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  To my girls,

  of course

  Alas! why plainen men so in commúne

  Of purveyance of God or of Fortune,

  That giveth them full oft in many a guise

  Well better than they can themselves devise?

  —Geoffrey Chaucer,

  “The Knightes Tale,”

  The Canterbury Tales

  Life is short. Golf very, very often. And dance naked!

  —Gramma Billy

  ROUND

  1. Littlestone Golf Club

  2. Royal Cinque Ports

  3. Prince’s Golf Club

  4. Royal St. George’s Golf Club

  5. Mullion Golf Club

  6. Perranporth Golf Club

  7. Trevose Golf & Country Club

  8. Royal North Devon Golf Club

  9. St. Enodoc Golf Club

  10. Holyhead Golf Club

  11. Bull Bay Golf Club

  12. Conwy (Caernarvonshire) Golf Club

  13. Wallasey Golf Club

  14. Royal Liverpool Golf Club Hoylake

  15. Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club

  16. Royal Birkdale Golf Club

  17. Blackpool North Shore Golf Club

  18. Eyemouth Golf Club

  19. Dunbar Golf Club

  20. Glen Golf Club

  21. North Berwick Golf Club

  22. Archerfield Dirleton Links

  23. Muirfield

  24. Gullane Golf Club, No. 2

  25. Renaissance Club

  26. Kilspindie Golf Club

  27. Kingarrock Hickory Golf

  28. Craigielaw Golf Club

  29. St. Andrews Links, Eden Course

  30. St. Andrews Links, Strathtyrum Course

  31. Burntisland Golf House Club

  32. Kinghorn Golf Club

  33. Lundin Golf Club

  34. Leven Links Golf Course

  35. The Golf House Club, Elie

  36. St. Andrews Links, Jubilee Course

  37. Anstruther Golf Club (9 holes)

  38. Crail Golfing Society, Balcomie Links

  39. Crail Golfing Society, Craighead Links

  40. St. Andrews Links, New Course

  41. Kingsbarns Golf Links

  42. St. Andrews Links, Castle Course

  43. Scotscraig Golf Club

  44. St. Andrews Links, Old Course

  45. St. Andrews Links, Old Course

  46. Monifieth Golf Club

  47. Carnoustie Golf Club

  48. Montrose Golf Links

  49. Stonehaven Golf Club

  50. Royal Aberdeen Golf Club

  51. Murcar Links Golf Club

  52. Newburgh on Ythan Golf Club

  53. Trump International Golf Links

  54. Cruden Bay Golf Club

  55. Peterhead Golf Club, Craigewan Links

  56. Inverallochy Golf Club

  57. Fraserburgh Golf Club

  58. Rosehearty Golf Club (9 holes)

  59. Royal Tarlair Golf Club

  60. Cullen Golf Club

  61. Strathlene Buckie Golf Club

  62. Buckpool Golf Club

  63. Spey Bay Golf Club

  64. Moray Golf Club

  65. Hopeman Golf Club

  66. Covesea Links (9 holes)

  67. Nairn Dunbar Golf Club

  68. Nairn Golf Club

  69. Asta Golf Club

  70. Shetland Golf Club

  71. Whalsay Golf Club

  72. Stromness Golf Club

  73. Castle Stuart Golf Links

  74. Fortrose & Rosemarkie Golf Club

  75. Tarbat Golf Club

  76. Tain Golf Club

  77. The Carnegie Club at Skibo Castle

  78. Golspie Golf Club

  79. Royal Dornoch Golf Club, Championship

  80. Royal Dornoch Golf Club, Struie

  81. Brora Golf Club

  82. Wick Golf Club

  83. Reay Golf Club

  84. Durness Golf Club

  85. Ullapool Golf Club (9 holes, 18 tees)

  86. Gairloch Golf Club (9 holes, 18 tees)

  87. Skeabost Golf Club

  88. Isle of Skye Golf Club

  89. Traigh Golf Course

  90. Tobermory Golf Club

  91. Carradale Golf Club

  92. Machrihanish Dunes

  93. Machrlhanish Dunes

  94. Machrihanish Golf Club

  95. Machrihanish Golf Club

  96. Dunaverty Golf Club

  97. Shiskine Golf and Tennis Club (12 holes)

  98. Trump Turnberry Resort, Alisa Course

  99. Prestwick St Nicholas Golf Club

  100. Prestwick Golf Club

  101. Royal Troon

  102. Barassie Links

  103. Western Gailes Golf Club

  104. Dundonald Links

  105. Isle of Barra Golf Course

  106. Askernish Golf Club

  107. Askernish Golf Club

  108. Askernish Golf Club

  109. Askernish Golf Club

  110. Bruntsfield Links (Open Qualifier)

  111. The Original Bruntsfield Links

  Spero

  His bones arrived by shipwreck. In life he was a fisherman, but he did not die at sea. He persuaded his executioners to tie him to an × of wooden beams and expired after two days lashed to his crooked cross. He considered himself unworthy of being crucified by the same design as his savior.

  Accounts describe his gratitude for martyrdom. As death approached, he proclaimed, “Receive me hanging from the wood of this sweet cross . . . . Do not permit them to loosen me.” And history records the travels of a Greek monk, St. Rule, to whom God gave instructions to move the martyr’s bones for safekeeping. Rule was to sail with the relics to the edge of the known world and build a church where the faithful would flock, finding health and hope.

  Storms pushed the monk aground near a tiny fishing village that would be transformed just as Rule’s visions foretold. A cathedral would be built, and a castle and a university, and it would become a place of learning and pilgrimage. A visionary cleric and a divine storm would turn a rocky bit of coastline at the fringe of civilization into a place that, eight centuries later, is still visited by six hundred thousand hopefuls every year. I’m one of them, though my route here was different than most. I designed my own shipwreck of a journey and prayed that my bones would land somewhere near the onetime resting place of St. Andrew.

  Whether golf owes its origins to bored shepherds searching out diversions in the dunes or to itinerant wool traders who brought a Flemish game to Scotland, the home of golf would probably be a modest village today if a holy mission hadn’t sent an apostle’s remains ashore there. Maybe that’s why the world’s perfect town feels so divinely inspired, as if God wants you to be there. When you stroll the medieval streets of St. Andrews, with its mix of ancient history and college youth, its gentle bustle of golf and restaurants and golf and pubs and golf and museums, you walk with a sense of destination that St. Rule must also have felt. And since he could have simply sent the bones to Constantinople as the great emperor Constantine decreed instead of washing up on a stretch of sublimely golf-suited land, the saint’s mission stands as proof that God is good—and that
He’s a golfer, too.

  I want to believe all of that, just as I want to believe that one morning in the ninth century a Scottish king looked up and saw St. Andrew’s diagonal cross in the sky above—white clouds against a blue sky—and took it as a sign to march outnumbered against the Angles. His vision and victory gave birth to the Scottish flag—white × against a blue backdrop—and is too good a story to not be true. And I want to believe that the patron saint of golfers did actually utter St. Andrews’ town motto as his final words, the Latin phrase now stitched into my putter cover and the only tattoo I might ever get: Dum Spiro Spero. While I breathe, I hope.

  I’m not sure I actually believe any of that, but I do breathe, and I do hope. And maybe hope will be enough, or maybe it will be too much. When does hope become the dream that becomes a mistake? Do the clouds ever steer you wrong? Is your morning perspective sometimes slanted? What if you walk into battle while the miracles stay home? Dum Spiro Spero, but how many have hoped their way right out of breath?

  I can’t help but wonder these things as I stare at that blue and white flag stamped onto a dimpled ball at my feet, the plastic gleaming clean from my caddie’s towel, struck three times this morning and still six feet from the hole. In these six feet there are three years, four hundred rounds, thousands of miles, and every dollar at my disposal. There are 107 British links courses played in less than two months. There are thirty-seven pounds of me lost among the dunes, spread over a million-yard walk in search of the secret to golf, and this par putt on hole one just outside of Edinburgh, Scotland, at a qualifying event for the Open Championship at St. Andrews—this meager distance—holds every ounce of it. A putt to prove it meant something, that I was right, that it was okay to think the wind held some providence, that we didn’t crash into the shore by chance—rather, we arrived safely, and found happy destiny waiting for us.

  Six feet to proof.

  Who knows how a golf swing actually begins, how many neurons and synapses and small muscles have to get to go? That wasn’t the mystery I was trying to answer on this odyssey—but maybe it should have been, because as I stare down at a silver putter head beside a white ball, I wonder which one is supposed to move first. Something terrifying and miraculous can happen over meaty par putts in competition: An infinite universe comes to fit neatly within the space of a golf ball. Time spins to a halt, and our bodies become inhabited by an unfamiliar presence. Too often that presence has shaky fingers and a grudge against God—Go in, goddammit. But the myriad rounds played in preparation for this one pay a dividend, because I suddenly feel an improbable movement in my shoulders; my body rocks, the clubhead comes unstuck and bumps the ball, sends it rolling, rolling.

  I’m not breathing. But I am hoping.

  Recall

  When I was in college, I spent a semester studying literature in London. I spent most of my time getting lost in the West End and talking about books I hadn’t read as though I had written them, waiting for the bartender to pull another pint of bitter. I was twenty years old with a handful of pounds knocking around in my pocket, roaming the city in search of bookshops and free museums and girls who fancied a Yankee accent. It was the time of my life. But I don’t recall any part of that spring abroad as fondly as I remember the weekend my roommates and I hopped the train for Scotland.

  I forged a passable handicap certificate for my flatmates, and my best friend Robert and I waited for my spikes to arrive in the mail from home. We picked a bank holiday weekend and entered our names in a lottery for a Saturday foursome, and when we arrived at our destination Friday evening, our names were posted by the first tee, owners of a late-afternoon tee time—the last of the day—at the Old Course at St. Andrews. We ran off to rent golf clubs and find a bed for the night, then went to toast our good fortune, sure to ask the bartender for whisky, because as Robert had warned us during the train ride from London, when in Scotland, you don’t call it Scotch.

  I have chased a golf ball around much of the globe, but my college weekend in St. Andrews remains the standard against which all other golf getaways have been measured. We lost golf balls all over St. Andrews that weekend, soaked through to our skin after packing nothing but sweaters, smiles stuck to our faces as we walked fairways that we knew we would remember for the rest of our lives. We warmed our soggy bones with clubhouse brown and didn’t talk very much, a little bit stunned by what we had just done. While our friends were backpacking around Barcelona and Bruges, we had lived our fathers’ dreams. I called mine to tell him that I had just signed my card from the Old Course, and to warn him about the charges headed for his Amex. Nothing I might have learned or accomplished that semester could have made my dad any prouder.

  It was a different life, and looking back, it seems a perfect one. I’m no longer in touch with the two flatmates who made up our foursome, but I know that every July when the Open Championship returns to our televisions at breakfast time, we each recall an erstwhile weekend and wish that we could go back. It’s one of my rare fond memories in which I don’t wish I’d had a greater appreciation of the experience as it was happening. I appreciated everything about my afternoon on the Old Course—every swing, every step.

  Years later, as I watched Phil Mickelson lift the Claret Jug at Muirfield, that trip came back to me with not just nostalgia but also a bit of urgency. Breaking 80 with rented clubs, eating cheeseburgers instead of haggis, discovering a golf course that felt both accidental and ideal—I was in that weekend getaway again, shaping my shots off the sea breeze, billiarding my ball through rippled gorges, imagining grandstands of well-mannered mayhem as I tapped in on eighteen and cradled the Jug like a newborn.

  I could play that golf. I had played that golf. Pure links golf was about playing with the landscape, not over it, and it didn’t demand pretty or perfect golf shots; rather, links golf required guts. Perseverance. Creativity. Balls. It was a boxing match—stay on your feet and fight your way home—and I loved everything about it. Mickelson rope-a-doped the field that Sunday and turned me into a Phil fan, and as I watched the rest of the players pull up lame behind him, I got a text from a British friend who I expected was forlorn about his championship going to the grinning American.

  Julian was a tall and easygoing Englishman who was always eager and ill-prepared for my golf adventures. He had joined me on my trip around Ireland with little more in his bag than designer sneakers and a comb, but if a journey offered the possibility of golf followed by a bright afternoon spent in a dark pub, Julian was up for it. He was born and raised in Manchester, found love in the States, and had recently relocated to Germany with a new baby in tow. Our chances of crossing paths seemed relegated to chance until Julian texted to suggest a get-together of my particular flavor:

  Did u know there are only 14 brit open courses? Let’s play them.

  It might have seemed an absurd request for a golfing reunion, but Julian knew he had the right audience. Not only was I in a particularly wistful links mood, recalling the tall and wavy dunes of a former golfing life, but something had happened a few months before this Open that had my fingers itching for the oldest trophy in golf, the one Mickelson was holding to his lips at that very moment. Back in May, I had lived every bad player’s dream and violated every good player’s protocol—surely bringing me decades of bad luck on the course—for having hoisted the Claret Jug with my own hands and smiling for a picture.

  I was revisiting Portrush in Northern Ireland as the host of a travel television show that involved me ad-libbing course commentary to the effect of “Amazing” and “Really amazing” a few dozen times per episode. When we finished filming at Royal Portrush, we met the club captain to thank him for giving us an interview and to assure him that our show had an Oprah-like following back in the States—among Mid-Atlantic golfers who watched cable television from 2:00 to 2:30 on Saturday afternoons, he was about to achieve rare celebrity. Pleased with our efforts, he mentioned that the Open trophy was there in the back and asked if we would like to se
e it. Portrush was hosting the Irish Open that year, so we said sure and thank you out of courtesy, about as interested in the Irish Open trophy as we were in another cup of tea. But when the manager brought out the trophy from her office, I believe I actually leapt—a little hop, and then I looked all around me: Who is here? Where’s the security? Do they possibly know what that is?

  “Here you go,” she said. “Makes a great doorstop.” And she handed over the greatest trophy in sports. I stood there in a hallway in the Portrush clubhouse, blushing a deep shade of crimson with my fingers wrapped around an Open champion’s Claret Jug.

  It had never occurred to me that they would be minding the Jug for Darren Clarke, who was a member at Royal Portrush, so this show-and-tell caught me dumbstruck. I remembered to ask for a picture, and I quickly looked at the list of names—true to legend, a giant GARY PLAYER stood out twice as tall as the rest, denoting the last year they allowed the winners to get their own engraving done. I was clutching a cup (albeit a winner’s replica) that had been held by every golf immortal from Old Tom to Bobby Jones to Hogan and Palmer and Nicklaus and Tiger.

  “Does my hair look all right?” I asked as I joined that list, with a big smile for the crew’s cameraman. My hair did not look all right, but the Jug was in perfect focus.

  Golfers who have any chance of ever competing for the Claret Jug avoid touching it until they earn it. The real players don’t want to lift it, not yet, while the schlubs would wrestle each other for a quick feel. Somewhere in my golfing life, I had become one of them—a spectator. A schlub. I had once played professional golf and teed it up in a Tour qualifier with a lad named Sean from London, holding my own with a Brit who had just made the cut at the Open at Royal Troon, but now here I was, another blank face waiting along the ropes for an autograph. I hadn’t even played a hole at Portrush that afternoon. My clubs were at home in the basement beneath too-small baby clothes, and I had not attempted a competitive round in seven years. I couldn’t remember the last time I really needed to make a putt. I had no recollection of sincerely caring about a golf score, and had excused myself from golf ambition by believing that good golfers had to be bad dads or absentee husbands. The truth was, Mickelson was neither. So I had given a good chunk of my life to golf with little to show for it but a closet full of resentments and a photograph of one of the great phonies of the game hoisting a trophy he had no business touching, looking like a kid dressed up as the superhero he would never be.