by James Dodson
“We need a road game,” I said. “Something to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel and driving into the rear end of that bus.”
“What’s the funniest thing you ever saw on a golf course?” my father responded, sitting up. He’d been lightly snoozing because the passing landscape might have been Ohio in a fogbank for all you could see of it.
I thought about it for a moment. “That would have to be a Norwegian golf writer named Olaf who got a telephone call in his golf bag.”
“Really?”
Olaf and I had been playing in the same foursome during an international golf writers’ tournament in France. He had just putted out when his golf bag rang. He unzipped the side pouch and took out a cell phone with a picture of the red Norwegian flag on it.
“He turned out to work for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” I explained.
“I thought you said he was a golf writer.”
“He was. Norway is apparently such a small hard-working country everybody does two jobs. Olaf was the country’s top golf writer and chief of security to the King of Norway. Heck of a nice guy. Always joking around. Had a grip like a polar bear. When I asked him if I could call Henry Kissinger on his golf bag telephone, he laughed and slapped me on the back hard enough to loosen a crown.”
“I don’t think I can top that,” Dad said.
“Sure you can. I see you top balls all the time.”
He took a shot at it anyway, reminding me of the time I was so eager to reach a ball in the fairway, I sped off and accidentally tossed my mother out of a golf cart, breaking her right forearm—which, we figured upon reflection, wasn’t really all that funny—and fondly recalled another time I rolled a cart over on the side of a steep hill, sending two sets of clubs and half a million balls racing down the hill onto a busy state highway, causing brief automotive mayhem but luckily no loss of life.
“I think your mother was always a little worried about the state granting you a driver’s license,” he said.
“I’ve got a better one,” I said.
I reminded him of the time we were playing a famous resort course in Florida behind a trio of slow-moving ladies, and he, in a rare display of impatience, decided to prod them along with a tactful approach shot to a short par-five; he’d picked out the biggest target in the group, a large lady in red plus fours, and breezily joked about “tattooing Titleist on her bottom unless she gets a move on.” The ball, a magnificent three-wood shot, bounced once on the front of the green and scored a bull’s-eye. My father nearly fainted from embarrassment. “I remember how you jumped in the cart and raced up to apologize. I’ve never seen you so rattled. You were even redder than her britches. Now that was funny.”
“That wasn’t even remotely funny.”
“You’re right. It was hilarious. But a brilliant shot.”
“Thanks.” He shook his head in mock horror. “Did I ever tell you about the time Bob Tilden nearly killed himself with a tee shot?”
“Gosh no.”
Bob was one of my father’s oldest chums, a charming but taciturn man who almost never said a word on the golf course. “It was the usual suspects, Bill Mims, Bob, Alex, and me,” my father began. “We were playing down at the university course in Chapel Hill, and Bob had won a couple holes and was really feeling his oats when we came to a big par-five. He said to us, ‘Boys, when I hit this drive, you’re gonna say to yourselves, “Goddamn, Bob, we’ve never seen anybody hit a golf shot like that.”’ His drive hit a tree and flew straight back and hit him on the forehead and the three of us shouted at him, ‘Goddamn, Bob, we’ve never seen anybody hit a shot like that!!’ ”
“Was he hurt?”
“Only his dignity. We remind him of it every time he has the honors.”
A sign to Preston suddenly appeared, and we veered off and began twisting through a series of turns that led to a stretch of potholed road that seemed designed to deter us from ever wishing to live in the city of Preston. We passed a lot of vacant warehouses and garbage-littered lots, followed by more warehouses and empty lots. We finally crossed a small bridge, and my father cheerfully piped up, “That’s the River Ribble. We’re getting close.” A McDonald’s appeared, followed by another empty lot strewn with garbage. Oh, good, I thought. Elizabeth, New Jersey. It wasn’t the romantic view of England I’d hoped for.
A few minutes later, though, we were driving along a better dual carriageway, and even the inky sky was brightening above us, allowing glimpses of a widening river estuary through forest trees to the left.
“I used to ride a bicycle along this road,” my father mused, looking closely for familiar landmarks. “All the way from Freckleton to Preston.”
“To meet girls at McDonald’s?”
“No, wise mouth. To go to the movies. Come to think of it, there were always these English girls waiting around the movie house looking for an American date. Their boyfriends and husbands were in North Africa or the Pacific. They’d spot your uniform and stroll up and say, ‘Hello, Yank. Care to have some fun tonight?’ ”
“Going to the movies in Preston must have been fun. Ever manage to see any movies?”
“A few,” he said, looking out the window with a smile.
Between November 1943 and December 1944, my father served as one of four chief parachute inspectors at Warton Base Army Depot Number Two, the sprawling Eighth Air Force maintenance facility on the Ribble Estuary and the Irish Sea, just on the outskirts of a village called Freckleton, where ten thousand Americans lived and worked, primarily repairing, testing, and building B-24s and other Allied aircraft. Freckleton during those years was called “Little America,” and it was my father’s home for thirteen months prior to being sent to northern France.
A few miles north of Warton’s front gates lay Royal Lytham and St. Annes Golf Club, sometimes simply called Royal Lytham, where Bobby Jones captured the British Open in 1926 and Seve Ballesteros became a hero to the British people by winning the Open twice, in 1979 and 1988. The British Open was going to return to Lytham in 1996, but more important to me, it was where my father used to play golf on his days off fifty years ago. The first round of our last trip was going to be here.
I slowed the Omega as we rolled into Freckleton’s picturesque village center—now this was the postcard England I wanted to see!—past a collection of tidy chemist and chips shops and a large dark brick Anglican chuch where the standard read “Harvest Festival this Sunday. Everyone welcome.” I saw my father staring at the church, then his eyes abruptly shifted to a group of schoolkids fooling around on the corner. Naturally, he smiled.
We’d left London early enough so that it was now the school hour in Freckleton. Children in dark blazers jostled along the wet sidewalks where the sun, in stiff defiance of the BBC weather lady, bravely broke through dense ragged clouds. Many were in pairs or alone, a few accompanied by their mums. Watching them, my father said, “We had kids just like that hanging around the base. A lot of them were evacuees from London and Birmingham. We’d give ’em candy and magazines.”
“You could get twenty years for that today,” I said.
He ignored my joke. “One of my jobs was to put together the daily information briefing for the base colonel. I carried around an old camera and took photos of a lot of the kids from Freckleton. We had one wall at the PX covered with nothing but snapshots of local kids.”
We drove straight through Lytham’s bustling town center and on into the outskirts of adjoining St. Annes. The golf club was several blocks off the main drag, and amazingly, my father remembered the way. There was one car in the car park, and we found Eddie Birchenough, Royal Lytham’s popular head professional, sitting in his cozy office in the pro shop. He shook my father’s hand vigorously, welcomed him back on behalf of the club, and explained, “I’d hoped to scour up a couple members to play with you this morning, but the truth is, I think the dirty weather kept them all in the hutch. You gentlemen are welcome to play at your leisure, though. Maybe I’ll jo
in you for a bit of lunch or a coffee afterward.”
I explained that Tony Nickson, a former club captain and Lytham’s historian, was meeting us that afternoon for a tour of the premises.
“Ah, well, you’re already in the best of hands then.”
Birchenough refused to accept a visitors’ green fee from either of us, so I purchased a wool sweater vest with the Royal Lytham seal on it. We thanked him and collected our bags and deposited them on pull carts, what the Brits call trolleys. A few minutes later, zippered into windbreakers, we were standing on the first tee.
Dad’s eyes roved slowly across Royal Lytham’s flat green landscape, taking in the course and the prim-roofed town beyond. He pivoted slowly, almost making a full circumnavigation, studying the ivy-wreathed Victorian redbrick clubhouse, the sedate white dormy house, the nearby empty putting green, and finally the small white pro shop, where Birchenough had burrowed back into his own hutch. The sun was welcomingly bobbing in and out, but the light breeze had a chilly bite.
“So how does the place look to you?” I asked.
“Very nice indeed. What’s Auden’s line about being unable to repeat the past but also leave it behind?”
I admitted I didn’t know the quote and patted him on the back. Only my old man would have been thinking about Auden at such a moment. I asked him how many times he reckoned he’d played Lytham in the thirteen months he was here.
“Hard to say. Quite a lot. I used to ride my bike up here at least one afternoon a week. What I liked was, they always welcomed American servicemen, and you could always scrounge up a match. The British love to play matches. We Americans spend all our time worrying who has the lowest score.”
“Who do you think is right?”
“Oh, I think the soul of golf resides in a golf match,” he said without hesitation. “Maybe that’s something I just picked up here, but the idea of competing against the field seems rather shallow to me. The joy of going with a fellow and playing him head to head, regardless of the score at the end—that’s special. Let the pros keep medal play if they want.”
I agreed with him on this. A growing number of the world’s best players seemed to hold similar sentiments, witnessed by the explosive popularity of the Ryder Cup, golf’s greatest match-play event. If you asked them their goals for any particular year, the Davis Loves and Nick Faldos would invariably answer: “To make the Ryder Cup.”
I asked my father how in his view Lytham compared to Royal Birkdale, its Open rota neighbor twenty or so miles down the Lancashire coast.
He said: “Some of the other guys used to like to catch the train down to Birkdale—I did, too, once or twice—but I always thought this place was somehow more special. There was a simple honesty about Lytham, its old clubhouse and little pro shop, that appealed to me. And the course is deceptive, a lot tougher than it looks. At least it was back then.”
“I know why you liked this place so much,” I said.
He looked at me, arching a brow beneath his St. Andrews cap.
“It resembles Green Valley. Think about it. Simple and straightforward. Set down right in the middle of the town. But the grass is lovely, and it probably is capable of ruining your scorecard fast.”
“Nice theory,” Dad replied. “Only one problem. The chronology is all wrong. I never played Green Valley before I came over here. It wasn’t even built, in fact. I’d caddied at Sedgefield, but I never really got to play until I reached this place.”
“So much for theory. Shall we play?”
I pulled out one of the Queen’s pound coins and flipped it. Dad naturally won again.
Some say Royal Lytham lacks the physical charm and visual majesty of the other great British linkslands because its contours are fairly subtle and the course is hemmed in by a coastal road and suburban neighborhoods on all sides. It doesn’t have the magnificent dunes of Birkdale, the eccentric double greens of St. Andrews, the thatched-roof aristocracy of Royal St. George’s, or the soulful ocean vistas of Turnberry. What it has, though, is extraordinary grass, and a glorious history of beating up the world’s best golfers. Did I mention the 190 lethal sand bunkers?
Bernard Darwin, the great British golf writer of the early century, once wrote of Lytham: “It has beautiful turf but not much else of beauty. It is a beast but a just beast.” When a young Tom Watson came here in 1979, he was no fan of British links golf, but Lytham helped convert him to the less is more theology of links golf. Recently, Davis Love III had told me that if he could win only one major, it would be the British Open at Royal Lytham because his father had briefly led the British Amateur there when he was a little kid.
The first hole is certainly a Darwinian little brute, a 206-yard par-three guarded by a series of sand traps. I watched my father tee up his Top-Flite. His takeaway was clean, quick, and self-assured. Tom Watson had this same kind of uncomplicated swing, which appears so natural, you simply must be born with it. Dad sent his ball scampering along Darwin’s beautiful turf, throwing up a fantail of water. He’d topped his Top-Flite.
“Take a mulligan purely for old times’ sake,” I suggested.
A brisk shake of the head. “No, thanks. I’ll play that.” A mulligan here perhaps would have been a sacrilege to him. He’d suddenly grown reflective. The old golfing sergeant had come home.
We played the hole in silence, recording double bogeys. It was a poor start. As we stood on the second tee, a commuter train whizzed past just beyond the trees to the right. We stood and watched it pass, tons of rocketing steel blasting through the air. I saw a whitish blur of faces. Commuters. Because of its location on the Ribble Estuary, Lytham was known as far back as the days of the Magna Carta, and was even mentioned in the Domesday Book, but as recently as 1875 its neighbor St. Annes hadn’t even existed. It grew up as a vacation town for cotton managers from Manchester, a sort of Victorian version of Hilton Head Island, while nearby Blackpool attracted the working-class hordes.
Our second tee shots were much better. I was again thinking about whether my father could make a complete round on foot. The limp I’d noticed in his gait on the first hole, however, began to disappear as we walked. He lofted a beautiful three-iron shot to the front of the second green, and before I knew it, he was toddling off down memory lane again.
“I remember there was this friendly pro here in those days named Fergie or Furman or something like that. Real nice fella. A club-maker. That’s how pros in those days made their money. He always wanted to make me a custom set of clubs. I was never in any hurry because I used the clubs of a member who was away in the war. They were good clubs. Handmade also. I took good care of them.”
“Did you take any lessons?”
He smiled. “No. But I had some help with my swing from an unusual source—the pro’s daughter. Her name was Nickie. She was about seventeen and had this mass of red hair and really knew her stuff. She liked to caddy for me. She used to tell me to keep my head down and get my bum into the shot. Head down and bum into the shot, love.” He laughed. “I haven’t thought about that in years.”
“So you’re telling me my golf swing is descended from a girl?”
“Something like that. A sturdy redhead. Very lively lass.”
We played two more holes more or less with our bums down and no chatter, the long (457-yard, par-four) third, which neither of us reached in two swats, and the somewhat tamer-looking fourth, which had far too many bunkers around the green for my liking. Lytham’s long par-fours are difficult critters and hold the key to scoring well. By the end of the fourth hole, alas, I’d already toured three of Lytham’s famous bunkers, and my scorecard was beginning to hemorrhage. With fourteen holes to play, I’d already shot half my handicap.
On the plus side, Dad showed no indication of fatigue whatsoever. There was even a discernible lilt in his step. At the frighteningly bunkered par-three fifth, he made a beautiful swing with his Big Bertha three-wood and caught an awful break—his ball striking the front of the green and kicking off into
the right front trap. Mine reached the green, my first shot to reach in regulation. He followed next with an exquisite sand shot that left him a mere tap-in for par, his first par. I holed a ten-footer for par to prove I hadn’t only just taken up playing the game. The day was getting better in several respects.
“Did you wear your uniform when you played?” I asked him as we walked off toward six.
“Of course. Every time. We all did. It was wartime.”
I could picture him swinging in his staff sergeant’s uniform, all necktie and peaked cap, handing his mashie niblick to a wartime Fanny Sunneson. I once wrote a column in which I helpfully suggested that modern tour players wear neckties and wool Norfolk jackets in order to make the game more colorful and challenging. A friend from the PGA Tour suggested I quit writing advice columns.
“How many matches did you win?”
“None that I remember. I wasn’t very good.”
“Probably forgot to keep your bum down, you bum.”
I managed to birdie the par-five seventh hole, and Dad was nearly up to his old magic at eight, just missing a chip-in from the fringe for bogey. Soon we were standing on the ninth tee, which ends the course’s outward march toward the sea. The ninth is the shortest hole on the course, a tidy par-three of just 164 yards. An easy six for me, a firm three- or four-iron for my father. I saw him take out a six also.
“Don’t you want to reconsider?” I said, pointing out that the wind was diagonally in our faces from right to left. There appeared to be half a million little bunkers set into Darwin’s “beautiful turf” around the ninth green, each one whispering my name like a sea siren. The pin was back. A six probably wasn’t even enough for me, either. I put the club back and pulled out a five.
Dad went back to a five, also. It wasn’t going to be enough, but I wasn’t going to give him any more advice.
