by James Dodson
Tom Watson, on the other hand, had never won much of anything when he came to Carnoustie in 1975. Jack Nicklaus was the heavy favorite. On fairways baked rock hard by weeks of drought, South African Bobby Cole went out on day one and eclipsed Hogan’s record by firing a 66 but was topped by an Australian named Jack Newton, who putted his way to a blistering 65—yet another record. Almost no one noticed a polite red-haired lad from Kansas lurking in the large pack just behind Cole and Newton. The media, in fact, focused almost exclusively on Nicklaus and Johnny Miller, expecting them to be the Yanks who broke from the pack.
Instead, on a gray Saturday when none of the contenders broke 70, Watson quietly birdied eighteen for a finish of 72, which placed him in a tie for the lead with Jack Newton. Carnoustie had its first-ever playoff, and local odds already had Newton the winner nearly three to one. Coming to eighteen, the contenders remained level. Newton fired his two-iron to the greenside bunker, while Watson coolly uncorked a high-flying shot to the heart of the green—capturing par and earning the first of his five British Opens.
—
With this kind of pedigree, it was reasonable to ask, why had the all-wise Royal and Ancient bumped sweet Carnoustie off the Open rotation, like a rough but favorite uncle being kicked out of the wedding?
Theories abounded, but there was a man I hoped would give me the real lowdown, and maybe a proper lesson on how to execute the famous “Carnoustie run-up shot” to boot. His name was Tony Gilbert, and he was supposed to be waiting for Dad and me at Carnoustie’s starter house.
You can’t miss Carnoustie’s clubhouse, which is really just an administrative building with pullcarts stashed beneath the stairwells, a small, drab concrete structure that possesses all the monochrome charm of a municipal incinerator. It’s the town’s leading eyesore. I walked up to the window and asked for Tony Gilbert, one of Carnoustie’s best-known teaching pros, paid my seven-quid guest green fee (the clerk was expecting me, I was playing as Tony’s guest), and was informed that my host was waiting for me in the putting green area.
There I found a trim, lean-faced man with youthful blue eyes and the kind of complexion that comes only from strolling for years in the sea wind. He was dressed in a red windbreaker and wearing a striped necktie, industriously rapping ten-foot putts into a hole with depressing repetition. I introduced myself, we shook hands, and I asked Tony straightaway about the Open controversy, wondering if perhaps having the ugliest clubhouse in creation could explain the R&A’s distorted logic. The only other plausible explanation was that blue-collar Carnoustie lacked the posh hotels and other luxury amenities many foreign golf travelers seem to require.
“Could be, could be,” Tony murmured as we set off down the fairway from the first tee, leaning into a gathering east wind, “but I think it’s a wee bit more political than that. For one thing,” he explained, “there has always been a heady competitive spirit between the golfers of Carnoustie and St. Andrews, Scotland’s two leading municipal layouts. These things are fairly cloaked in mystery, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the decision came down purely to personalities. Golf is a character-builder, they say, and the burghers of St. Andrews perhaps simply think they’ve got the superior character.”
The way he chuckled, I could tell he found this notion simply laughable. “For one thing,” he added, “our Carnoustie golfers regularly beat their St. Andrews counterparts in regular competitions.”
Tony stopped in his tracks and gave me a quizzical look, as if we’d forgotten something.
“Say, aren’t you supposed to have your father with you, laddie?”
I explained, somewhat uncomfortably, that my father had run into some “unexpected difficulties” and would possibly join us later. Tony nodded and left it at that, and we played on, striking long irons dead into a rising wind at a flag flapping wildly just over the hummock, guarding the first hole at Carnoustie’s championship course. My three-iron shot flew about a hundred yards through the air. At Carnoustie, as at most seaside links, wind is the eternal enemy.
—
I realized I was trying not to let my concern show. My anxiety wasn’t over my pitiful golf shot. My nerves were frayed from an incident that had just taken place back at the hotel. Our rooms at the Glencoe Hotel faced the links, and when I’d barged excitedly into my father’s room without knocking, babbling on about my eagerness to play Carnoustie finally, I’d been horrified to discover him stripped naked, red-faced, with a stomach that appeared to be, well, exploding.
That’s what it looked like to me, at any rate. He’d shouted at me to either “invite the whole world inside or please shut the door!” and I’d swiftly obeyed, unable to take my eyes off the huge fleshy bulge on his abdomen and the angry red welt. “Good God, what’s going on? Should I call a doctor?” I stammered. “For chrissake, calm down,” he snapped at me. “I’ve just blown the gasket that holds the flange to the stoma-bag in place. No big deal, except I seem to have left my spare at home.”
“But what’s that—that big thing on your stomach? And that red thing?” “This?” He patted the bulge and smiled ruefully. “This, dear son, is what’s called a colostomy. And this red thing is my intestines. Please forgive me for being a little indelicate, but when you conduct your bowel movements into a little bag, it’s important to have a bag that properly works. That, in a nutshell, is my big problem at the moment.”
I was momentarily dumbstruck, watching his frustrated ministrations in a kind of detached horror. It was just the kind of unexpected development my mother had forecast and that I, somewhere in the back of my mind, feared might scuttle our trip. As he cleaned his stomach with a damp bath towel, I told him I would go phone Tony Gilbert and cancel our round.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Dad said sharply. “You go on and play. I’ll take care of things here.” He glanced at me and explained that he’d already spoken with the hotel manager, who was phoning up a chemist in Dundee. There was a large medical facility there.
“Go, go, go!” he snapped at me, and I involuntarily began to back up. I bumped into the door, paused, turned to look at him once again, and then left him with a sinking feeling in my own gut.
—
Tony and I finished the first hole with a par and a double bogey respectively, then walked to the second tee, nestling in crumpled dunes and hummocks of sea grass. The hole, a long par-four aptly called Gulley, was a narrow doglegged corridor that cut left to right. “Position A would be just to the right of that large bunker in the middle left. That’s called Braid’s bunker,” said Tony, and proceeded to slug his ball there as if he simply did it every morning before eating his porridge. I teed up my ball and buried it under the lip of Braid’s bunker, or position F, which stands for a word rhyming with ducked, which matched my darkening mood. Tony watched me slam the sand and advance the ball a meter or two into the fairway.
“You’re workin’ mooch too hard on that shot, laddie,” he said calmly.
With that, he climbed down into the trap and dropped a ball and showed me how to strike it smoothly out of the sand, using mostly my arms. His ball soared, leaving only the smallest indentation in the firm sand.
“You have a loovely swing, Jimmy,” he said soothingly. “Stay back on your heels now, relax, and let the shot coome oot.” I dropped a ball and stroked a decent shot out of the bunker, though nowhere near as fine as his. “You’re a good teacher,” I said.
He smiled, extended me a hand up from the trap, and said, “You’re a good pupil. Tell me now, where did you learn that big nice strong swing of yours? Your father, I expect?”
I shook my head and explained that my father had introduced me to the game but refused to give me lessons, insisting that I learn from a real teaching professional. My first teacher had been a man named Aubrey Apple at a club called Green Valley, in Greensboro, where I grew up. “Eight kids lined up with hand-me-down clubs. I didn’t remember much about the lesson except that Apple yelled a lot. That meant he really liked us.”
“You teach kids?”
For some reason I’d assumed he worked with older and more skilled players. Somebody had told me Tony Gilbert was the best teacher in Carnoustie.
“Aye. That’s who I teach, in the main. The little ones, the wee ones. I march ’em down to the beach to learn the sand game, and we have a nice day of it. They’re usually fearless in the sand after a day at the beach with old Tony.”
“How many young pupils do you teach at once?”
“I have ten or twelve pupils at the present. Some of my older lads are doing quite well up in the ranks, I’m proud to say.”
The wind slackened, and we both played the next three holes in even par. At six, called Long, a murderous par-five with out-of-bounds all the way down the left side and bunkers in the middle of the fairway, Tony, pointing at the turf, showed me the exact spot where Hogan eschewed the safe driving line during his “mystical” four rounds in ’53, landing his tee ball daringly on the narrow sliver of grass left of the treacherous bunkers, a target no more than fifteen or twenty yards wide, an area now popularly called “Hogan’s Alley.” “Pinpoint precision it was, absolutely incredible. Each time he improved his drive a little bit, and each round his score got better. I’ll never see anything like that again, I feel safe to say.”
“You were there?”
“Indeed so. I saw almost every shot the man made coming home. He appeared to be in his own world. It was bonny golf.”
I liked that—bonny golf. I heard echoes of Sam Bennie’s voice in Tony’s words. I liked the way the wind abruptly died, too, and the way the day was becoming sunny and mild…and my father’s situation slipped momentarily from my mind.
Tony and I chatted amicably and played. Par bogey par par. I was just getting the hang of the game when we stopped at a rustic snack shed after nine and had a cup of tea and an egg sandwich. Thinking once again of my father, I asked Tony about his family particulars.
I learned Tony had once been a championship archer, a greens-keeper at Burnt Island in Fife, and had just missed qualifying for the British Open by two strokes in 1967. His interest in the game had come from his father, Ted Gilbert, a Glasgow thread-buyer who won the Calcutta championship while doing his military service in India in 1927. “I have his medals at home,” Tony explained. “Dad didn’t think highly of my decision to turn golf professional. He was strictly an amateur guy, if you know what I mean. But golf is a working-class game in Scotland, and I thought I was king of the working-class guys.” Tony chuckled, sipping his tea in thoughtful silence.
“The irony is,” he continued, “I thought my son Timothy might well be the best of the lot. Big strong lad, an excellent player, a long striker like you. Broke m’heart when he decided to go another way…aye. But what a pro young Tim could ha’ been.”
I asked what Tim Gilbert did now.
“Manages a casino aboard a cruise ship based in Miami.” Tony smiled cordially at a trio of golfers strolling up; they looked defeated, either by the wind or their games, it was difficult to tell which. “Can you imagine that? But he loves it, which makes his mum and me happy. Lovely lad, Tim.”
We started on Carnoustie’s infamous back nine, probably the roughest home walk in golf, especially if the wind is up. Tony asked where Dad and I were headed next, reminding me once again of the disaster at the Glencoe that was awaiting me. I decided not to say “Probably Edinburgh Airport.” So I replied, “Muirfield. A man named Archie Baird is getting us a game there.”
Tony nodded. “Aye. I know of old Archie. Good man. So you’ll have a day with the mad colonels at Muirfield. Good for you.”
I asked him why the colonels at Muirfield were mad. He responded with a joke:
The old colonel invites the young lieutenant down to his snooty golf club for a drink on Wednesday night. “I’m sorry, sir,” says the young lieutenant, “but I don’t indulge in strong drink.” “To hell, man, you don’t take a decent dram?” says the astonished old colonel. “Well, perhaps in that case you should come doon on Thursday evening. That’s when the ladies come in, and we get up to a fair bit of frolic.” The young lieutenant shakes his head. “I’m sorry, sir,” he says, “but I’m afraid that kind of thing just wouldn’t do for me.” “God help you, lad,” cries the bewildered colonel, “you’re not a bloody poof, are ye?” “No, colonel, I am not a poof,” replies the indignant young lieutenant. The colonel shakes his head. “In that case,” he says ruefully, “you may as well skip Friday night altogether!”
I played horribly on Carnoustie’s difficult back nine, but picking Tony’s brain about when and how to teach my own wee ones was a pleasure. He showed me the Carnoustie run-up shot—a shot in which, by adjusting your stance and keeping your hands firm, the club face of a lower-lofted club is kept low, and the ball scampers forth with a low trajectory and a beautiful overspin—and he told me tales of Carnoustie’s former commercial life as a center of the jute trade. He talked about the internecine politics of the local clubs, about proposed grand hotels along the sea front, rumors of big deals being made in anticipation of the ’99 Open. I was bending over a twenty-foot birdie putt at eighteen, concentrating hard, when Tony commented mildly, “There’s a man who seems to be waving at us. Could that be your dad?”
I turned around and saw my father standing on Carnoustie’s acre-sized practice putting green, where George Lowe, Jr., the famous putting wizard, had supposedly learned his technique. He was wearing a fresh change of clothes, his old Ping putter was in hand, and his soiled green St. Andrews cap was jauntily cocked.
“That’s him.”
I made the putt, and we shook hands and walked over. I introduced Tony. “It’s too bad you could not join us, Brax,” Tony said, “but I would love for you to come by the house to meet my wife Julie. We’ll have a drink and a proper visit, if you like.”
We agreed to come at seven.
After Tony left us, Dad and I conducted another putting examination on Carnoustie’s empty putting green, two spins around the eighteen holes. We finished in darkness, and he beat me yet again, winning by three holes. “I trust you’re feeling better,” I said as we started across the street to the Glencoe. “Much better,” he said. “Thanks.”
“I gather our next stop isn’t the departures lounge in Edinburgh, then?”
“Be kind of a shame to miss Muirfield and the Old Course, wouldn’t it?”
I knew no further questions were required or desired, so I told him Tony’s joke about the colonels.
Dad was laughing as we entered the lobby of the hotel, where owner Joe McClorey was still walking around like a man in a daze. Joe explained that he’d just taken a phone call from Karsten Manufacturing, the Arizona firm that manufactures Ping golf clubs, booking every room in the hotel for Open week of 1999. He invited us into the bar for a celebration drink, which we didn’t refuse.
Tony Gilbert’s house was on Kinloch Street in Carnoustie. He met us at the door wearing gray slacks, another striped necktie, and a green Carnoustie sweater. We’d planned to stay twenty minutes but lingered three hours. Tony showed my father his father’s golf medals and the beautiful crystal glasses upon which he carved club crests. Crystal carving was a modestly profitable sideline of Carnoustie’s most agreeable golf teacher.
Julie and I made small talk about son Tim, cruise ships, vacations in Greece, and public accountancy, her professional trade. She was a handsome energetic blonde, a chartered accountant who didn’t really care, as she put it, “a jot for golf” because she had “another love besides Tony.”
I asked what that was. “I’m a lawn bowler and toxophilist!”
This turned out to be a championship archer. Julie had also bowled in the Sco
ttish Nationals.
The Gilberts both walked us to the door, Julie standing close to Tony. We shook hands, and Tony urged us to come back for the Open championship in a few years. I looked at my father and smiled.
“We’d love to,” Dad said, without hesitation.
“Excellent,” said Tony. “It’s settled, then.”
“Maybe I’ll even bring my wee ones,” I said, “for the Carnoustie run-up and a lesson on the beach.”
“Even better.”
Julie kissed us both, an accountant’s no-nonsense buss on the cheek. She promised to teach my wife lawn bowling if she agreed to come, too, so Alison wouldn’t have to “spend the rest of her natural life listening to you silly men rattling on forever about golf.”
TEN
Mystery of the Hole
“Right. Here we go.”
Archie Baird took a deep breath.
“We’ll begin at the beginning. The first stick and ball game we know about was a Roman game called paganica, which came up through Europe, through France and Germany and into Holland, where the Dutch made the most of it, playing a game they called kolf. We have evidence the Dutch played something they called kolf going back to 1300. There is no evidence of golf in Scotland before 1450. Kolf, a game played on ice in winter and fields in summer, died out completely around 1700. It was probably Scottish wool merchants who brought the game back here. Scotland was a poor country, Holland was a rich country. The merchants took their wool across and sold it and sometimes encountered unfavorable winds, and so it was perhaps inevitable they would fill their time playing kolf. They brought the game home with them, and it was here the game changed forever and took root. Here, on the east coast of Scotland, with an abundance of land, we transformed the game from playing to a stake on ice to playing on natural land to a rabbit scrape…a hole. I truly believe the game as we know it today would never have evolved without rabbits. The rabbits, you see, would gather in the hollows and nibble the grass down smooth and prevented scrub vegetation like buckthorn and hawthorn bushes from overrunning the linksland. In the middle of the scrape, the buck rabbit would create a hole and urinate in it to mark his territory, and the early golfers played from one hollow to the next. The hole was usually marked with a gull feather. It was very simple golf.”
