If God Designed Golf Courses, They Would Play Like This

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/20/opinion/british-open-championship-links-golf.html

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Every links is a golf course, but not every golf course is a links. We throw the term around as a synonym for anything resembling a golf course, but most golfers will never actually play a links. Yet they witness one every July, when, as it has this weekend, the Open Championship returns to our televisions.

This year’s Open is being played on the Scottish coast at Carnoustie, and for golfers, it brings four consecutive Christmas mornings of coffee and major championship golf. But unless you know what you are looking at, it may seem a joyless holiday of brown fairways and bland sport.

Without any framing foliage for the cameras, links golf looks like a walk across a wide and rumpled and faded carpet, where the holes are dotted with sandy pits and bordered by tall weeds lest the golf played between them gets too boring. We see the billowing flags and the ski caps pulled down over the player’s ears and feel grateful for our summer sunburns.

We fail to realize that we are watching golf played upon its most sacred altars. We can’t see that we are witnessing a miracle of both nature and sport.

I recently circumnavigated Scotland in search of the secret to golf. My two-month itinerary of 107 links courses would have felt empty without a visit to Carnoustie and those angry fields near Dundee, where visitors leave calling the place not Carnoustie, but Car-nasty.

I was to play the course with my 81-year-old father. When I told Dad that Carnoustie would be the final round of his portion of the trip, he muttered its name under his breath and gazed off into the distance, contemplating some final words for me to pass along to my mother. Tell Mom I loved her. And that I went down swinging.

He was no doubt recalling the Carnoustie collapse of the French golfer Jean van de Velde, who in 1999 pinballed his way down the final hole of the Open championship and frittered away a three-shot lead in infamous fashion.

All golfers remember where they were that Sunday. I was a caddie at the time and watched on tiptoe at the pro shop window, glued to the television inside as images of golf’s great tragedy unfolded. From every corner of the clubhouse came the groans, the laughter, the sickened silences as we watched Carnoustie rip back strokes from the Frenchman, leaving him barefoot in a flowing burn. It is a recollection that still unsettles a golfer’s soul, because in our memories of that morning, we somehow feel our every failure and misstep and regret; we see Carnoustie, and imagine our own dreams turning to sand in our hands and passing through our fingers. We fear the place, but we really fear what it proved to us: that this game we love doesn’t love us back. Golf remains indifferent to notions of hope and mercy, and on any given tee box, we suspect that we might all be Van de Velde.

Dad and I had a quiet drive up to Carnoustie from St. Andrews. He had introduced me to links golf when I was 13 years old, on a family trip to Ireland where we took a break from hunting for gravestones with our name on them to play a local track called Enniscrone. From that first moment when we peered out into a rippled horizon of sandy mountains and waving beach grasses and our caddy said, “Hit it there,” I was hooked. Links golf was not the golf I knew. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I wanted to know it deeply. I have been chasing my golf ball through the dunes ever since.

The expression “links” derives from an Old English word meaning “hill” or “ridge” — it came to describe the ranging dunelands with which the British Isles are uniquely blessed. Unusable for farmers, links land was left to the herdsmen and hunters, and to the first golfers in Scotland who found a landscape ideally suited to their game. Livestock nibbled the valley grasses down to playable height, rabbit’s warrens were patted down and puttable, and where the sheep laid into hillsides and wore the grass down to its sandy bottom, golf’s first bunkers were born.

Before the helping herds came glaciers and ice ages and millenniums of receding waters and shifting tides that left behind these former seabeds turned preposterous dunescapes that no course designer could have imagined or sculpted. Millions of years of geographical phenomena went into shaping a true links course; nature forged the pathway that inspired and sustained the game. It’s hard to say the same about Wrigley Field or the Staples Center, so forgive golfers when they behave as if their game is divinely inspired. Because it was.

It took years for me to understand that this is what I was feeling on a links — the providence of it all — and to accept that golf in any other setting was an imitation (often wonderfully so) of the game’s true state. Links golf plays differently — the ocean breezes require one to engage the landscape rather than avoid it. It’s bowling versus darts.

Links golf forces you to ponder the myriad ways a golf ball might arrive at point B from point A, while our softened version often suggests one or two straightforward strategies. It feels and sounds differently, too — the crunch of hearty beach grasses underfoot, the thud of a ball hopping across hard-packed sand. It’s the sandy base that makes all the difference — it drains like a colander, playing fast and firm even in the frequent downpours. It is a place where a game meets the natural world in a way to stir the spirit, to make a participant feel like a small piece of a vast plan. Mountain climbing probably achieves the same end, but tee times in Ireland and Britain are an easier summit.

It’s also relentlessly difficult. Links rough is wiry and hungry, and with little to stop your Titleist from finding it, golf balls go missing like there’s a hole in your bag. The bunkers are shoulder-height, the gorse thorns will bleed you before giving back your ball, and even the most seasoned links player will struggle to gauge how the wind is going to affect a putt.

That is why links golf, and the Open Championship where it is annually celebrated, is golf’s greatest setting — because golf is a game for chasers. There is no perfect score, no blemish-free round, no reason to not go back out tomorrow. Links golf cannot be solved, and its whims shift with the winds. It offers a hundred answers to one simple question: Can you bury this little ball six inches beneath the earth?

Dad and I both survived Carnoustie that afternoon; we even carded a bogie and a par on 18, scores that would have had Van de Velde kissing the Claret Jug. But my pilgrimage to Carnoustie was only a stop on this links journey. I am in Donegal, Ireland, as I write this, a week deep into another links binge, and this morning I took five swings to dislodge my ball from the vegetation beside a fairway. I was Jean van de Velde. And I may be tomorrow when I head back out into the dunes again. Or maybe tomorrow will be the round when all the shots follow my intentions, and golf is finally solved. For this chaser, that would be a bigger nightmare than anything that ever happened on the 18th at Carnoustie.

Tom Coyne (@coynewriter), an associate professor of English at St. Joseph’s University, is the author of, most recently, “A Course Called Scotland: Searching the Home of Golf for the Secret to Its Game.”

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