Robert Tyre Jones

Come Masters weekend, golf’s rank and file fans will be joined by millions of drop-bys.  They will look for a spare chair in the living room and ask who’s winning, what an eagle is, why anyone would wear that ridiculous get-up.  But most simply absorb the beauty of the golf course, and as they do, they fall silent and grow attentive.  A very few of them have little stories they can tell.

Among the kibbitzers is my ex-father-in-law.  Never a golfer, he is however, a Georgia native, Atlanta born and bred.  In the ‘60s, as the South agonized its way through still more of the seemingly endless toils of its past, Atlanta billed itself as “the city too busy to hate.”  It was plausible.  Coca Cola and IBM were as much institutions as blue ribbon businesses, and segregation had no place in their business models.  Their names alone gave Atlanta a worldly aura, and in time, a skyline matched by no city in the South.

A booster mentality obtained.  Business was good.  Upward mobility was real.  Everything was about moving forward.  There was at that time no more important or powerful institution in the city of Atlanta than the Chamber of Commerce.  C of C luncheons brought the city’s business elite to table with its up-and-comers, and they were not to be missed.

Yet for all of its sky-is-the-limit enthusiasm, Atlanta was in some respects as much a part of the Old South as any nook of the Confederacy.  Courtesy bordering on courtliness was still the way people treated one another.  Even as it looked forward, Atlanta was a city that felt the tug of its past.

My father-in-law worked for Atlanta magazine, which did more than support the city’s positive outlook: it helped articulate, focus and energize it.  The Chamber’s events were a natural for him to attend.  And that was how he came to be riding in an elevator one noon when the doors opened and admitted, in the glittering cage of a wheelchair, a slight man, plainly withered by whatever wasting disease he suffered from.

What struck my father-in-law was the man’s self-possession.  While he was obviously pained by how much space his wheelchair used, he didn’t apologize for it.  No need.  The atmosphere in the elevator had turned electric.  Everyone knew who he was.  When he was rolled into the dining room, there was a slight murmur. Atlanta’s elite paid respects not by stopping over to gladhand, but by not stopping over to gladhand.  The volume of conversation in the room dropped for the balance of the event.

That was all.  But in a room full of wealth and ambition, the kind of place most likely to pay no heed to its past, he was the center of attention.  If one thought about it, he was hard to get a handle on.  The magnificent golfer, of course.  But what about the engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the English degree from Harvard, the JD from Emory?  What kind of mind enquired into such varied disciplines with such obvious command?  And there was his fate: the athlete denied the use of his body, for the spinal disease he contracted did just that, and would kill him before his time.  He was hard to get at.  In a roomful of his native Atlanta’s most elite strivers, gravitas attached to the man who had no great fortune, ran no great company, whose great deeds were a generation old.

Hearing this years later, I wondered what my father-in-law had said upon that chance encounter with Bobby Jones.  A simple hello?  A handshake and a word or two?

He was silent for a bit, and then he said: “No.  There was no such person as Bobby Jones.  All anybody in Georgia knew was Mr. Jones.  I heard him called Bob Jones sometimes, and that was borderline acceptable coming from people who new him well.  That implied a familiarity.  But to me, and most folks, he was Mr. Jones.  Pure and simple.”

I imagine it is difficult to lose your personhood and become an icon, and that is exactly what happened to Mr. Jones.  Who ever managed it better?  He was, in one sense, lucky, because he put his gifts to work in yet another field, designing Augusta National, which all at once deflected attention from the man, and came to represent him.  He left behind not only his legacy as a player, but one of golf’s most sublime golf courses, and a tournament that squeezes the breath out of the best players in world.

People from around the globe will tune in for the theater that the old peach orchard in Augusta produces every April.  And Georgia will pay its respects to Mr. Jones in the way it always has: not by presuming a false familiarity with the man, but by glorying in his most enduring achievement.

The crossing to Portaferry

Waiting for the ferry I watch Strangford Lough tighten and boil whitely through a last narrow chute.  Somewhere beyond a horizon made brief by sullen clouds, it spills into the Irish Sea.  Beyond the crossing sits the Portaferry quay and behind it a steep hill.  It is a sunless Monday morning in October.  Bored commuters ignore the scent of salt water and the screaming gulls.  When they hear the bass rumble of the ferryboat’s diesel the men prepare to board by shuffling their newspapers closed and getting into their cars.  The women rearrange the children in their prams.

The ferry ride lasts all of five minutes, but the short, steep chop and strong breeze feel bracing and fresh, an antidote to the achromatic day and the feeling that every day is the same.  Map of Ireland in hand, golf clubs in the boot, I am bound north, from Newcastle to the Ards Peninsula, a hook-shaped prominence south and east of Belfast, for a round at the Kirkistown Castle Golf Club.

Designed by the great golfer and course designer James Braid, who called it “an eerie, exposed course,” it is not easy to get to.  For my purposes, I count that good.  The combination of a great architect and a remote location is the promise of Kirkistown.

There are a great many out-of-the-way courses that have been hauled from obscurity into the light of day.  Still, I’m sure there are worthies that have not.  I would like to find one or two.  The getting there is half the fun, and in most cases, all of it.  If you do not feel this way about these things, then this sort of exploration is not for you.

Once across and over the rise, I am in sheep-raising country, following twisty, hedge-lined roads, passing through ancient villages with names like Clough and Churchtown.  There is mud everywhere on the roads, brown and red, in stripes and clumps, for the roads belong as much to the farm tractors as they do to the cars.  A mist begins.  Too light to fall, it hovers, integrating itself into the grey light and the brown and red mud.

Hungry and in need of a directional tweaking, I stop at a pub.  It is not quite noon and I know Kirkistown is not far. In the pub three young farmers are leaning on the bar drinking their pints.  One is quite drunk, and the other two not drunk at all.  All wear black Wellies and mud-colored overalls and yellow slickers.  They are covered with mud, vestments of mud.  Their faces and their hands are red from weather and hard use.  The drunken farmer asks me if I am a Yank.  I affirm, and he offers me a thrashing for it.  His mates take an arm each and tell me no bother; he’s harmless.  He argues the point.  He is, he says, far from harmless. His friends buy me a pint.  I drink it and am on my way, undirected but uninjured.

The mud, the mist, the easily understood temptation towards an early cocktail hour, all conspire to make Kirkistown feel truly remote.  The road emerges from the farmland and starts heading due north, hugging the Irish Sea.  The seaside location of the course suggested by the map seems ratified.  I feel a score coming on.

No.  The road in fact hugs the beach quite tightly, too tightly to place a golf course between it and the water.  When I spot a very modest sign directing me to the clubhouse, it is on the landward side.  So much for a links course.   The pro is genial, lanky.  His shop is more like a tool shed than a pro shop’s display set-up.  What he has to sell is limited almost entirely to what a round of golf that day might require: tees, balls, gloves, ball markers featuring the course logo, trolley handles, rain gear, golf shirts packaged in odd glassine bags.

The course is deeply undistinguished.  It is, of course, treeless, but it doesn’t have much else to shape it, either.  No gorse, no humps and hollows. The bunkering is minimal.  Most of the holes are dead straight.  Its most profound feature is a mesa-like rise in its center.  Braid in his routing of the course used it whenever possible, but it adds no interest.   The land is so flat otherwise, and the hill so abrupt and brief, that the sudden rise plays less as the leit motif of the golf course than as an impediment to any kind of rhythm. Hole by hole I whittle the course away,  eager to be finished.  I feeI less like a golfer than a commuter trying to make a train.  In Kirkistown’s topography, Braid simply had far too little to work with. Good golf ground in Ireland is like its roadways, all gentle heaves and twisty hollows, and that topography I had negotiated with a steering wheel, not my golf clubs.

When I play locally, I occasionally partner up with a native of Ireland, and I ask him for the best obscure course he knows of.  I always get a thoughtful answer.  I write the unfamiliar names on my scorecard so they don’t escape memory.  Often these courses have a website.  If it is an unpolished website, good.

Braid’s description of Kirkistown holds up.  It is exposed, in the way an airport runway is exposed.  It is eerie, in that a landform more appropriate to Arizona than the north of Ireland erupts from its center.  So it goes.  Panning for little-known and very good golf courses, there is no such thing as Fool’s Gold, only Next Time.  I have some names saved up.  I’ll keep at it, because you just never know.

Snowing.  Again.  We live in our zip codes and take what we get.

Up here on the mountain, winter is emphatic in cleaving golf into separate seasons: one forever gone, one way too far in the future.  There is last year, and next year.  Between them is now.

If we didn’t strain for signs of the fresh season’s start within weeks of the old season’s end, we’d be reasonable people, and golfers are not reasonable people.  So the signposts, implausible as they may be, are needed, and noted.

A few I count on.

Jim Nance ‘s seductive tones, promising for the first of what will be many times, that come early April, CBS will for the zillionth time host The Masters.  (All genuflect.)  Georgia’s azaleas will bloom in just, mmm, ten or so weeks.

Jim’s plugs came on last weekend’s football broadcasts.  Parenthetically, is Bill Belichick not a tad quirky?  In fact, the only thing he’s missing to complete his look is the scythe.  Now that he’s secured his last offseason berth (his home) and the Jets remain alive, media outlets here in New York are encouraging Jets Coach Rex Ryan to have fewer press conferences.  If the Jets beat Pittsburgh come Sunday, the prospect of doubling up on Rexspeak over that two week lull before the Super Bowl becomes a real danger.  Could be rough.

I like the January Thaw.  Not this year.  No thaw.  Sorry.

The Super Bowl.  It used to be played in mid-January.  Now the tournament stretches into the first part of February.  Toss in the fact that Ground Hog Day will be in your rearview mirror by the time the game is played, and winter looks like it might someday conclude.

Spring Training.  Is there a surer promise of spring’s advent than the news that pitchers and catchers are due to arrive across Florida and Arizona?  A true milepost.

Equipment Fantasies.  More complicated because they arc across the entire winter.  Gardeners, afflicted with the same off-season malady as golfers, cope by memorizing Burpee’s catalogues and promising themselves that this is the year they’ll really, really, commit to weeding.

Golf magazines, prospecting among this year’s new clubs, new balls, new shoes, and all the collaterals, whet the appetite.  All-new, much-improved, custom fit.  None of this off-the-rack business.  In darkest January, this is light, and what it illuminates is the path to a better game. It best, or some players might reason that it would be okay to stick with the thousand or so bucks worth of equipment they’re playing now.

Of new equipment, there is no reason to dismiss it out of hand, but balance expectations of equipment-driven improvement with Brooklyn Dodger general manager Branch Rickey’s comment on the connection between money and success enunciated in a contract negotiation with outfielder George Shuba: “We finished last with you, we can finish last without you.”

Maybe it’s true.  Maybe I can play just as crummy with what I’ve got as what I might get.  But.  I just saw a prominent—make that blaring—teaser on the cover of one of my golf magazines that said simply: “Buy a Better Game!”

Shook my world.  A flat out guarantee?  This is the best idea.  Ever.  I’m off to the world of sporting goods, credit card in hand.  Just as soon as I finish identifying the car (I know it’s somewhere in the driveway), shoveling it out, and finding a kindly neighbor to give me a jump start.

This year I mark not one, but two, silver anniversaries.  My golf clubs and my pickup both hit 25.  It’s a time to pause and reflect.

The pickup is a 1986 Chevrolet C10, the line’s entry model.  It was cherry red when I bought it, but it’s not anymore.  Too much sun.  Now it’s about the color of an M&M your kid lost behind a couch cushion years back.  That it’s around at all is a marvel.  It was built just as American manufacturers figured out that by dint of economies like thinner sheet steel and plenty of plastic, they’d improve margins.  Good thinking!

Never a show truck, the Chevy was put to work.  Firewood by the bed-load, overstuffed couches, dump-bound televisions, skylarking children, the truck’s done it all.  Sometime in the ‘80s I gave up all pretense of maintaining its looks.  When I backed it into a brick wall and bent the diamondplate rear bumper, I took on the bodywork myself, using a splitting maul to get things more or less in order.

As of this writing, the truck has never been washed by the hand of man, and I better not find anyone trying to break the streak.  I have my pride.

The clubs, 1986 Hogan Apex blades, are, like their namesake, severe-looking and unforgiving of a bad shot.  They’ve always been a little more than I can handle.  But I’d played a few sets of sloppy-feeling clubs, and I wanted to go with blades.  That meant the Apex, the Staff, or the beautiful, pretty much forgotten Palmer Peerless.

The Apex woods were shortlived.  The 5-wood cracked, a replacement cracked, and I was told to forget it: persimmon was in short supply, was being harvested too early, and couldn’t stand the gaff.  I put the wooden woods away and bought a metal driver.

The irons are quite another story.  Look at a pure blade Apex today and it won’t look much different than one of mine.  In some years the head shape is more musclebacked than in others, and the tiny gold disc on the back of the clubhead comes and goes.   But they’re all true to the look of mine.

I am a golf Luddite, though I’ve continued to upgrade drivers and fairway woods in self-defense.  I won’t own a rescue club.  It’s a matter of principle, though I’m not sure which principle.  I play the 3-iron, which is hard, and I carry the 2-iron on windy days or whenever I go the UK, because while I can’t get it more than 30 feet off the ground, it will scamper true for a couple of hundred yards.

Club fitting wasn’t around in 1986, and I’m not sure I suffered too much for the lack of it.  Not long ago, though, I succumbed to the loft/lie thing and brought my clubs in for a look.  The club-fitting guy eyed them for a long time and then said, “What do you want me to do with them?”  Smarty pants.

In truth, though, over 25 years they have seen some hard duty.  Their silver luster is mostly gone, the red ink in the numbers on the soles entirely so.  And—here’s the rub—the grooves aren’t very groovy anymore.  I priced an overhaul: re-grooved and re-chromed runs about $700.

I don’t know.  Maybe it’s time for champagne, cake, a gold watch and honored retirement.  I know that was the feeling of a pro I met up with during a round last fall.  He was, of course, completely plugged into the elegance of the Apexes.  Yet as we shook on the 18^th, he said “Let it go.  Look around some.”  And finally, like Welles at the close of Citizen Kane, he uttered a single, final word: “Mizuno.”

There is nothing of Welsh-flavored golf at The 2010 Course, a glorified patch job engineered for the Ryder Cup.  Fourteen holes of dead-flat slogging through the rather aptly named Valley of Usk lead to some thumping good stuff: a four-hole finish that includes a drivable par-4 and concludes with a par-5 that can be reached, though not readily, in two shots, the second of which must fly a greenside pond.  There will be moments when decisions and execution down that stretch will mean much.  Risk/reward, hero/goat, defining swings.  It will be fun to see, especially for the loads of fans who will watch it all from the best seat in the house: the stadium-like rise that forms one side of the Valley.

It is a course that will never make anyone’s best-of list, and if it goes onto the must-play list of some golfers, it will not be because it epitomizes Welsh golf, but because it had a moment’s flare in the spotlight.  Upcoming U.S. hosts Medinah (2012) and Hazeltine (2014), along with past venues like Valhalla, The Country Club and The Ocean Course at Kiawah, have hosted plenty of U.S. Opens and PGA Championships.  For painfully obvious reasons, The Belfrys, K Clubs and 2010′s of this world will never host the Open Championship.

There is nothing flavoring of Wales about the competition’s host, the Celtic Manor Resort, either.  The very best that can be said of the resort’s flagship hotel, a 350-room brute bristling with cherry-red faux awnings above each window, is that it’s a fine chunk of infrastructure for a world-class pageant.

For Wales, though, it’s all about the spotlight.  The Ryder Cup is An Event, and what it will do this time around is showcase Wales and its golf.

The countryside is beautiful, the people warm, and first-rate links golf is strewn liberally along its shores.  Aberdovey, Royal St. David’s, Pyle and Kenfig, Pennard, Southerndown, and the jewel that is Royal Porthcawl will gain more notice over three days than they have in the 100 or so years they’ve been in existence.

The world is not getting a first-class golf course out of this contraption of a venue.  But Wales, its people, and its marvelous golf are all making their debut on a worldwide stage, and they will more than stand the scrutiny.

TheAPosition is a big fan of the Champions Tour.

On America’s High Plains, towns announce themselves as clusters of silvery skyscrapers rising above the flatness, and only with diminishing distance do the great towers resolve themselves into grain elevators.  After awhile I knew that the towns were much alike.  Along with the elevators would be a railroad grade crossing, a convenience store for gas and Coke, the remains of what once was the center of town, and then more road, much more road.

I have always wanted to see that kind of vastness, grand and unpeopled, always known that I’d never tasted it in the east.  When I had a chance to satisfy that craving, along with my more or less permanent desire to play really good golf courses in places that are really hard to get to, I jumped.

The golf was promising: Ballyneal, Tom Doak’s stroll through the Chop Hills in the northeast corner of Colorado; the Sand Hills Club, the Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw overnight sensation in the Nebraska panhandle, and finally, along the Missouri River, the Links of North Dakota.

I wanted to get from place to place with my feet on the ground, absent the familiarities that have dulled away the tang of travel, blunted  the edgy strangeness of new places.  I made the concession of flying to Denver, then applied three strictures: no interstates, no name-brand lodgings, no brand-name restaurants.  It’s come to this: we Americans like to be on the go, but we want to feel like we’re home while we’re on the road.  We want to put pushpins on the map, but keep the experience antiseptic.  From sea to shining sea, we can use the same overhead bins, roll over the same pavement, read the same green road signs, check in and check out of motels where we can find the light switches in the dark.

That arrangement wouldn’t answer the question of what vastness looked and felt like, and it would cut the heart out of these golf courses, these gems whose attraction lays partly in the fact that they are far from beaten paths.  I let the golf dictate my route: northeast to Holyoke, up into the Nebraska panhandle, doubling back to nearly the Wyoming line, and then north almost to Canada.  Five days, 1300 miles.

Suburban Denver was slow going, and I was late to my first stop, Holyoke.  The terrain had changed as I drove north, growing sandy and dry, developing washes and rises, and eventually gathering itself into a rhythmic pattern of tightly spaced swells and drops running in long parallels.  By Holyoke they had a perfect name: the Chop Hills, and in Doak, a perfect architect to shape them for golf.

Among course architects, Doak is the prototypical minimalist, a man who loves to find good land, create green complexes that invite a variety of tactical approaches, and otherwise let things alone.  How he found his way to such a style is mystifying, because he started his career working for Pete Dye, who has done things like run a conga line of sand-filled dump trucks to the shores of Lake Michigan in order to transform a barren coastline into Whistling Straits.

Doak told me Harbour Town, the relatively short, small-greened gem we see each year as part of the Tour rota, is the Dye course in which his approach is rooted, because it rewards precision off the tees and the ability to play a variety of shots.

I got out onto Ballyneal quickly and quit at dusk, the only player out, when I couldn’t find a ball I felt I’d hit into the fairway.  Ballyneal is textbook Doak, a reflection of its terrain.  It sluices through the Chop Hills and their 50 (count ‘em 50) kinds of grasses, all of which help hold the hills in place. It creates in the player the sense of a world unto itself, and it is fun, because it is really quite eager to reward.  It asks for patience, creativity, and favors accuracy over length.  It allows players to discover how well they can play jack-of-all-trades style golf.

When I left the clubhouse I’d marked a radio tower as a good line back in–I’ve learned that a links course without a reference point can turn you around.  In the failing light I made for the pulsing red light of the tower, following the fairways as best I could and bushwhacking the rest, not a plant among the 50 varieties failing to get a piece of my ankles.

The club pro, Eric Petersen, met me outside his shop, arms crossed, taking in the sunset.  He told me he had worked in California prior to coming to Ballyneal.  “You smile here and you get smiles back,” he said.  “Different than California.  I feel like I’m in heaven.”

I thought of Doak’s luck in having the Chop Hills to work with when I assessed The Links of North Dakota, the last course I played on that trip.  The Links sits on an all but flat piece of land set along Lake Sacajawea, which until a dam went in was far more slender; part of the Missouri River.

A perfect spot for a picnic, not as prime for a golf course.  It so lacked lift, and without lift, depth perception becomes a real problem.  Call it drama, or character, it’s hard to find on dull ground.  Stephen Kay, a designer who has done most of his work in the New York and New Jersey region, must have had the devil’s own time putting it together.  It pops up on 100 Best of this or that lists, but that may have more to do with getting North Dakota onto those rosters than anything else.  Golf, however, is as Doak points out, meant to be fun.  And playing a round in North Dakota, with its flavor of obscurity, was fun.

Between my first round and my third, there was ground to cover, about 1000 miles worth.  When I struggled back into the pro shop at Ballyneal, a pack of coyotes was howling.  Somewhere far to the west, silent lightning flickered from cloud to towering cloud, delineating their edges with lavender light.  Petersen gave me directions back into town.  Turns on unmarked roads, no lights, no houses.  Holyoke seemed a long way away, let alone Mullen, across the Nebraska state line, where I’d spend the night and get to one of our generation’s gems, The Sand Hills Club, next day.

I found Holyoke, gassed up for the run to Mullen, and within a hundred yards was stuck at a grade crossing.  Gates down, signals flashing, bell ringing, hopper cars not budging.  After fifteen minutes passed it dawned: They call them freight trains because they take on freight. Long train may mean long wait.

Stalled.  Hungry. Sandy. Sweaty.  I felt like a used up Lawrence of Arabia. But I’d made the rules.  No grade crossing-free roads, or familiar neon-announced demi-foods, or bellowing green exit signs promising motels I’d heard the names of before.  Have a Coke, for the caffeine.  I went back to the gas station.

There lounged a young local.  He was smoking in that sublimely comfortable way that suggests his entire being had been organized around his cigarette.  Red hair, red beard stubble, freckles, skinny.  A rusty razor blade of a fellow.  He listened and sent me up past the grain elevator, beyond the head car.  I crossed, boxed my way back to my road, and was on the way to Mullen.  Self-designed travel has no middle ground.  Elation and despair live side by side. Have the trip you’re having.

I called Patty Glidden, proprietress of the Sand Hills Motel, to say I’d be running a touch late.  She yawned. “Ring the desk bell when you get in.”  I could tell it wasn’t the first time she’d taken a call like mine.

The road to Mullen was runway straight, illuminated exactly as far as my headlights could throw a beam, and I picked up some time.  The Sand Hills, burlier by the mile, spooky creatures less seen than felt by night, funneled me along.

The motel was a little the worse for wear.  It was interesting the way nothing–chairs, sink, bed, carpet– smelled particularly savory, but no two of them smelled alike.  I turned on the air conditioner to help flatten out the mélange.

Reds-Café, the place to breakfast in Mullen, sits right alongside Route 2, the main east-west stem across southern Nebraska, but the crowd was strictly local.  It was a place where you kept your cowboy hat on and any customer who wanted coffee went behind the counter for the pot and said things like Anybody here got dust in their throat?  I was told a good Nebraska story: Red, the now deceased owner of Reds-Cafe, served breakfast to a lady who asked for her toast light and got it served up burnt.  She made a remark.  As did Red, pointing to her butter knife and suggesting she scrape at her toast until she got it to the shade she liked.

Dick Youngscap, the man who bet that a golf course hundreds of miles from a city of any size would stand up if it was very, very good, and had purchased a great many acres of Sand Hills real estate to back it up, was the portal to my getting out for a round at The Sand Hills.  (The club is far from public, but the opportunities in that special landscape are now well-understood.  Dismal River, not far down the line and open to all, is said to be well-worth looking into.)  He gave me the mile marker to watch for on the side road leading south from Mullen to the club entrance and warned me to watch carefully because it was so small.  Youngscap is a languid-sounding man of few words, but his accomplishments speak clearly.  Highly-regarded Firethorn (designed by a somewhat kinder, gentler Pete Dye) on the other side of Nebraska, in Lincoln, is also a Youngscap brainchild, though he’d never bring something like that up.  “We don’t wear our boots too high around here,” he told me, in one of his longer sentences.

From the parking lot to the first tee it’s a long cart ride up into the dunes.  On the rise, the golf course slowly takes on its shape, flag by flag, green and tan runs of prairie grasses separated by slightly greener fairways, and shaggy-edged  explosions of intensely white sand called blowouts.  It has the one attribute great courses of every stripe must: character.  It just feels so well-executed, so complete, consistent without repetition, and it imparts a can’t-wait-to-see the next hole feeling.  Crenshaw and Coore, who are philosophical brothers-in-arms with Doak, created a blend of very generous fairways and greens that slip and slide so much a caddie is well worth the hiring.  Getting to the greens isn’t terribly hard unless the wind is running, which it certainly will do in the High Plains, but without a very fine touch and deft reads, the putting can be a terror on any day.  I liked it too for its we-don’t-care-what others think eccentricities.  It has, for example, no tee markers, just boxes in which to peg it as you please.

After I played at The Sand Hills Club, I headed back through the hills themselves, towards South Dakota and the run up through Hot Springs and into North Dakota.  The hills are exhilarating, so long-running that the word forever popped into my mind.  Smooth-topped, big-chested, they loafed along beside me mile after by mile.                                    That was the beginning of a long ride, more than 800 or so two lane miles of roads not many people use any more.  On Route 85 north through the Dakotas, the miles fled by, yet I seemed never to advance.  Fifty miles of telephone poles carrying a single wire ran in perfect tandem with barbed wire confining – if that’s the word – range cattle zip codes from their barns.  Clouds billowed to 50,000 feet, the hot wind throbbed, and I was all the time reining the car back down from 90 because 90 seemed, if anything, a little slow.  Another vehicle was an event.  Occasionally, 18-wheelers appeared, mirage-like, quivering in the road heat, closing no distance at all until in a trice they blew past and left me in their backdraft.

I stopped the car once in awhile, because I was curious about the sound of such hard, profoundly lonely land.  It was silent, enormously still, devoid not only of sound and movement, but even the possibility that that could change.  By then I thought I had nailed down the idea of vastness.  It was a spaciousness beyond comfort, a deep loneliness with nothing to offer but a strange, abiding beauty.

In Watford City, N.D., I pulled onto Main St., parked, and walked.  Sun-cooked, unmoving, dominated by a grain elevator along the railroad tracks, Watford City seemed to have pretty much closed up shop.  Most of the storefronts, and there were few, had blinds snugged down, fending off the heat or suffering the last years of their near-barren irrelevance.

I turned a corner and there gleamed, as improbably as spats at an Iowa church picnic, a spiffy limousine.  It sat outside of a bar.  Out of the bar came music and chatter.  I walked in; it was cool and dark and alive, there was a white cake on the bar, people of every age were laughing and drinking, and the bride, luminous against the good cool gloom in her white dress, was dancing.  I was welcomed.  A visitor from another world was just fine.  The beer was cold, and I regretted having to move on.

I wished afterwards that I had asked where that limo was headed.  Back down Route 85 to a small resort in Hot Springs, South Dakota?  Or maybe an airport and a flight to New York.  I pulled for New York, I suppose because the best places are the ones you haven’t gotten to yet.  As for me,  I can only tell you that when in Mullen, eat at Reds.  Good coffee, friendly, and word has it no bad place for a chicken-fried steak if that’s your mood.  And while Belle Fourche, Buffalo, and Bowman may have their points, I recommend a stop in Watford City.  You’ll probably have a bunch of miles under your belt and a bit of High Plains dust in your throat, and the folks in Watford City will see to it that you don’t leave on that next long leg of your trip without getting rid of that dust.

We worked our way up Ireland’s eastern coastline from Dublin toward Belfast with one of the world’s big boys, Royal County Down, on the agenda.  After a tough driving day; wet, slick, and breezy, we’d made Newcastle, about 30 miles south of Belfast, and taken rooms at the Slieve Donard, a massive old dowager overlooking Dundrum Bay.  Close to the golf course, too.  A two-minute stroll along a path framed by tall privet hedges to the pro shop.  Nothing if not handy.

We had the good luck to stumble upon tickets for Christy Moore’s show that night in the hotel theater.  In the pantheon of Irish rock and roll/balladeers, only Van Morrison occupies a more exalted spot than Moore.  He is much-loved, a hard worker on stage, joking and deadly serious by turns, playing the house.  He sang about love and music and politics.  In Ireland, always and forever there will be the politics.  But for me, the vague feeling of risk that was once part of trips involving Belfast and Londonderry is gone, though the aphorism that what has gone on between England and Ireland should never be remembered by the Irish nor forgotten by the English still obtains.

Outside the Slieve, I’d spent a little time preparing the emotions for the donnybrook scheduled for the morning. The town, strung with lights, had an almost carnival look about it, but on closer inspection the lights weren’t signifying much.  A seaside town gone out of season.  The lighthouse marking the north tip of Dundrum Bay was flashing, warning mariners off with a snapping beam of white light.  Between me and it, I knew, lay 18 holes of golf that were, besides being memorable, hard.  Difficulty is not necessarily a component of a great course.  Royal Portrush’s Dunluce Course, for instance, does not deal out the punishment with the remorselessness that County Down does.  But I hadn’t been to Portrush yet, and knew only that come morning, I’d pay a good bit for my mistakes.

I played on a Monday morning, and so the place was deserted.  An indifferent-looking assistant pro looked up from his newspaper and waved me towards the first tee.  There was a starter’s hut, sans starter, and  a very small practice green behind the tee boxes.  County Down is an odd links in that the water’s presence is felt but the Bay itself goes virtually unseen.  The fairways run like rivers through big-shouldered dunes, and while you can smell the water, hear its wash along the shoreline, and are obliged to respect its breezes, the water itself is a thing beyond.

This setup is the look right from the first tee.  I hit off, and lured by my ball, followed along and entered County Down, the dark star of Irish golf, a consuming world of ragged-edged bunkers, blind tee shots, humps, swales, twists, gorse and thistle.

There are many ways to define a golf course that lifts itself above the rest—even the very good—and can arguably be called great.  They all, I think, begin with good ground.  All the rest; setting up hazards, creating danger (or the perception of danger), giving the player more than one way to play toward the same result, all these rise off the foundation of good ground.  Great courses are never shoehorned into a real estate parcel.  As different as they look, feel and play, they are true to their environs.

County Down was shaped only by the hands of God and Old Tom Morris (Morris worked for four gold guineas; God’s earnings are unrecorded).  The collaboration wove a world of wind-and sea-scoured defiles that not only shapes the course, but creates as remote and absorbing a feeling as I’ve eve felt on a golf course.  It wasn’t until rethinking the round that one of the strongest emotions it produced, that of the loneliness that singles acquire, is especially strong at County Down because one can rarely see another hole.  Fore is a cry seldom heard.

Morris said the golf course was 90 percent built the day he first set foot on the site.  He was left to design only the bunkering and shaping of greens. In this he was artful.  We can feel this something, this hand and glove union of the game and the ground, at some moment early in the round—a click in the part of the player’s brain devoted to golf that registers, gee, this place is really, really something.  At County Down, where the first holes move steadily away from the clubhouse, I hit off on the 3rd, a sinuous par-4 of 440 yards, and even though the ball finished in the fairway it was right of center, and so my view of the green was compromised by a shoulder of dune intruding into the fairway.

I suppose there are golfers, some of them mumbling about “fairness”, who would have the offending hummock shaved away.  But no.  County Down sunk a black and white candy-striped pole with a black and white bullseye atop it into the ground behind the green.  Hit it at the pole and trust.  That’s when I thought: there’s no place quite like this.  And turning that corner is where the click came and the rest of the world vanished behind me.

County Down truly is hard—I mean by this it is not open to negotiation, to half-shot penalties for balls that stray and can be thrashed back into play, or tee shots that never get going and just make a hole longer.  On many holes, the carry from the tee is forced.  Keeping it straight avoids the trouble running alongside the fissures of fairway.  Accuracy off the tee is vital –and rewarding –anywhere, but the grasping runs of nettles and spiky gorse and lank grasses at County Down make it vital.  They are as entangling as any.  Even finding a ball in that clumpy, grasping wilderness is a bit of misfortune, for hitting it out is like trying to swing a club in a field of railroad spikes.

That said, a ball in the fairway almost always opens a scoring opportunity.  The green complexes tend toward the simple and straightforward, and the course’s length is not insuperable (6722 yards from the middle tees, 6190 from the front.)  Some holes,  such as the aforementioned third, the fourth (a 212-yard par-3 to a slippery green) and the 9th (a par-4 of 425 yards) will play shorter than the card if the wind is right.

Playing to a handicap — “marker” in United Kingdom parlance – of nine, I most certainly took some scrapes along the ankles as the price of waywardness, but I birdied two holes, including a lipped out eagle try on the short, blind  (480 yard) par-5 12th, and those, of course, are the things you remember.

Blind.  Five of County Down’s tee shots are blind, further amplifying the feeling of mystery, of constantly needing to round a corner in order to see what lies ahead.  Since the course includes four par-3s, the mystery of where you are going with the driver nets out to five of 14 swings — more than one-third.  These blind tee shots, marked though they are with rather tentative-feeling directional aids (white-painted stones the size of seed pearls set at the far limit of visibility), are the one serious criticism leveled at County Down.  It’s a good grill room debate.  In fact, say some, (include me in this), a blind shot is only truly blind once.  But, say others, you can never swing with quite the conviction you’d like to when you can’t see where you’re going.  Blind shots equal flawed architecture.  You decide.

On balance, I wanted to play County Down again.  For the golf, and simply for being there, enveloped in the coarse beauty of the dunes and the thistle and the gorse.  I had been awed by it, enchanted, really, and I would have liked to switched attitudes next time and simply play it as hard and well as I could.

On the last turn back towards home, the spires of Newcastle’s churches and the Mountains of Mourne lift in the background.  It is a time of reawakening.  There really is a world beyond the green thread Old Tom pulled through the dunes below.  You don’t finish County Down: you emerge from it.

Royal County Down is justifiably called one of the world’s great golf courses.  Unlike most of its brethren — and there are of course truly great golf courses throughout the United Kingdom and in Ireland — County Down is a bit of a doyenne. And with one or two exceptions, that’s rare.  There is a tale that at least one golf club in the U.K. posts this sign outside its pro shop: “All visitors welcome except members of Royal County Down.”

Many a round in the U.K. and Ireland ends up with club members and officials having the Yank into the grill, but County Down was as quiet and unpeopled when I finished as when I began.  I found a spot in the car park and used that as my clubhouse, changing my shoes while leaning on a car.  Municipal-style.  And I considered as that day’s playing partner the links themselves: Old Tom’s layout, the aiming rocks, the candy-striped marker pole, the forbidding beauty of the place.

I have a file — loosely speaking — labeled “Golf Stuff.”  It’s an old, out-at-the-elbows shoebox, struggling to hold a warren of magazine clips, logo balls, tees, and ball markers.  Most particularly, though, it’s my scorecard library, wealthy with the short stories I write to myself in a hieroglyphics of numerals, dots, checks and circles.

These cards are the few culled from the many.  Some I save simply because they name the most luminous stars in golf’s galaxy: The Old Course at St. Andrews, Shinnecock Hills, The Sand Hills, Royal County Down.  Others are simply the reportage of rounds played well, outside my norms.  The shoebox holds few photos.  Most are curiosities; a foursome of strangers, me among them, lined up shoulder to shoulder, drivers at parade rest, just prior to an outing of some sort.  A picture of the lighthouse at Turnberry with me as the requisite prop.  A football team-style shot of the entire field at an alumni outing.

I have, though, one prize set of pictures, of my own making: my father and my son, each on a knee, flagstick behind them, putters in hand.  Same green, same angle as best I could manage it, three years running.  Neither boy nor man is smiling self-consciously or mugging for the camera, and so the photographs are perfect.  My father looks no older from year to year, but the boy grows broader across the shoulders and his face takes on the lineaments I recognize today.  Time did its work of slendering the baby fat in his cheeks. The resonance of the photos—why among all the golf pictures and all the family pictures I own these mean so much— is in how they capture at a glance a bond between the generations.

My father and I did not always see eye to eye.  He was a child of The Great Depression and World War II.  I come from Woodstock and Watergate.  Will’s cultural touchstones are, well, yet to be identified.  I’m sure he’ll eventually text them to me.

I can’t remember exactly when my father and I called a generational truce and began playing golf together.  I don’t think we ever did.  Or needed to.  He played, I played, we played together, it got to be fun, and then it got to be much more: it got to be time well spent.  When Will turned five or so, he began traipsing along with us.  As he got a bit older, he began to fiddle with our clubs, and then to swat his own way around. We were a threesome, three generations, and our families never gathered without our sticks in the trunk and a piece of time set aside for golf.  It became ritual.

Will was not on the golf course with us the autumn afternoon my father died.  We were playing with a friend of my father’s, and, to complete the foursome, a single we’d never met, who in the shambles of that day I would remember little of.

I recall the afternoon in snatches.  I remember that when my father fell, the abandonment of every effort to remain upright was instantaneous and complete.  I remember other golfers rushing over to help.  I remember how long, how horribly long, it seemed to me, it took for the ambulance to wail its arrival and complete its hopeless careening across fairways and along service roads.  I remember the shirt being cut away, the paddles, the ride to the hospital.  I remember thinking, incongruously, that I would never again see my father apply his flaring whip of a signature.  I remember arriving home and saying to the boy, who was standing alone in the center hall’s late-day shadows, “Will, he’s gone.”

That happened in October, when the weather here in the Northeast restlessly shakes away the green of summer and begins to grow its winter teeth. The end of the golf season often comes abruptly.  Sometimes the weather runs fine one week, and the next bears no resemblance to it.  The marsh grasses grow brittle and chatter in a new, cutting wind, the clouds trade their ivory billows for a look sleek and steely gray, and the season is over.  That was one of those years.

Over the long, slow-moving months of winter, I wondered if I could ever play there again.  The question was complicated by affection: as a writer, my first big golf feature had been written about that course.  And as a player, it had fascinated me from the start.  Working along the breezy hilltop breast of treeless farmland gone fallow years ago, the architect had fashioned a weathery, links-like layout, bunkered it ingeniously, and created a puzzle that I grew to appreciate more the more I played it.

Its future in my life seemed to offer no middle ground: to play was either sacrament or sacrilege.

In early April, when the desire to play trumps good sense, I decided I had to go back.  It happened that I played alone my first time out.  When I arrived at the sixth tee I stood in the box an extra few moments, waiting for something.  I don’t know what.  A transformation. A shot of insight.  Enlightenment.  But everything was adamantly unchanged: I could easily see the short line of old crabapples, the tail of the service road, and further out, flapping as if to draw my attention away from it all, the blue flag.  That was all.  I hit, played the hole in the humming quiet of the breeze, and moved on.

It was not until full summer that I got out with Will.  We’d never played there before; the forced carries and many bunkers were simply more than he could have handled when he was younger.  But he had grown, and even without playing much he’d developed a swing that could get him where he needed to go.  When we got to six tee I told him that was the hole on which his grandfather had died.  He nodded, nothing more, and together we looked down the fairway.  Another season had brought along another world: the fescue was running thick and blond along the fairway borders.  The turf was intensely green.  In the crease of a marshy wetland, redwing blackbirds squatted on wavering cattails and darning needles drew silver streaks across the air.

Will and I have always had a deal.  If we walk, I take care of the grill; we ride and he’s on his own nickel afterwards.  We had walked that day, and so I was cleaning my shoes and hunting up my billfold preparatory to going inside when someone approached me, excused himself, and said that while he wasn’t sure, he thought he had played with me once.  I said it was possible; I often started off alone and picked up partners along the way.

He hesitated a long moment and said: “Did your father have a heart attack on this course last year?”

I stuffed the scorecard and the pencil into my pocket and put out my hand.  “You were our single.”

“I wasn’t sure I had you right,” he said.  “I didn’t want to, you know, ask.  And be wrong, or out of line with it.  It’s not my business.  But I remembered your clubs — Hogans — because not many people play them, and that made me pretty much sure.”

“No,” I said, “I’ve always felt it was your business.  And I’ve always felt bad for you.  You didn’t sign up for what you got that afternoon.  Don’t get me wrong on this — it’s just something I wonder about when I put myself in your place.  Did you finish the round?”

He hesitated again.  Then he said:  “Funny thing.  You know, it just seemed to be such a big decision.  My clubs were sitting right where I dropped them.  The ball was lying on the green.  You were all gone.  Everything was weirdly normal.  I was going to walk off.  And then I changed my mind.  I finished the round.  I didn’t really play it.  I kind of marched through it.  Eighteen was like a finish line.”

I said: “I’ve always hoped you did.  It’s strange.  Where else do you have someone die in the middle of what you’re doing, and then go back to what you were doing once the hubbub is over?  And have it be the right thing to do.  Just a strange game.”

I said nothing more out loud, but I knew that like our single, I too had finished that October round.  It just took me longer.  Until a day when my son and I, walking that golf course, together affirmed that the generations prepare to hand down the things they need to hand down not though formal ceremonies, but simply by completing what needs to be completed.  And so a day I wouldn’t wish on anyone moved golf a shade closer to the heart of life.  My time playing with Will is more prized.  He’s got a little brother coming along, and I look forward to that.  When I play alone, roaming around the immense, undisciplined beauty of the old farmland, I commune with the old man’s spirit.  It’s all good.

So the shoebox fattened.  A course you’ve never heard of.  Numbers that wouldn’t turn your head.  But there is more than one way to keep score, and because there is, that summer afternoon’s card is one that I am keeping.

TheAPosition say that keeping score easier when you use a golf course directory.

Third Green at Kiawah's Ocean Course (Joann Dost)

How formidable a challenge is the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, South Carolina?  Mike Vegis, the resort’s public relations director, and my host, puts it succinctly: “Yikes.”

There are golf courses, and then there are great golf courses, the outsized affairs that provoke our awe.  The Ocean Course is like that: unendingly beautiful to look at, impeccably handled in design and execution, and impossible to play.  Feel the love?  Nope.

That’s me and Pete Dye, when it comes to designing golf courses.  He’s a giant.  But no love.  Dye himself hides a bit behind a gruff exterior, but you won’t come across a nicer man, a more provocative golf mind, or an architect who believes more vehemently that designing golf courses is a good deal more simple than it’s made out to be.  Some of the most notable minimalists around these days — Tom Doak to name one — started their careers with Pete Dye.

The Ocean layout is no secret: best-known as the site of the 1991 Ryder Cup matches, it will host the PGA Championship in 2012, and for what it’s worth, you’ll find it on most every list of the best 100 golf courses in the world.  Running tight to a brilliantly white strand of South Carolina’s Atlantic beachfront and rolling dunes for much of its route, The Ocean Course is minimally manicured, loaded with hazards, and almost invariably windy.  Its somewhat links-like routing (it doubles up on conventional links structure by going out and back to the clubhouse on both nines) assures that the golfer will contend with those winds, which commonly blow at anywhere from 10 to 40 MPH, from a variety of angles.

I played it twice, both times with the surf roaring in my ears and a wind stiff enough to blow sand out of the bunkers playing with my mind, and finished with the sense that in benign conditions it would be a roller coaster ride, and that in the wind, I’ll never play anything more difficult.

On that score, let us take for our text the hole pictured above.  The third.  A mild dogleg, playing directly at the Atlantic off the tee, into the prevailing wind, with ominous-looking marsh, that alligator soup, fronting the teebox.  And that strip of sand running just about the length of the left side, which is set well below the fairway?  In local argot, a “transition area.” Its floor is reached by ladders, about ten steps worth.  From that depth, there is nothing in view when you hit out except the embankment you darn well better clear.  The good news?  A transition area is not a hazard!  You get to ground your club!  Changes everything!

Now look at that green — never mind the tree/rock thing in front of it.  In Dye’s constellation of tortures, that’s mere piffle.  From above, the green looks like a green Hershey’s kiss with the top third shaved off flat. No bunkers.  Simple, if small.  Notice the thick, golf ball-stopping collar?  Can’t see it?  That’s because there isn’t one.  Now think about how hard that whole construct is, and then factor in the drying capacity of the wind.  And consider the speed of the greens, which Vegis told me they like to keep at about tournament speed: 11 or a little better on the Stimpmeter.  Approaches both long and short absolutely flee this slickest of summits.  A problem Vegis, who has played the Ocean Course many times, copes with by using his putter once he gets near the base of a crowned green.  Think of the green as a commuter does about the morning train:  it’s not about getting close, it’s about getting on.

One way to sum up the character of the course is to say that from the many tee shots requiring forced carries, to the shortest of oh-so-fast putts, the Ocean Course is ready to pounce.  Another way to look at it is to say that there’s almost no opportunity to hit some loose shots and still coax pars from the course.  No scrambling allowed.  And as a loose shot hitter, I freely admit I am sensitive to this.  I remember hitting an approach at Dye’s Blackwolf Run course outside Sheboygan, Wisconsin, have it miss the green by ever so little — a foot or three — and bound off one of those railroad ties into the water.  No up and down possibilities for that fractionally errant shot.

As far as the Ocean Course goes, the best advice I can give is to leave your ego behind.  Before you ever peg the ball up, move one tee box ahead of the one you normally use.  You’ll have more fun.  If the wind is up, and you haven’t already moved up about as far as the boxes allow, move up yet another.  (Many holes have six choices.)  And take a caddie.  For moral support if nothing else.

The Kiawah resort includes four other golf courses, all of which treat the golfer with considerably more kindness than does the Ocean.  Of these, the best might be the Nicklaus-designed Turtle Point, which plays primarily inland, but finds its way out to the dunes for three holes late in the round, including the 14th, a short par-3 with a small, tightly-trapped green tucked into the far end of a tunnel-shaped run of sea grasses.

The property’s hotel, built seven years ago, is called The Sanctuary.  It’s a Southern-style beauty, evoking an earlier time with its large, high-ceilinged lobby, curling stairways, and interior columns.   The amenities are what one would expect of a five-star hotel: spa, fitness center, three restaurants (one outdoors), indoor and outdoor swimming pools (one heated), conference facilities, retail shops.  I never had a question the staff person I went to—whatever his or her specialty might be—couldn’t handle without needing to ask anyone else, and when my Luddite thumbs got in the way of setting my rental car’s GPS unit correctly, one of the bellmen took the task on as a personal (and successful) mission.  Southern pace, southern grace, inform the resort.  If that’s for you, try, while in the area, to explore nearby Charleston, one of America’s most beautiful and lively small cities.

At the last, great golf courses, like the Ocean Course, have a feeling of inevitability about them.  Of course, we think, that was the right place to set that green, and of course the rhythm of the holes was preordained.  But it never is.  Dye’s original concept for the Ocean Course had it somewhat further inland than it is.  His wife, Alice, goes the story, suggested that shifting the entire course tighter to the beach would make it truly memorable, and so that change was made.  One measure of a golf course is how successful it is in capturing the essence of its surroundings.  Rugged, wind-scoured, intimately connected to the sea, the Ocean Course is wholly successful in translating its geography into the language of golf.  Alice Dye, a fine competition-level player in her own right, wins at least some of the plaudits for that.

But I’m leaving her out of my own personal war with her husband.  Only one evil genius to a family.

Aberdovey at Sunset

The links at Aberdovey, Wales, as you see, are not a difficult place to get up an afternoon’s worth of links golf you won’t forget, and if you’re lucky, a few good stories into the bargain.

As fine as Aberdovey the course is, its great legacy to golf in Great Britain is one of its members: Bernard Darwin, who narrated golf’s stories better than anyone of his era and set standards for the entire sportswriting genre that have never been eclipsed.  A grandson of the famous naturalist, Charles Darwin, it was Bernard Darwin’s uncle who had introduced him to the Aberdovey links. As a child, Bernard witnessed the creation of the original Aberdovey course and, throughout his long and distinguished career as golf correspondent for The Times and Country Life, and in his many books on the game, he wrote frequently and lyrically about the delights of golf at Aberdovey.  In his own words, Aberdovey was the course that his “…soul loved best of all the courses in the world.”

You do not play alone at Aberdovey.  It seems unthinkable.  I suspected for a little while that this attentiveness was directed particularly at writers — everyone wants to come off well — but it’s not.  It’s simply the ethos of the place.  I had arrived in Aberdovey from the next village north, Harlech, home to Royal St. David’s.  Harlech’s links are inevitably campared to those at Aberdovey, and over dinner in the noise and roaring happiness of the village’s eating and watering hub, The Penhelig Arms, I had visitors aplenty stop by to wish me all the best.  And incidentally, to inquire about Harlech.  Competitions between the two clubs are are regular, fiercely contested, and thoroughly enjoyed.  A current of local pride runs just beneath the surface of every club’s politely generous assessments of its neighbors, and at Aberdovey it was all about Harlech.

Harlech, I said, was very nice, but I was looking forward to Aberdovey in the morning.  Yes, Harlech did have some attractive holes—a couple, in fact.  And yes, it was a shame that the Harlech links never reached the sea—it was always just beyond the dunes, and so it didn’t really play.  And wasn’t Royal Porthcawl something?  Prime, I said.  The Aberdovey members certainly wanted to hear that they had a links that overmatched Harlech, but nobody was soft-soaping the lordly dominance of Porthcawl.

All this golf chat was conducted to the defiantly unmusical pealing of a bell, periodically yanked to life by the bartender, whose domain also served as the service bar for the other — white cloth — side of the restaurant.  Evidently it was thirsty work, for the bartender, a hale fellow in his mid-60s, refueled his own inner man each time he shipped an order.  As the evening wore on, he grew more rubicund and the bell grew louder, more belligerent.  On that trajectory, the evening ended.

When I arrived in the Aberdovey car park next day, I could see the bartender standing near the practice green, and I thought I was going to have a very interesting playing companion.  He looked me up and down, told me to follow him, and headed for the clubhouse.  When we got to the door he turned to me again and told me to take off my hat.  We went upstairs.  He knocked on a door — the Club Secretary’s door — and I was given the honor of a formal introduction to Mr. Ian Hamilton.  The secretary hoped I would enjoy Aberdovey’s links.  With that, I was whisked downstairs.  And no, I wasn’t going round with my friend the bartender, who wasn’t playing at all, but had come over just for the rite of introduction.  He shook my hand and departed.

I played, in fact, with two young, well-to-do gents out for a few days from London’s Wall Street, The City.  Because Aberdovey is close to London, a simple train ride from downtown London to the clubhouse door, (a convenience Darwin loved), it is something of a summer colony.  Its strand is lovely, full of dogs walking their people, the sea air is bracing, and the shopping is more cutting-edge than old curiosity.  The links themselves are built on a thumb-shaped piece of coast pushing into the sea, obviously prime golf real estate.  The earliest course comprised nine holes, these being flower pots sunk into the turf. However there was soon a realization as to just how splendid the local linksland was, and the Club was formally founded in 1892.  The first 18 hole-course measured some 5,540 yards, and over time it has been tweaked by some of golf architecture’s best:  Harry S. Colt, James Braid, and Herbert Fowler.  Darwin said of Fowler that he had a knack for finding interesting routing with minimal invasiveness. His quiet hand touches Aberdovey in just that way.  There are few bunkers, and many greens are laid out at grade level.

Because the greens ride the landscape, the hardest thing about Aberdovey is hitting approach shots with conviction.  The lack of mounds, or flashed bunkers, makes distance estimation a problem.  Being told it’s 160 meters to the center is very different than knowing it’s 160 meters to the center.  Creeping doubt is a golfer’s enemy and one of the architect’s most subtle skills.  Aberdovey, while loping and unfettered-feeling, is still full of double bogeys.  Lank, heavy, club-stopping grasses are the enemy.  They also hide golf balls most effectively.  An Aberdovey man is, of necessity, a superb ball hawk.   And, bless him, a caddy of sorts.  For there are holes, in the center area of the basic out and back vee of a links, where several flags are visible, and the correct choice isn’t apparent.

On the first hole, between the tee box and the fairway proper, lies a pronounced mound.  Last of a lawn mower, I was told.  Hmm?  Yes, from back in the day when mowing was no different that tilling; a horse provided the pulling power.  And when this one up and died on the crew, there was no sense in doing anything but digging a hole and rolling him in.  Thus the mound.  I began to ask if that was really so, but I stopped myself.  A good yarn or a hard truth?  Is there a difference?

There is one hole, one unforgettable hole, the kind of hole you desperately want to nail, that violates the basic out and back structure of the course, and that is the par-3 12th.  It sits high up in the shining grasses of a dune and slyly offers just a peek at its redan-style green complex.  Far to the left the stick stretches its neck above all that you must carry or go around.  The hole plays towards the water, and into the prevailing breeze. The first time I played it I hit the ball just left of the throat, and we watched it begin a good-looking slide towards the hole.  Tap birdie.  But that’s not right, is it?  My second, and, I’m afraid, most recent, effort, involved a snipe, which proved a lost snipe.  Then, ball gone, hole tragically misplayed, I handled the pin for the other players because I was (metaphorically, since I had no ball) in the linen.  The walk to 13 is short, and was no doubt lovely that day.  I was looking at my shoes.

The last three holes head back to the clubhouse.  Going right risks another go-round in the thick stuff, but going left risks the train tracks, out of bounds.  Trains clatter through often, and I couldn’t help but feel that since virtually every man, woman and child in Great Britain plays golf, that there was some swing analysis going on in the passing coaches.  There was a last on-course story.  Our Pen Helig bartender, in the midst of his stretch run one afternoon, hit an awful hook.  A train, meanwhile, was gathering momentum out of the Aberdovey station.  There was that moment, that electric instant, when it became obvious that an intersection of ball and train was inevitable.  The only available emotion was fascination.  The ball, hooking hard, struck the train head on and spiderwebbed the engineer’s windshield.  He couldn’t stop fast enough.

“You’ve hit my train,” he shouted, adding some salty language to his wrath.

There was no denying that bare fact: the bartender, already out of bounds and most unhappy about it, was back on his heels, sputtering, nearing a dreaded l’esprit d’escalier, desperate for a rejoinder.  “Well,” he finally shouted back, he too dressing up his language for the occasion, “If you’d been running on time, you never would have been there.”

After the gauntlet of the final three holes comes the cure.  Upstairs in the clubhouse lounge are mounted the bits and pieces of a history that goes back more than 125 years.  I noticed a set of old golf clubs and ‘featherie’ golf balls neatly affixed to a wall.  They were presented to the Club by a member of the course-founding Ruck family, who wrote of them: “Set of golf clubs actually played with at Aberdovey about the year 1882.”

In the grill I asked about Darwin.  Surely his passion for Aberdovey didn’t go unremembered?

A member sitting with us excused himself, approached the barman, and said something I could not hear.  In a moment, a man whom I had noticed wheeling his clubs to the bag room minutes before, appeared in the grill.  I believe he had been waiting outside.  He introduced himself as Mr. O.G. James, and said he understood I cared to see the Darwin Room, of which he was the keeper.  He led me down a flight of stairs and unlocked a door.  There was — too bad for me — very little time to explore a place that begged for a good long browse. The Darwin Room is part memorial, part a library of sorts, full of Darwin’s prime products: books, both his and many others, and collections of his columns, along with clubs, balls and hardware that dates from an age that while earlier than ours, is hardly dead.  We know the game, and the way in which he writes of it: it’s all as fresh as the breezes that called him from his desk in London to the seafront at Aberdovey.  Mr. James, who plainly was familiar with every scrap and trinket in the room, gave me a cook’s tour.  I found myself as interested in him — the keeper of the flame — as of the room itself.  I didn’t know his name, had no notebook, and so when I inquired after him a month or so later, described him (to my eventual mortification) as an utterly genial, rather elfin-looking man.  I had this in return:

Dear Tim,

I have just picked up the email from our secretary Ian Hamilton about your visit around the Darwin room at Aberdovey golf club in Wales.  I’m sorry it has taken so long for me to collect this email and reply but my elfin duties have kept me busy!

My name is Owen Gwyn James and I have been a member of Aberdovey golf club for 40 years. When I first joined I was teaching in London and then I moved to Hereford where I now reside.  I have always made an effort to attend the Easter and summer meetings at Aberdovey and have been successful in one or two competitions over the years. My lowest handicap was nine. I now play off fourteen, not very well.  I am currently recovering from major surgery, so my golf is on standby. I hope to be fully recovered before long.  I have had the honour of being Captain of the club in 1999 and am currently Vice President, an honour which runs through 2010.

I have always taken an interest in the history of the club and when made Vice President I offered to become, with my friend, and former President, Dr. Edward Bell Davies, archivists for the club. So far we have listed all the books in the collection. These consist of most of Bernard Darwin’s published works, together with other historical golf books donated to the club by various societies and members. We have numerous photographs from the 1900′s onwards which we are in the process of cataloguing. Arranged around the room are other items associated with Darwin, i.e. articles from The Times.  Darwin whenever he was “lost” for a piece to write, inevitably wrote about golf at Aberdovey, whether it be the junior championship, or the Welsh championship.

Some interesting facts about Aberdyfi (Welsh spelling):  It is a founder member of Welsh Golfing Union 1892; Dennis Amis, former England test (cricket) player is a current member; and Ian Woosnam and Ian Baker, former Captain and Vice Captain of the Ryder Cup, are honorary life members, both having caravans on the club park.

If there is anything more I can do to help you, please let me know.

Gwyn

Darwin in his day found comfort and ease at Aberdovey (not to mention the occasional emergency column), although a line like  “…about this one course in the world, I am a hopeless and shameful sentimentalist and I glory in my shame….”  could never be written for the sake of expediency, but only from joy in the game brought to life by a favored links.  In the years since Darwin wrote that, the equipment has changed and changed again, book bindings have grown stiff, newspapers have gone yellow with time, but Darwin’s writing stands up, and so does the golf course he loved best.