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From Carnoustie to St. Andrews, rounds to test the bravest heart

Playing Scotland's Great Courses
By Patrick Hasburgh from Forbes Traveler

It was a daunting challenge--twelve rounds of golf, to be played in seven days, on the ancient and blood soaked links of Scotland: Turnberry, Troon, Muirfield, North Berwick, Gullane, Carnousite, Kingsbarns, Crail and St. Andrews. I would carry my own bag, caddyless, and perhaps take a shot at the middle-aged American record for cursing and tripping, chili dipping and missing.

I probably had no business playing these esteemed and historically significant golf courses with such a mediocre skill set, but if youth is wasted on the young, money is wasted on the middle aged. I did the whole trip for five grand, but I could have very easily spent ten had I not switched from the porterhouse steaks to the fish and chips.

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My golf swing is like a snow flake--no two are alike. Still, I was hoping to play at least one of my Scottish rounds in the eighties. I'm a seventeen handicap who frequently plays like a twenty-two, with the occasional scratch hole after a dead solid perfect two-hundred and fifteen yard five-wood dinked off of a short tee. Thanks to my local PGA professional, I can now score in the eighties with a swing that doesn't deserve to break one hundred.

I had been told the courses in Scotland are short and relatively flat, and except for the wind, pretty easy: "Just stay out of the gorse and you'll be fine." Hah! In twelve rounds I played in the nineties four times; my other rounds were triple digit slug fests that, had they been actual prize fights, would have been stopped shortly after the opening bell.

On a cultural note, it must be observed that Scots strictly adhere to the magnificently arcane etiquette of the game. Taking a questionable drop, or kicking your ball out of a divot, immediately produces guilt ridden and remarkably un-American regret. If you pick up a ten inch putt, the local player will politely look away, ignoring the transgression as if you had just passed gas in front of the Queen.

It's also been said that the number of holes on a links match the eighteen shots in a bottle of Scotch. Here, whiskey and golf are as married as drugs and tedium, prematurely aging both lads and lassies into knockoffs of Peter O'Toole. Maybe it's the fluoride free water or the residual disaster of socialized medicine, but pub conversations often look like a contest of Stonehenge impersonations.

When I teed it up on the first hole of the Ailsa Course at Turnberry late one Sunday afternoon this past August, my goal, regardless of score, was to play the round with just one ball. On my first Scottish round I scored a leaky one hundred and six, and lost five brand new Turnberry logo Titleists, as well as two yellow range balls scrounged from the bowels of my bag. The weather was unusually sunny, but typically windy; I played each hole on the wind whipped backside of as if it was a par seven, and I thrust my fist in the air every time I made six.

Leaning into a sharp gale at the infamous Ailsa number nine hole, with a glimpse of my ancestral Ireland behind me and the ruins of King Robert the Bruce's castle my target line, I began to rediscover that golf is an astonishingly pleasurable, if not magnificent, obsession. There are less than one hundred people on earth capable of racing a Formula One car wheel to wheel with Michael Schumacher, but there are countless high handicappers who have hit at least one pro-level eight iron six inches from the stick. On rare occasions golf lends greatness to the chump, the working stiff and the also ran; for an instant we can be Young Tom or old Arnie, holing out for a birdie from the bunker.

Royal Troon and the Portland course at Troon were the most environmentally difficult courses I encountered. The roughs were intentionally unkempt in true Scottish tradition: the fairways dimpled and brown, the greens fast and hard. A Wizard of Oz wind raged throughout both rounds. But who has time to complain when you're shredding your knickers in a gorse patch hunting down nine dollar ProV1s emblazoned with the Royal Troon logo? Muirfield was exquisite, the most turned out and exclusive course of the trip--playing the course is an invitation only affair, and the hardest course to get on in Scotland. Just down the road were North Berwick West Links and Gullane Number One, two of the best walk on public courses I have ever played; fantastic and fair links golf, reasonably priced and welcoming.

Playing Carnuoustie, however, I was simply content not to break down and cry. On a day that looked as if it had been shipped in from Hawaii, our foursome, of which I was the weakest corner, voted to play from the championship tees; a rarely available option and arguably golf's most challenging test. I made my only par four on the ninth hole, two five woods and two putts, and then played out of my shoes to bogey sixteen, seventeen and eighteen; among the most demanding closing holes in the game. Some golfers kneel at the altar of Old Tom Morris or maybe Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Nicklaus or Tiger. My golf god would be Sisyphus.

Kingsbarns is a magnificent links course, big, bold and a little over the top--everything is outsized, from the bunkers to the blue cheese burgers served in the bar; think Ancient Golf World at a Scottish Disneyland. Just south is Crail Balcomie, a humble yet quite delightful course, the seventh oldest in the world, established in 1786; a hodgepodge of clever par threes, yawing-into-the-wind par fives and gorse protected par fours, it is and up and down and around and about--the holes wonderfully out of order, lopsided and amiss.

The morning of my last day I played the New Course at St. Andrews, an over-rated working class track that looks more like a divot farm than a one hundred year old world class links. At three-thirty that afternoon I teed off in front of an omnipresent SRO crowd on the Burn hole of the Old Course at St. Andrews. I hit my best drive of the week. From one hundred and thirty-five yards out I smoothed an eight iron intentionally left of the first green to take the water out of play. I chipped on and two putted to make five. I had three pars on the front side of the Old Course and shot forty four; two strokes under my handicap.

The Old Course at St. Andrews contains only two bunkers designed by humans. The rest were crafted by sheep; hoofed out by mangy ruminants hunkering down against a wet and relentless onshore wind while nibbling away at the fairway grass. It has been unremittingly windy since before brave hearts were drawn and quartered on these par fours, so the sheep herd dug out protective hovels, which are now the sand traps that routinely swallow your shots. Dolly's primordial gene pool is to blame.

I made five on ten and then doubled bunkered for a double bogey on the eleventh hole, maybe the toughest par three in the world. I made the turn at Heathery and headed in, battered by a two club wind, scrambling out of bunkers with an occasional stroke of brilliance, but falling prey to the Old Course's subtle greens. I carded a marginally respectable ninety-five from the back tees on the Old Course at St. Andrews -- astoundingly, I played the entire round with only one ball. This, even to a lapsing atheist like me, was something of a miracle.

As I looked back from the eighteenth green and regarded the magnificence of the Old Course, and the precious village of St. Andrews and all its spectacular ancientness, I couldn't help but ponder how a game as civilized and sophisticated as golf could have been born and then flourished in a land and at a time when witches were drowned by the thousands, and heretics beheaded for the public good. King James II banned golf in 1457 because it was distracting his archers from target practice while an invasion from England loomed, and anyone who has ever played the game with even a modicum of dedication can attest to its distractions and fixations.

But how does one squeeze in a quick eighteen on the Old Course and then go and cheer as a dozen young women are burned at the stake for being disciples of the devil? And how is it possible to attempt a ten foot putt for birdie with the howls of the damned and the raw slap of the lash ringing in one's ears? During golf's first two centuries Scotland was an intellectual wasteland of raging religious lunacy. While a Christian Taliban executed countless infidels and satanically possessed witches, the Reformation roiled and priests were hanged for advocating a married clergy.

Yet despite this holy fanaticism, or maybe because of it, the royal game of golf somehow endured--eventually outlasting such bloody duffers for good. If music can calm the savage breast, maybe golf can cure the zealot. Scots no longer burn witches or behead heretics. In fact the country feels politely and delightfully secular; its religion, if it has one, appears to be golf.

See our slide show of the great courses of Scotland.