In Europe in the early 1400s people were burning witches and fighting with broadswords and using leeches as medicine, and they called these times the Dark Ages, though they didn’t at the time, they just thought they were rubbish. But what were they going to do? No-one had invented anything useful in 900 years because they were too busy fighting with broadswords and with leeches, as history tells us.
Because since 476AD when Russell Crowe and his Roman Legions stopped unleashing hell – but also spreading several nice, progressive things around Europe, stuff like sanitation, roads, the rule of law, the aqueduct, all that – Europe experienced several centuries of cultural and economic degradation, and many people were sad.
And then Scots invented golf! And thus heralded an Age of Enlightenment and the Renaissance and a few of those things you may have heard of had you listened in history class at school. Mind you it depends which history you were taught. (Granted this one could be considered a bit sketchy.) Because while Europeans were rolling about in their own muck and fighting with leeches, in China they were driving cars and getting to work in super-fast trains that floated on magnets. No they weren’t.
But they were quite advanced in medicine and sculpture and being clean, and many things, in China, and it’s suggested that Chinese people invented the game golf. Indeed during the Song Dynasty (AD960-AD1279) they played a game called “chuiwan” meaning “hit ball” with a special stick. Mongolian traders took the game to Europe. And here we are.
Where are we? The Home of Golf, friend, St.Andrews in Scotland, where they’ve been whacking away at the white pill since the early 1400s, some three-hundred-and-three-score-and-ten years before Captain Cook “discovered” the great southern island continent that people had been living upon since 50,000BC.
Yes, St Andrews, and the fabled Old Course links. And for this man of golf, well … for just as when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way from your first cigarette to your last dyin’ day, when you identify as a golfer – a rusted-on lunatic of a golfer, a man who would happily spend each day waking to watch golf on the telly while reading a golf magazine before playing golf and then drinking a beer and talking about golf (“How’d you go, mate?”) before returning home to watch golf on the TV again and reading the magazine again then checking the internet for his club’s results, his handicap and some bargain golf stuff on Ebay – then visiting the Old Course at St.Andrews, it’s a must. It’s a Thing.
The town of St.Andrews is on the coast of Fife and an hour north-east of the bridge over the Firth of Forth, an estuary. It’s all old grey buildings and sandstone and narrow winding streets and lanes, and little shops and pubs. There’s an “old”, “European” feel that’s appealing for visitors from the gleaming, sun-bleached New World of Australia. It’s like walking about in The Rocks in Sydney on excursion from school.
We walk the perimeter to Gate 5 with its view over a beach of wet grey sand whipped by salt-flecked rain, you’d no more go for a swim than run nude across the 18th. I’m here with my mate Rob and neither of us have a ticket to get in. I’m waiting to arrange for a press pass to be delivered, while Rob has a half-baked plan to blag his way in pretending to be a journalist, or photographer, or some sundry official and/or minion.
Then my press pass is emailed to my phone and I head in like that while Rob mills about and somehow joins a slow-moving queue and is soon enough being frisked by a security man with a metal detector because being frisked by security is how you get into St.Andrews, it’s like at the airport. And soon enough he’s in, the plucky pimpernel.
And so we walk about the Old Course of St.Andrews the Home of Golf, and for a golfer, a rusted-on semi-addicted lunatic that so many golfers are, the Old Course represents your Mecca, your Machu Picchu, your place Scientologists go when they go seeking extra-terrestrial enlightenment, if you believe that type of thing, and who wouldn’t? Sounds excellent. St.Andrews, similarly, is a holy, revered, enlightened place where you can walk the course drinking beer in a glass.
The course was designed by Old Tom Morris and “Mother Nature”. The fairways look flat enough on the telly but are rolling, bulbous; like a green sea of aqua bumps frozen mid-swell. The fescue and bent grass is short-cut to 8mm. The layout is open in parts, tight and tricky in others. There are little burns (pronounced “b’r’rr’ns” by the locals) and riveted, fiendish pot bunkers. There are massive double-greens and double fairways. The first and 18th fairways combine for a fairway so wide it’s the Straits of Hormuz. The whole course undulates. And walking across it, the ground feels hard and trampoline-like, as if you could bounce a golf ball across it and it would run like a sailor’s nose, as they say.
We come to the famous hole called “The Road Hole” because a road runs by the hole. There’s an old stone wall called “old stone wall”. I once stayed in the Old Course Hotel in a hotel room overlooking the Road Hole, the floor-to-ceiling windows waking my jet-lagged eyeballs to the purples and mauves, contours and promise of St.Andrews. Never forget it.
The great golfers of today, the brilliant exponents of a fiendishly difficult sport that we’ve come to watch this Sunday in the 149th Open Championship, they “manage” their game here. They can hit whatever sort of shot they want and often choose to hit irons off tees and let the ball run to the green. They hit low runners and high fades, depending which way the wind’s going and how hard. When the wind blows – as it does during this Open Championship, so hard it’s like a fan of the Norwegian Ice God, so hard that this Sunday we’re here was meant to be the final round but it had to be put back to Monday – they struggle. When it’s placid and still, St.Andrews is gettable, eatable, and players shoot low numbers, the best kind. It’s another thing that makes the place great. Momma Nature is a factor, as she should be in a game played outdoors.
The stand overlooking the Road Hole is thick with people. They cheer and applaud, long and sustained for a 22-year-old Irishman, Paul Dunne, an amateur, who’s leading the tournament. We watch Dustin Johnson, the great lanky, angular piece of South Carolina, striping his Titleist Pro-V1 to the hole. We see Jason Day and Adam Scott, Australia’s hopes for glory.
Americans in the crowd smoke huge cigars, a Yorkshireman beseeches Danny Willett, “Coom on Dunny lud, coom on for Yorkshire.” And Australians walk about slack-jawed that they’re drinking beer in glass in the outdoors at the Old Course at St.Andrews.
The next day we watch the final round of the Open from the dressing room of Kingsbarns Golf Club down the road (because mad golfers would still rather play themselves than watch someone else, it’s a Thing and because Kingsbarns is so good it’s more fun than all the drugs) as Zach Johnson beats Louis Oosthuizen and Marc Leishman in a four-hole play-off.
And there we look at St.Andrews, the Old Course, the Home of Golf, headquarters of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St.Andrews, the governing body of the great game, with the old greystone hotels and houses you’d sell several organs to live in, and you think like old mate Connor MacLeod from the Clan MacLeod in Highlander: it’s a kind of magic. You’ve seen it on television, you’ve read of it, all the history, all that stuff, all the Tigers and Sharks and great Golden Bears, and you remember playing the course and people being nice and asking with a glint in the eye, “How’d you enjoy that?” and knowing from your face that you’ve enjoyed the most fun round of your life.
The Scots may not have invented invented golf. But they’ve made it what it is. And that is the greatest game ever played.
St.Andrews is home. No place like it.
