A Course Called Scotland Read online

  In A Course Called Ireland, I played as many Irish links as any living person (that is to say, I played all of them). That links knowledge and passion had been shelved, an old manual for a car I no longer owned. In Paper Tiger, I learned the golf swing at the most micro of levels and took my life’s shot at pro golf by way of a Tour coach, a personal trainer, and a professional shrink. I had learned what 68 felt like (it felt like it should have been 67), but as I approached forty, I hardly maintained a handicap. There was no joy in tracking my ballooning numbers, knowing their ascent was a trend I might slow but could no longer reverse.

  As I watched the end of the Open at Muirfield, I wished for another shot while my three-year-old explained that we had watched enough Daddy shows and Doc McStuffins was coming on. My wife was about to have our second child, and my days of roaming the links with nothing ahead of me but another round and another pint and another story were long behind me.

  Sorry, Julian, I thought, but I wouldn’t be taking that trip. I could fantasize about a golf resurgence, but I would have to enjoy my fairway epiphanies from the living room. I couldn’t summon the urgency to golf down another long road, not anymore. Life had changed, and as with millions of men, golf gluttony had gone the way of hair gel, two-seaters, and season tickets.

  And then I got a phone call.

  More

  We met at freshman orientation, though it felt like we had grown up trading secrets and insults. He was that acquaintance whose first handshake felt familiar, who talked as if you had known each other all along, and who made a faraway campus in cold, flat Indiana feel like home. He was a ginger as well, but wore his red with confidence, brave enough to befriend another one. He was better-looking, taller, smarter, a fearless golfer, and could chat up any girl on campus and have them wondering whether he had a girlfriend by his third sentence. He was also darkly insecure, and he subsisted upon and propagated a banquet of bullshit. The fact that I could see that in him, and that he knew I could, bonded us as brothers, two young men who needed each other to know who they were—or who they were not. I wasn’t Robert and he wasn’t me, no matter how much we both wanted that to be otherwise.

  Regardless of the time we spent apart, Robert was the friend who could quickly remind me how little people changed—most of all myself, as I still reacted to him with the same awe and acquiescence I did when we were nineteen. I hadn’t spoken with him in a year. When my phone rang, I didn’t recognize the number.

  “I have an idea,” Robert said.

  “You’re alive?”

  “As far as I can tell,” he said. “The dog seems to think so. He’s licking my face. Dude needs a walk.”

  I could hear a late night in his voice. It was the nasal tenor of a horizontal talker, and I envisioned the mess in which he lay: takeout containers and torn-open boxes of wine and last month’s mail. I worried for the dog’s chances.

  “You sound like you just woke up,” I said.

  “I’m sick. Brutal cold,” he said.

  “You had a cold last year. The last time you called.”

  “Can’t shake it,” he said. “When was that? Christmas?”

  “I think so.”

  “I got your card. It’s still here, up on the mantel. Looking at it right now.”

  I didn’t doubt it, though I was surprised to hear that he had a mantel.

  “I figured out where we need to go,” he said, as if we had been collectively kicking around travel plans for months.

  “We’re going somewhere?” I said, and laughed. “I’m going somewhere: I’m going to pick up Maggie from ballet in ten minutes.”

  “Wow. Ballet. That’s right out of the married suburban playbook, my man.”

  “We live in the city.”

  “Technically,” Robert said, “but your soul is suburban.”

  This from the person I called my best friend. He said he had been watching reruns of the Open and was moved to epiphany by a memory. “You remember St. Andrews?”

  I did, and somehow knew what he was after. Ever since college, when Robert had gone around St. Andrews at level par with borrowed clubs, he had been convinced of the divinity of the place. As we sipped spirits beside windows overlooking the links, Robert’s eyes watched the sunset blaze across the dunes, and he said, “Whoever made this place knew something. They knew it. A very simple, very pure answer to this game. It’s gotten buried under all the numbers and the bullshit, but you can feel it here. Golf has bones, and we just played them.”

  The rest of us smiled and twirled our tumblers and asked him what this answer was. He didn’t have a clue, but promised us that one day he would know the secret, and when he did, “You can all say you knew me when. Brag to your friends about the day I kicked your ass at St. Andrews.”

  We didn’t understand the part about bones and a secret, but as for us telling people we knew Robert when—we didn’t doubt that for a sip.

  “Remember Julian’s text? The Open courses?” Robert said, his voice waking up on the other end of the line.

  I said I did, regretting having forwarded the message his way.

  “That was it,” he said. “I see the future. And it’s wearing a kilt.”

  “Is it? You’re making a plan here?”

  “It’s not a plan. It’s an inevitability,” he said. “Scotland. All of it, searching for the secret. We go to golf Mecca, hunting for the Holy Grail.”

  I silently pardoned his mixed theological metaphors, and the line went quiet as I searched for holes in his argument. They were probably glaring to most, but to me, his case was irrationally compelling.

  “Why not?” he said.

  “For starters, I did that once, Robert. You were there.”

  “Exactly. And this is the upside-down opposite of that. No Tour coaches or headshrinkers. Forget the Golf Channel and the Rotella books. Yeah, you can get down to scratch. That’s a real crowded monument. Scratch sucks. Scratch shoots seventy-eight in a qualifier for the Philly Open. I’m talking about skipping the pretenders and the guessers and going straight to the source.”

  He was wise to pilfer my own argument. For a decade, ever since I had attacked next-level golf via coaches and trainers and finely tuned technology, I’d wondered whether the decoder for golf was a simpler, more soulful strategy. I daydreamed of testing such a tack—less work, more play—and imagined a search for the soul of the game as a long-bearded seeker, a courier of fine hickory shafts, wandering in the Highlands and playing to the sounds of bagpipes and the smells of clan-stoked bonfires. Far from any driving range, I envisaged lost answers nestled at the bottom of ancient golf holes. My friend’s words picked at my whims, but they would remain just that. I could barely find time to get a haircut anymore; chasing par around Scotland was pure Robertian fantasy.

  But in case it wasn’t, I asked, “And how long do you envision this trip taking? Weeks? Months?”

  “Maybe a year,” he said. “You’ve spent more time on golf chases, with less to show for them.”

  I admitted that I had. “But look at the Christmas card, Robert. I can’t disappear for a year.”

  “Oh. Right,” he said. In his pause, I could hear his mind trying to contemplate parenthood, a concept as baffling to him as breakfast. His bachelor’s brain gave up, and he said, “Then I’ll go find it, and you’re welcome to join me.”

  I knew he meant it, and that he would go. He lived a life of uncommon feats and gestures, addicted to the next trip or task or unreachable frontier. Each promised to fix him; when it didn’t, he planned larger. An episode three years ago in which he flatlined in an emergency room after a two-year happy hour seemed only to put more chase in his steps. Some people saw the white light and came back reborn, craving health and simple happiness. Robert saw the light and started looking around for something brighter.

  “Won’t be cheap,” I said, wondering how a guy whose career had detoured back to carrying golf bags could afford such ambition. “Sounds like a lot of loops to pay for a trip like
that.”

  “That’s where your company would add a great deal to the itinerary.”

  Of course it would. “And you’re well enough to do it?”

  His laughter was interrupted by a cough. “Not at all,” he said.

  We were quiet for a moment. “You’re crazy.”

  “You used to be,” he said. “You were nuts. And people looked up to you for it. And you know it felt so goddamn good.”

  He was right; there was nothing more intoxicating than the look on someone’s face when they listened to you tell a story they could not believe. You did what? Some people liked to feel special, but for Robert, special was the only thing worth feeling at all. And he knew my wires were twisted the same way.

  “Listen,” he said, “we do this, and you can go back home and weed your flower beds and go to ballet, and you will never have to wonder about what you didn’t do.”

  “I like my life,” I said. “I have a life. I love my life.”

  “I know you do, Tom,” he said, his voice now lighter. “I believe that. But, Jesus Christ, don’t you want to love it more?”

  Query

  Planning great golf is easier than playing it. I find that arranging a golf journey—juggling dates and details and diving into a map—is the trip before the trip that stretches a week’s fun into months. I’m an obsessive planner, perhaps because I suspect that my future is always going to be more compelling than my present, and I love to live there. I like to wade around in my past days, too—rearranging former conversations and imagining my past results improved. Maybe Scotland would give me some nows I could settle for, but until then, I relished the chance to spend a good year planning my and Robert’s grand golfing tomorrows. I just had little idea where to start.

  Robert’s vision had us spending an entire season across the pond, digging golf balls out of the gorse and hanging on the whisky-warmed wisdom of caddies who knew where X lay on golf’s map. His plan was to play every course to ever host an Open, plus every links in Scotland—“If we want to know what Old Tom Morris knew, then we have to out-golf him”—and then measure our summer of grand golf epiphanies at a qualifier for the Open Championship.

  “If the answer to golf was easy to find, every investment banker who spent a week in St. Andrews would have it,” Robert explained. Somewhere, in one of Scotland’s yonder nooks or on one of its outer islands, there was a revelation waiting for us, a reward for golfers who braved the beyond. But before we roamed the UK in search of golfing miracles, the first divine intervention to secure would be a green light from a wife with a full-time corporate career and two wee ones at home.

  The dream was a simple one. I expressed it to my wife, Allyson, as, “Do you think the girls are too young to travel to Scotland?” But what I was really saying was, I want to go find the secret to golf and qualify for the greatest championship in sports.

  It was either that or paint the basement that summer. Seemed worth an ask.

  • • •

  The proper and peaceful arrangement of the married man’s golf boondoggle requires decades of thoughtful practice. Golfing obsessively and remaining happily married demands preparations that predate a wedding, an engagement, and even a first kiss. One must bring one’s love of the game into a partnership like a child from a former marriage: I hope you like kids, because I already have one, and he golfs 278 times a year.

  If you have discovered your love of the game later in life, there is still hope for a golf binge, as long as you’re confident that your partner condones obsession. This may require years of aloof or solipsistic episodes in order to ingratiate a spouse to your individualistic nature, warming them to a partner who sometimes—often for five hours a day during the summer—enjoys time alone. You must also be willing to put the time and work into establishing yourself as someone who is charismatically inconsistent, so that self-centered surprises become the charm of you being you.

  Brokering a married golf boondoggle is also a craft best practiced upon a foundation of low spousal expectations. Ideally you have provided your partner past glimpses of what an asshole husband looks like, thus fostering a sort of hindsight gratitude—At least he doesn’t do that anymore—for your future semi-asshole episodes. In my case, I had offered hard evidence of my asshole-husband potential when I wrote Paper Tiger, a smorgasbord of selfishness that saw me moving to Florida and playing golf 542 days in a row. Such precedent made the four months needed for A Course Called Ireland an easy request—a 120-day retreat seemed magnanimous in comparison to that year and a half I spent on the driving range. This progression suggested that a summer in Scotland would seem status quo. That was my hope. But this was AK—After Kids—and kids blow the asshole metric to bits, to where ten extra minutes on the toilet spent staring at one’s fantasy team lineup feels like a rare and heavenly indulgence.

  Allyson—or, as my friends and family sometimes call her, St. Allyson—was well accustomed to my questing and migratory tendencies. We met in college, she a published poet and me a future mutual-fund salesman. But by graduation our paths had crisscrossed, and she headed for law school while I set off to write a novel. She became the adult in our relationship, with a buzzing work phone and a 401(k), while I dreamt up plot points and punch lines and took far too long to ask her to marry me. Tall and beautiful and selfless to a fault, Allyson was a steady anchor around which I orbited, often scared, sometimes broke, and always lucky as hell that the tether held tight. She never made me feel like she was putting up with me, even when I struggled to put up with myself. Somehow, I made her happy—happy enough that it felt as if she expected it when I told her about my plans for a summer in Scotland.

  My previous golf-quest inspirations had been met with smiling head shakes and looks of amused surrender. But this request—my first attempted AK—was met with a look of genuine fear. Two little ones were tough to handle with both of us present and caffeinated. I could see the months of exhaustion and solo child-wrangling flashing before her eyes, and I said something I had never contemplated in such moments before, going off the boondoggle script I’d thought so cleverly written. I told her I didn’t have to do it. I could stay here. It would really be fine if I didn’t go, I told her, and I meant it.

  Kids. They really do change everything.

  For one of the first times in the life of teenage entitlement that I had managed to stretch into my fortieth year, it wasn’t up to me. And I wasn’t running something past her; I was asking her, and would have been content with a laugh and a request to go empty the recycling. Maybe that’s why she said yes—or, rather, that I needed to go. I suspected I might have needed to go, but when I heard it from Allyson, I believed it. I believed it enough that this dream, in an instant, came to life and took over my days.

  Needing to go wasn’t about my needing more golf. There are only a handful of people on this planet whose résumés need more golf less than mine, and most of them play it for a living. I think she meant that I needed to go now, after so much had changed—whole oceans of life had transpired since I had last been this bold in my ambitions. It was as if she had a new husband with an untried bag of tools who wanted to see if he could make it, as if that former husband had passed away. A few years before, he actually had, but that was something we didn’t need to talk about now, because life was moving forward in ways that neither of us dreamed it ever would again, and we had plans to make. Surely the kids were ready for Scotland. And I had already researched homes to rent in St. Andrews, finding one with room for a family and a long and blooming garden. She didn’t even ask if Robert was coming. Approaching ten years of marriage, that was one of those questions upon which we no longer needed to spend our breath.

  Whether I had gotten a green light or a red, my greatest boondoggle was marrying Allyson. She was full of joy, and had remained so through real darkness. She was still always up for the good, and what might be the grandest golf trip ever attempted—excavating the secret to golf and sharing it, taking my own stab at the tourn
ament to top all others—was plenty good enough for her.

  Provision

  I stared at a map of Scotland for months. The Michelin map was a little taller than my five-year-old, Maggie, and each course was marked with a tiny red golf club. There were loads of them. For each coastal golf course, I inserted a pin. Robert was unspecific about where the secret was residing, but we knew it had to be on a links. A true links is a seaside course set upon dunes—sacred, sandy altars on which the game of golf was born. After going through two packs of pins, I got a little nervous. I didn’t mind when a curious Maggie pulled out one of the pins, as long as she didn’t stick it in her sister. The more she pulled out, the less terrifying the trip appeared. She didn’t pull out nearly enough.

  I turned the board over and hung a new map, one sent to me by a friend. A trip of such ambition required help, so I opened up to assistance in ways I never had before. I didn’t even know how to tell people I planned to play all of Scotland and find the secret to golf and qualify for the Open without it sounding like a joke, so I decided to trust the universe—surely it was smarter than I was, on most days—and listen to the people it put in front of me. And a woman named Gramma Billy stood front and center.

  The emails started with Cruit Island. Pronounced Critch, it’s a giddy nine-holer on the coast of Donegal in Ireland that I lovingly gushed about in my last book. Gramma Billy and her partner, Gene, sent me a warm email thanking me for the passages that had propelled them there. I was happy to write back to this kind lady who worked for an airline and who I might meet some day at check-in. More than a hundred email exchanges would grow from that first reply. It might be unwise to befriend strangers on the Internet who go from admiring your work to sending you gift packages with chocolate bars for you and teddy bears for your children, but as tricky as it can be to gauge a person’s intentions and authenticity over the web, Gramma Billy from Canada transcended the murky paranoia of stranger-danger. If I was going to find anything life- and golf-changing in Europe that summer, I was going to have to accept the possibility that Gramma Billys are out there. They are real, they are here to help us, and they can be right, and the cosmos wants us to listen to them. So I did. And what could be the harm, anyway? Her emails always made me smile.