, by the way, were made of apple, beech, and blackthorn, with a bit of lead in the back. The first iron clubs were made by blacksmiths. This was how the game was played for more than three hundred years. Obviously it was not a poor man’s game. In 1850 there were still only fifteen golf courses in the world—all but one of them in Scotland. That year the gutta-percha ball was introduced, and everything changed. Gutta-percha is a tropical gum-like material that acts like a thermoplastic. When it’s hot, you can mold it; when it’s cold, it goes hard. Dentists still use it to make temporary fillings. Gutta balls were cheap and durable as opposed to the fragile and expensive featherie balls. For that reason alone, golf suddenly exploded in popularity. By 1900 there were more than two thousand golf courses in the world. Next came the Haskell rubbercore ball, invented by a clever American in the early part of the century, but frankly a bit bouncy and erratic—so they started marking the face of clubs to put a bit of helpful spin on the ball. Control became a central part of the game. Club-makers replaced blacksmiths. The so-called modern game was born.”
Archie showed us a practice ball with a parachute, a metal-headed driver dating from 1900, a pitching iron with a hole cut into the face (“Meant for playing out of the water. Didn’t work, I’m sorry to say, which explains why they’re so rare.”), and a “flicker book”—a flip-action instruction manual that animated the swing of Bobby Jones, a sort of crude portable home golf video, “The Americans are a very simple people,” Archie said, handing me an odd-looking iron with a novel wooden face. “They knew their woods went farther than their irons, so they cleverly put wood on their irons. That didn’t work either, to no one’s great surprise.”
“What a place,” said my father, pausing to examine a print of a pale gentleman decked out in a lacy eighteenth-century waistcoat. He was swinging a crude golf club. “You must get lots of tourists in here.”
Archie shook his head. “Funny thing about that, Brax. When I opened this place, I thought that’s exactly what would happen—they’d come in droves. I thought they would be lined up to learn a wee bit of history. But you know? That’s not the case. The Golf Museum over in St. Andrews can’t seem to draw respectable crowds either. Difference is, theirs is a business enterprise while mine is purely a labor of love. I’m not so brokenhearted if only a few people come by asking for a tour each year. That means they’re really interested. You’d be surprised who’s been in here, lots of ordinary Americans and even some of your top American professionals. Ben Crenshaw always makes an effort to come by. Now there’s a man who loves his history.”
“This print looks very old,” my father said.
“That print is very interesting. The cl
othes are wrong. The club is wrong. And it’s a modern swing the man is using. The print’s a total fake, but there’s so much blessed mystery surrounding this game, you can make a handsome living peddling fake art and replicas of old clubs. On the other hand, I think the mystery is why we love it so much. Take, for instance, the mystery of the hole.”
“The hole?” we both said in unison.
“Right. What you Americans sometimes unfortunately call a cup. We know the hole was invented by a Scot when the Dutch or Roman game came to these shores and became golf. The rabbits were critical to the process, but somewhere along the line someone had to come up with an actual hole. We just don’t know who that clever individual was.” Archie gave us a slow solemn look and then shook his head. Niblick sighed and leaned against my leg.
“It remains one of golf’s greatest mysteries—lost forever, I’m afraid, to the mists of time.”
—
Fourteen British Opens have been contested at Muirfield, home of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. Descended from the “Gentlemen Golfers” who had played at Leith Links in Edinburgh since the fifteenth century, the Honourable Company’s “Rules of Golf” were adopted almost word for word in 1754 by the society destined to become the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—rule-makers of the modern game.
Nicklaus made his Walker Cup debut at Muirfield at age nineteen in 1959 and captured his British Open here seven years later. Player, Trevino, Watson, and Faldo also took home the claret jug from history-steeped Muirfield, a linksland that sits well above the sea and features beautiful turf and a visual honesty better players find irresistible. There are no forced carries, no water hazards, no ruinous outcroppings of prickly gorse to speak of. “The good shot is consistently rewarded,” Jim Finegan writes, “the indifferent shot is just as consistently chastised.” Before Nicklaus and Watson won at Muirfield, Harry Vardon, James Braid, Walter Hagen, and Henry Cotton anointed its greatness.
For the good player, the primary challenge at Muirfield lies in the ever-daunting sea winds, a bearded rough that can resemble the wheatfields of Kansas before harvest, and far too many exquisitely constructed sod bunkers to make a passage round pain-free. My first drive hooked badly out of bounds left, prompting Archie Baird to recall fondly that the great James Braid of Elie, first born of the Great Triumvirate that included Vardon and J. H. Taylor, also miserably hooked his opening drive over the wall on the left the year he won the first of his two Open championships at Muirfield, in 1901. He seemed to be telling me there was always hope at Muirfield. My next swat from the tee found the fairway, but a subsequent poor long iron shot from the fairway left me facing a difficult fifth shot from the bottom of a bunker in front of the green. I staggered off the hole with a triple bogey.
Archie made par, Dad a surprisingly easy bogey.
“You seem to be off to a poor start,” said Archie, as they headed for the riding cart Archie had thoughtfully arranged for Dad. “I hope old Sandy didn’t exhaust all your good shots at Gullane yesterday. How much did he take you for?”
“Three pounds.”
“Aye. Could have been much worse.”
“Jim always starts late,” my father chipped in, smiling at me. The rest at Greywalls had done him good. I heard a lilt in his voice and saw renewed vigor in his swing. “Takes him a while to figure it out, but once he gets his head on straight, he can post fine numbers.”
This was nice of my father to say. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be the case. I played somewhat indifferent golf on the outward leg, which had nothing to do with the quality of the course. Muirfield was outstanding, a pleasure to play and an inspiration to behold. Something else was bothering me. Walking off the second tee alone while the two older men sped ahead to their balls in the cart, I realized what it was. I was keyed up and worrying again about the outcome. Not just the outcome of our round here at Muirfield—but of the trip. We’d been away thirteen days. Something told me Dad wasn’t planning to go much farther.
Muirfield’s second hole is considered a “breather,” a 351-yard par-four some players have a go at if the wind is favorable. I drove my ball into the right rough, shouldered my bag, and started after it. As the East Lothian sun shone down, my mind slipped back a few weeks to a useful “lesson” I had learned on another dramatic faraway coast in the company of a friend named Laird Small. Laird is the head professional at Spyglass Hill Golf Club, Pebble Beach’s famous sister course among the tall coastal pines of the Monterey Peninsula. He is also one of America’s finest young teachers, responsible for fine-tuning the games of several promising young tour players.
I also started miserably at Spyglass that day, double bogeying a fairly easy par-five opening hole. Another double followed at number two, a short par-four that was exactly the same length as Muirfield’s second. As we climbed the hill to the third tee, I was almost ready to give up and head back to the clubhouse. Laird suggested we sit on the grass of the third tee for a few moments and talk. The spot, he said, meant a lot to him, so we sat down. The tee sits high among the dunes where Scotsman Robert Louis Stevenson supposedly used to walk, trying to get inspiration for his work, while living briefly in Monterey in the late 1800s. The green sits below, framed by a glorious panorama of the Pacific Ocean. Spyglass Hill takes its name from Treasure Island, and its majestic beauty and rugged difficulty make it one of the most admired—and feared—golf courses in America. I’d hoped to play so well there that day instead of so miserably. I apologized to Laird and admitted I was kind of rattled. This was mere days after my father had called to tell me he was dying of cancer and our trip to Britain would have to be postponed indefinitely.
I rationalized my poor start by admitting I’d hoped a memorable round at Spyglass would take my mind off my problems. Laird smiled and said he understood. That’s why many folks played golf. Unfortunately, their mind usually was the problem.
As we sat looking at the view, he proposed a little experiment. He asked me for the scorecard, and I handed it over. He tore it up and said, “Let’s see if we can get you into NATO.”
“NATO?”
“That stands for Not Attached To Outcome.”
He said the idea wasn’t original with him—a blind golfer pal had thought of it—but that every good teacher knew that the more you pushed against the game of golf, the more the game tended to elude you.
I told him he sounded like my own father, with his talk of “everything contains its opposite” and how trying to “create the magic makes it vanish.”
“There’re really no new ideas, are there?” Laird agreed. “It’s all how we choose to look at things.” He suggested that we look at the rest of the round differently, proposing that we play merely for the simple pleasure of each other’s company and the opportunity to be out on such a fine morning, unburdened by thinking about our scores and trying to determine the outcome.
A memorable round did indeed follow, though I can’t remember exactly how I did on most of Spyglass Hill’s romantically named holes. We walked along striking shots and talking about our wives and my children and the baby he and his wife Honor hoped to soon be adopting. I recall us stopping to watch seabirds and listen to the way the wind soughed through the famous Monterey pines. A fog rolled in on the back nine. Deer crossed our paths, pausing to wiggle their noses at us. I vaguely recall, in the midst of all this, a string of pars and even a couple birdies happening. It may have been the finest round of my life, but I’ll never know for sure.
It was an exercise worthy of Opti the Mystic. I’d come to Spyglass tense and worried, hoping to bury my sadness by beating a great golf course into submission. Instead, I’d submitted and left relaxed and reminded once again of things I’d known since I was a boy, lying on the soft green fairway of my father’s golf club.
—
At Muirfield’s tenth hole, one of Nicklaus’s all-time favorite holes, a mammoth 475-yard par-four, I unleashed my best drive of the day, a three-hundred-yarder that Archie Bair
d said compared favorably to anything the Golden Bear had done on the hole.
He and Dad rolled down the fairway in their sputtering cart, with Niblick trotting importantly just ahead and slightly to starboard. Golf didn’t seem to be the particular aim of either man. The weather was mild and sunny, the tall rough leaning beautifully in the slight breeze off Aberlady Bay. It was a day, in some respects, that eerily recalled my lovely day with Laird Small at Spyglass Hill.
I took out my scorecard and tore it up, immediately feeling better. I looked at Dad. He was laughing and obviously having a good time. In the honorable company of Archie Baird, a voluble host and a fellow veteran of the air war, sharing stories and reminiscences that had little or nothing to do with golf or the greats who had trampled this turf, my father seemed thoroughly in his element at last. In Archie, he’d met a Scottish version of himself.
I lagged back a bit, noting the solemn beauty of the turf (the best in the world, according to Nicklaus, for making iron shots with the kind of spin you want) and the geometrically perfect bunkers, which my worry had made me too blind to appreciate on the front side.
We came at last to seventeen, the difficult par-five where Roberto de Vicenzo once holed a two-iron for an albatross, and a hole that possibly altered the playing career of Tony Jacklin. In the final round of the ’72 Open, Lee Trevino and Jacklin approached the hole tied for the lead, just one stroke ahead of the ever-present Nicklaus. Jacklin played two solid shots within a few yards of the green, but Trevino sprayed his shots all over the place. First he drove into a bunker, was forced to play a second “safe” shot out, then trap-hooked his third to the deep rough in front of the green. Discouraged, certain he’d handed Jacklin the tournament, Trevino slapped an indifferent shot over the green. Jacklin chipped his third shot to within fifteen feet of the cup. Trevino went to his ball and hastily struck another poor shot—which raced across the green and jumped into the hole for par. It was the Merry Mex’s third “miracle” shot that week.