A Course Called Scotland Read online

  Self-described as a “crazy ginger-head senior who started golf just about the time I was sixty . . . started painting just about seventy . . . perhaps I might be an exotic dancer at eighty since I won’t be known for my golf,” Gramma Billy wrote bright emails that roller-coastered from frustrations with her golf (“Do you think red hair makes your head lighter and that tends to make it come up too soon?!”) to inspirations and encouragement (“It’s not the mountains that slow you down, it’s the sand in your shoe. Enjoy the sunshine! YOU are a winner!”) to blush-worthy stories of topless sunbathing in Australia or her dancing for Gene (“He always has a smile! Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.”). And she sent me cards and notes; one that hangs above my desk reads: “Golf and yoga are a lot like life. Breathe deep, try to relax. And don’t fart.”

  What she shared most were her and Gene’s travel plans and experiences: they were hidden-gem hunters and had golfed much of the UK and Ireland, and she sent me scorecards from unknown courses that didn’t have so much as a web page. Gramma Billy (or GB, as I would come to call her) was all energy and enthusiasm, and she boosted my book sales by pushing A Course Called Ireland on each passenger checking in at her counter with golf clubs. “I probably talk about you more than your own mum!” she wrote to me, and I believed her.

  She sent me Scottish guidebooks and cheered me on with weekly check-ins, exhorting me to live fully, golf often, and dance naked. The poster Gene sent was a golf map of Scotland that he had seen in a Scottish B&B twenty years before, and he researched its origins and acquired a copy through the National Library of Scotland. This benevolent gesture rescued a rare Scottish chart that would be my spirit guide, a divine caddie, a golfing treasure map marking the path to the game’s secrets. So I put pins in all its seaside courses, too, and suddenly my trip was twice as long. So many, many pins.

  I consulted George Peper and Malcolm Campbell’s definitive guide to links courses around the world, True Links, and discovered more required layouts born after my library map’s printing. I checked out Golf on the Rocks, a book GB sent me that tells the story of an eighteen-course journey through the island holes of Scotland—some requiring daylong ferry rides or chartered prop planes, with courses seemingly reachable only by parachute, and soon there were tiny forests of pins sprouting up around my map’s edges.

  Scotland was beginning to look a lot different than Ireland. Ireland was a tidy little loop in comparison to Scotland’s cracked and gnawed coastline, with links tucked into the deepest corners and holes hidden at the remote tips of unending peninsulas. Robert told me that the search for the soul of golf wasn’t meant to be simple, so I ventured deep into the heart of Google Maps and crafted a tally of courses that included every layout to ever host an Open, plus every Scottish links I had ever heard of and about fifty of which I had not a clue. I tacked on every course Gene and GB had discovered on their UK travels—their picks, I decided, were musts on this mission, even though a handful were planted out in Wales and down in Cornwall on the southwestern coast of England. The trip had outgrown my map, covering three countries and stretching from the southernmost to the westernmost to the northernmost courses on both the Scottish mainland and its islands. If the secret to golf wasn’t there somewhere, it simply did not exist. I could accept that result, but Robert was right—I couldn’t accept the unknown possibility of a course unplayed.

  Experience had shown that unexpected links would appear and alter my list, but after months of plotting, my pre-trip tally arrived at 107 destinations:

  1. Littlestone

  2. Royal Cinque Ports

  3. Prince’s

  4. Royal St. George’s

  5. Mullion

  6. Perranporth

  7. Trevose

  8. St. Enodoc

  9. Holyhead

  10. Bull Bay

  11. Conwy

  12. Wallasey

  13. Royal Liverpool

  14. Royal Lytham & St. Annes

  15. Royal Birkdale

  16. Blackpool North Shore

  17. Eyemouth

  18. Dunbar

  19. Glen

  20. North Berwick

  21. Renaissance Club

  22. Archerfield Dirleton Links

  23. Archerfield Fidra Links

  24. Muirfield

  25. Gullane

  26. Kilspindie

  27. Luffness New

  28. Craigielaw

  29. Eden Course, St. Andrews

  30. Old Course, St. Andrews

  31. Jubilee Course, St. Andrews

  32. New Course, St. Andrews

  33. Castle Course, St. Andrews

  34. Strathtyrum Course, St. Andrews

  35. Burntisland

  36. Kinghorn

  37. Lundin

  38. Leven

  39. Elie

  40. Anstruther

  41. Crail Balcomie

  42. Crail Craighead

  43. Kingsbarns

  44. Panmure

  45. Scotscraig

  46. Monifieth

  47. Carnoustie

  48. Montrose

  49. Stonehaven

  50. Royal Aberdeen

  51. Murcar

  52. Newburgh on Ythan

  53. Trump International Golf Links, Scotland

  54. Cruden Bay

  55. Peterhead

  56. Inverallochy

  57. Fraserburgh

  58. Rosehearty

  59. Royal Tarlair

  60. Cullen

  61. Strathlene

  62. Buckpool

  63. Spey Bay

  64. Moray

  65. Hopeman

  66. Covesea

  67. Nairn Dunbar

  68. Nairn

  69. Asta

  70. Shetland

  71. Whalsay

  72. Stromness

  73. Castle Stuart

  74. Fortrose & Rosemarkie

  75. Tarbat

  76. Tain

  77. Skibo Castle

  78. Golspie

  79. Royal Dornoch Links

  80. Royal Dornoch Struie

  81. Brora

  82. Wick

  83. Reay

  84. Durness

  85. Ullapool

  86. Gairloch

  87. Isle of Skye

  88. Traigh

  89. Isle of Colonsay

  90. Machrie

  91. Machrihanish Old Course

  92. Machrihanish Dunes Course

  93. Dunaverty

  94. Shiskine

  95. Trump Turnberry Ailsa

  96. Prestwick St. Nicholas

  97. Prestwick

  98. Royal Troon

  99. Barassie

  100. Glasgow Gailes

  101. Western Gailes

  102. Irvine

  103. Barra

  104. Askernish

  105. Isle of Harris

  106. Old Course, Musselburgh

  107. The Open Qualifying Series—Bruntsfield Links

  I didn’t bother seeking Robert’s approval of the final agenda. I knew our trip was really my trip the minute I silently said yes to it. As large as his presence loomed over the itinerary, I couldn’t depend on his being there for a minute of it. Robert would come and go, commit and back out, show up and disappear; while he loathed unreliability in others, he relished his own. Robert would be with me throughout, but I could only guess at the days I would actually see him.

  Complicating the arrangement of my Scottish splurge was the title on my business card, along with the fact that I carried such a card at all. It read Assistant Professor of English, Saint Joseph’s University. I had somehow infiltrated academia in recent years, where I found that a professorship closely mimicked a round of golf: the bucolic serenity, the opportunities for growth and learning, the chance to feel like a genius and a moron in the same minute. In the interest of not blowing up my chances for tenure—as a professor, and as a husband—my proposed glacier of golf had to squeeze into a needle’s-eye timeframe. If I le
ft after my final class of the spring semester and teed it up the following morning, I would have less than two months till the Open qualifier. The absurdity was too gorgeous to resist. So I went and built a schedule of tee times, reservations, ferry rides, and flights, shoehorning 107 rounds of cross-UK golf into fifty-six days.

  The itinerary sat on my desk for a few weeks, each date packed with two or three rounds without a single empty day to buffer for weather, shin splints, or pneumonia. At night, I dreamed gluttonous dreams—I was large and round, tobogganing hot dogs down my throat in the heat of a summer competition. I was running marathons with golf clubs on my back, a pale and waifish shadow of a man falling just short of the finish line, collapsing under the weight of a tour bag, dead and blistered. I had done crazy golf before, but at forty, a golf trip covering 107 courses seemed unhealthy in the kind of way that makes friends and forgotten siblings circle around you before a “family dinner” to tell you that they love you and want the old you back.

  The list ended with the Bruntsfield qualifier as my final round, and I wavered on whether I should have stuck a return trip to St. Andrews for the 2015 Open there. Would it be a cocky and foolish tempting of golf’s fates? But if I didn’t believe in my chances enough to plan for it—if I didn’t trust that this plot pointed to St. Andrews—how was it supposed to come to life?

  GB didn’t doubt for one second where my round around Scotland was going to end: “We will be there! Pushing you on to St. Andrews! YOU WILL DO IT!” She was unafraid and stuffed with hope and so comfortable in her own skin, so carefree and convinced of the good in life. I didn’t know whether she could break a hundred on the golf course, but it became clear that it wasn’t Tom Morris I needed to become; it was Gramma Billy.

  • • •

  I would surely be joined by caddies and locals along the way, but in each cell of the spreadsheet I’d hatched (the first of my adult life), I began penciling in the names of friends and strangers who’d offered to walk a few holes with me. As a guest on the PGA Tour Radio Network one morning, I described the girth of my quest, and did something that this careful foursome-arranger had never done before—I left it up to chance, wadding up my best-laid plans and tossing them across the airwaves like dice. “If anyone listening wants to join me,” I said, “I would love to have the company.” And with that came the emails: Were you serious when you said that? You got any spots left at St. Andrews?

  Robert told me I was an idiot.

  “Do you know how many nutjobs are going to show up for this? Everyone’s going to want you to entertain them and tell them stories about Ireland and shit. No thanks,” he said.

  His opinion mattered little in this case—he didn’t need courting for the trip, and he excelled at inconspicuously avoiding the company of new acquaintances he wouldn’t take the time to get to know. I explained that the open invitation came with a firm no-roommate policy, and that I could enjoy pretty much anyone’s company on a golf course. I didn’t tell him that a portion of the motivation for inviting all comers was to avoid two months on the road alone with my best friend.

  Most of my potential companions inquired about St. Andrews, but I informed them that those two weeks of the trip—when I would be dropping anchor in town and day-tripping to courses all over Fife—were reserved for family. Those who were willing to hike out to farther-flung destinations included a couple from Rochester; a designer from Chicago; a pro from Florida; a consultant from Boston; the Women’s World Speedgolf Champion, who was living in Amsterdam; and a character named Penn, from Georgia, whose emails were a blend of poetic links musings and first-day-of-school giddiness—Holy cow, I’M PUMPED!!!—that made it impossible to tell whether he was sixty or sixteen. When Penn forwarded along his Edinburgh flight times, with arrival and departure separated by eleven days, I felt my back sliding down my office chair. Maybe my laissez-faire approach had attracted not the sagest golfers but the loneliest and least balanced. Who decides they want to join a guy they’ve never met before in Scotland? For more than a week? It wasn’t healthy thinking. Then again, neither was golfing Scotland for two months and trying to qualify for the Open. If they were unbalanced, this was the trip for them.

  None of the partners I didn’t know were as worrisome as the partner I did. Robert had nearly sunk my Ireland trip entirely, almost sending me home a month early after a run-in with Irish police. (When they showed up looking for him at our hotel, he was upstairs sleeping off a Jameson mugging while I begged forgiveness for an evening they seemed to recall far better than I did.) Robert had been with me for all my books, though I didn’t write about him, per his request. Being reduced to a character in a story—like some sort of admirer or punch line—was, he felt, beneath him. So I promised I wouldn’t write about him until he was dead. That would make him smile and say, “So, next year, then?”

  “You’ve got nine lives and more,” I would tell him.

  Robert considered himself the spark behind the stories I had written and felt that my books were as much his as mine. I feared that he was right, which only added to my list of resentments about the friend I couldn’t shake. He was still the twenty-year-old I wanted to be, and the golfer I never was. He would probably spend most of our Scotland trip drunk and under par. The dumb, lucky bastard.

  Robert had been sick for the last three years—we both knew why but didn’t talk about it—but any doubts I had about his showing up in Scotland were disproved when he messaged me a photo of his application for the Open qualifier at Bruntsfield. GAME ON, read the text. Suddenly, I didn’t care about teeing it up at St. Andrews with Rory and Phil and the gang, nor was I worried about the travel habits of Penn and GB. I was after something bigger. The answer to golf took on a quiet and piercing focus: Beat Robert.

  Posture

  I took the biggest one they had. I hadn’t considered whether the luggage I purchased was too large to check on a flight—who sells a travel-banned suitcase?—but mine passed only after the agent decided she could subtract two inches for the wheels. I had stuffed two months’ worth of garb for golf in all seasons into one hard case. Hopping from one accommodation to another every morning meant I would have one hand for the sticks that would never sleep alone in the car and five fingers for everything else. Add a shoulder for my laptop, and my whole world would be able to travel sans luggage cart from hotel to tee box to car to B&B to ferry port to airport terminal, a snug one-man caravan.

  I wheeled my life down the long hallways of Heathrow and arrived at a short line of Americans waiting for entry stamps on their passports. There were two officers stamping—a woman in a burka who smiled and breezed visitors through, and a large and bitter-looking lady who opened each passport like a nun opening a Penthouse. I prayed for the burka, as I knew the dates and locations scribbled on my entry form would raise eyebrows and might involve a supervisor while a tee time well south of London awaited me. When I got to the front of the queue, I heard a “NEXT!” from the angry agent that had me feeling like Oliver Twist begging for another bowl.

  “You’re here for a while,” she said as she read my form without looking at me. “Can you tell me why?”

  Well, you see, there was a text from my friend about the rota courses—rota means the courses on the Open rotation, and there are only fourteen, or really ten nowadays—and this was after I lifted the Claret Jug but shouldn’t have, and once I played golf for 542 days in a row but didn’t find the secret to the game, and there are a lot of links courses over here and I couldn’t look Robert in the eye if I didn’t play all of them, and Allyson said yes, and then Gramma Billy sent me a poster and told me to golf often and dance naked . . .

  “Golf. I’m a golf writer. I’m going to write a book about your golf courses.”

  “You write golf books?” she said, as if I had told her I jumped unicorns over rainbows.

  “I do,” I said.

  “That sounds boring.” She turned back to my documents, her suspicions giving way to apathy. “What’s this addr
ess in St. Andrews?”

  “It’s where I’m staying with my family . . .”

  “Are they here?”

  “Not yet.”

  She reached for her stamp, satisfied that someone willing to say they wrote about golf posed no possible danger to her homeland. But then she paused and looked at me. “Does your wife play golf?”

  I said that she didn’t, and the woman smiled, a point tallied for her side. “I don’t blame her,” she said as she handed back my passport. “Hey, he writes golf books!” she called to the woman in the burka, who looked up from her desk and smiled at me with tender confusion.

  “Good luck,” my friend said, and I grabbed my world by both hands and stepped forth into the now.

  • • •

  I inhaled deeply. I looked around me and told myself to remember this—all of it: a breeze knocking at my back, the pale green and yellow mounds, my cold feet settling into the turf. All the planning and predicting and hoping—it all led here, to this small patch of short grass, where I turned a golf club in my hand and waited for the group up ahead to clear the fairway.

  A start. There were precious few moments in my life when I knew a beginning before it passed, when I could recognize a commencement, when I breathed deep and knew the jumping-off point. My first day of school, my wedding, the births of my girls—they all came with the fearful knowledge that only one thing ahead of me was certain: change. As I bent to stab my tee into the ground, I reminded myself that on this round, this two-month bout with my golf ball, I was responsible only for the effort, not the outcomes. There might be change for the better or for the worse, but all I could do was keep swinging. As few times as possible, I hoped.