HORIZONTAL GOLF
“The newspaper is read more in the vertical than the horizontal plane, while film and advertisement force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular. And before a contemporary finds his way clear to opening a book, his eyes have been exposed to such a blizzard of changing, colorful, conflicting letters that the chances of penetrating the archaic stillness of the book are slight.” – Walter Benjamin
I was not crazy about Kilspindie, but it’s hard not to stand in awe of the striated horizon here of golf course, dry sand, wet sand, surf, ocean, and finally the hills across the way. It just goes on and on and makes what is already a flat course seem like it is being crushed under these layers.
I had heard the ground game so often described as aesthetically satisfying, as clever and proper and real. But in reality it’s just necessary—there were so many times when the ground and the wind combined to eliminate an approach through the air.
There is nothing perpendicular about these courses at all. There is nothing to draw your eye upwards, there is no shade coming down from the sky, there is nothing framing the green, there aren't a lot of birds flying around. Modernity has certainly drawn our attention to the windshield and the computer screen, and I found it refreshing to look downwards to investigate the “stillness” of the turf.
GOLF IN A 35 MPH WIND
Is it golf, even a modest form of the game? I can think of only one argument in favor, which is that my opponent in the morning, an affable professor of history at Berkeley, fired a smooth 83 while I was at times physically unable to route the club on plane. So it can be done, but for the most part, it ain’t golf. I thought that I was having a “real” Scottish links experience, but all of the locals to whom I later bragged quickly informed me that I was crazy for having played recreationally on a day like that.
I played in 25 MPH winds the first day—I thought it was delightful, and, perhaps in a fit of naiveté, I had my best round of the week. It occurred to me within a few holes that a critical challenge of links golf was the ability to hit a long iron as far as possible, off the barest of lies, directly into the wind, several times in a row on the same hole with increasing panic. I skill I was unlikely to master on holiday, though Gullane has thoughtfully for the tourists pointed their practice range into the prevailing storm.
But 35 MPH was not exponentially more difficult, but rather impossible. It is said that Fred Couples went fifteen years without missing the sweet spot, and if you can’t do that, you can’t play in these conditions. Misses with sidespin took on a comic trajectory, some of my slightly fat shots went just forty yards downrange, and even my best-struck irons went straight up into the air, resembling the kites I used to fly on the beach as a child, and crashing to earth with an equivalent suddenness. Playing downwind was just plain bizarre, as the jet stream that I thought would be so helpful was actually strong enough to create downdrafts, which drove the ball into the turf with topspin, causing it to go all kinds of places.
Not to mention the insane incessant roaring in one’s ears, as well as the low-level nuisance of having the snot literally blown out of you for the entire day.
YODA (GOLF IN THE KINGDOM)
I played Muirfield with a sixty-nine-year-old member who walked and played much faster than anyone I have ever seen. He carried his bag and hit a burning draw well past me on most holes. When I parred the seventeenth to go one down, he came right up to my face and said “ ‘tis a good match that goes to the last.” He finished me off, and at lunch, when I was annoying the other members by attempting to discuss the courses in Castine and Islesboro, he tugged on my sleeve and whispered “Michael, this is a dining club with a golf course attached.”
After lunch I said that I was going to play Gullane #2. “I’ll take you ‘round, I’m a member there as well,” he replied. He paid my guest fee and then gently attempted to snag the first tee time for Saturday because, for convoluted reasons pertaining to competition, he needed to play three rounds with his son that day.
On the back nine, as he was running me into the ground and clearly enjoying it, I asked him if we could sit down for two minutes, stretch our legs, and take some photos. After I gorged myself at the water fountain on this sunny and windy day, I asked him if was going to drink anything more than the glass of lemonade he had with lunch. He said he was fine.
This time the match was over on the sixteenth green. On the next tee, after he smashed one down the hill I said “You’ve got to help me. I need to find the sweet spot. I’m getting my ass kicked by an old man.” He said, “I’m self-taught, son, I can’t help ya.” I pressed on about the secret of golf, and, after confessing to a robust amateur career that included nineteen aces, he said, exactly like Harvey Penick drew it up, “You’ve got to drop that elbow straight down, son. It straightens the left leg.” I hit my tee shot, dropping my elbow and pegging up, and it was that nice butter fade, gently dropping down twenty-five yards behind his ball. I turned to him for an assessment.
“Agh. Ya cut the ball. All day. It goes nowhere.”
THE OLD COURSE AT ST. ANDREWS
Total chaos. The mindless opening tee shot has a deadpan hilarity to it, because once you hit the burn and its razor-sharp edges, all hell breaks loose. For some reason, I thought that this was going to be a subtle golf course, but it is quite the opposite. The number of bunkers, their invisibility and depth, the amount of ground contour, its steepness and diversity, the tee shots to a blank horizon of gorse, the places where the fairway simply goes missing, the insane crossover, the hundred-yard greens—I would say this course is defined mostly by the sheer amount and variety of
stuff on it.
Add to this the threat of getting beaned, the threat of getting lost (my host Rich Goodale, who wrote a book on this place, got us lost), the baggage that comes with playing at the Home of Golf™, the extreme height of the numerous high notes right next to a few ugly and awkward corners, and you’ve got the most unusual and atonal walk in the park that I have ever seen.
It’s just a golf course, so The Old Course is not alive and it is not sacred. What then makes it so good and causes to emotions run so high, as mine certainly did?
In
Rabbit at Rest, Updike writes about any round on any course that “When you stand up on the first tee it is there, it comes back from wherever it lives during the rest of your life, endless possibility, the possibility of a perfect round . . . ” The Old Course is the only one I have ever seen that reciprocates, whose permutations of features, wind, and hole locations indeed seem to be endless and therefore a match for the human imagination.