Golfing experience in Scotland reminds the game that will last even as championships, tours come and go
Monday afternoon at the Old Course, when the townspeople of St. Andrews regained their fortune and sanity, a handful of the luckiest people in Fife completed their round. With all the Open Championship skins still intact, a curious sight took place on days 1 and 18. At the top of the floating yellow leaderboard, several workers slowly and quietly began removing the name and number that identified the 150th instance of this event. It’s a reminder that even the glamor and circumstances of a historic Open eventually fade away.
This is the same leaderboard that Rory McIlroy said he watched from his hotel room at night, hoping his name would be on top of a structure that now has only one name. there.
Monday after major is always serious and can even be empty. There was so much anticipation, so much energy, so many years poured into the previous week that the end could leave everyone involved in a stupor. It doesn’t seem fair that the last two holes of the majors take just as long as the first two, and then it abruptly ends with 262 days standing between The Open Sunday and the Masters Thursday. 2023.
Is anyone ready for the nine months in between?
“Golfing in the UK” by Michael Murphy is the kind of book whose title tells you all you need to know. Although the book is excellent and critically acclaimed, the summary can be found in that four-word title. Those words can conjure up one of the great experiences in your life or hope for what’s to come. Scotland, yes, but also Kingdom. There may never be a better mix of land, people and sport.
That phrase, like the sport at the professional level, is completely besieged. If the makeshift LIV runners now have their way, Golfing in the UK could mean differently in the next 20 years than it did 200 years ago. Of course, LIV exploded last week like the winding sting at the Old Course running through two of its most famous holes. The weekend was a good one, but the question heard in pubs, on the street, inside media centers and even at the airport was unanimous: What will happen to golf?
No one knows the answer, at least not on a professional level. There are rumors of a Very Important Meeting at PGA Tour headquarters this week to discuss… exactly? How to fight against a sovereign nation with a wealth of assets that may be on the verge of winning both an Open championship and one of the few pieces the PGA Tour can afford to lose, Hideki Matsuyama? The supposed present future of split tours and a debunked Ryder Cup is looking horribly bleak.
What can be done? There are a lot of ideas – we’ve discussed each iteration of them in the last week – but no action will matter if money continues to be thrown at people whose psychology slips usually for those who are not. 1 foot bet is ceded.
Can we reconcile that future? Is LIV livable and can we agree to it? I’ve come to believe it has some good components (the team part is really engaging on the secondary level), but there’s still something unsettling about it – a lifelessness that couldn’t be more contrasted with the Scottish spirit of game.
The Tuesday and Wednesday before The Open began, a group of friends and colleagues played a pair of courts, Crail and Elie, standing in the shadows of St. Andrews. Calling them “other roads nearby” doesn’t do it justice, as one could fly across the Atlantic and have experienced the heart of Scotland in just those two passes. On both nights we played until we couldn’t see the golf ball and could barely see each other. Unfortunately, there’s no camera to make it look lighter.
Crail is a riptide of beauty. Adorned in contrasting gold and greens and blues, the quaint streets and stone walls crisscross the course so much that it feels as if God built the earth around those 18 holes. We start when the sun goes down and end when the moon rises. Golf in the Kingdom.
Elie is a wonder. A seaside town took us out to the water, with which we played what James Braid calls the best hole in the world, the par-4 13th hole. At the edge of that hole – and it seemed like the whole world – we encountered a line of jagged cliffs and the sky was so pink, orange, and red that I was surprised Nike didn’t have someone put it on. Sunday afternoon.
Dan Rapaport wrote later about the gravity of this sport. Professional golf is appealing for a thousand reasons, but most The catch of it all is that it’s a sport we can all play, even against each other, regardless of skill differences. The residents couldn’t hit the ball at Fenway Park the day after the World Series or run the routes at Lambeau Field the day after the NFC Championship, but they took the first course at the Old Course playing the same golf course as the heroes. Their unimaginable talent passed just 24 hours ago.
It begs the question: Who does the golf course really belong to? Because sometimes the pros come in ours so are the steps.
Friday night during the Scottish Open, held a week before The Open, Max Homa left the Renaissance Club – where he was playing for $8 million – for North Berwick (another stop for us). me), where he played because he was so intrigued by a YouTube video No Laying Up that he had to watch it for himself. Homa pushed a cart and chased the sun as well as a few guns down the nine-second incline of North Berwick. This is Kevin Durant at Rucker Park, except in golf, it happens all the time.
The best thing about golf in Scotland is its accessibility. It’s a good reminder for those of us whose countries tend to privatize what’s best on our land, although that decision is certainly hugely profitable, it has may not always be best for all parties. If that’s not the recap of this summer, I’m not sure what is. You don’t have to have a lot of money or a knack for sports or 21 other friends to play recreational golf in Scotland, however, you do have access to some of the most incredible lands on Earth.
Surely you watched Cameron Smith hammer home in ’30 when the stunned McIlroy stopped after waking The Open on the line. The past two hours have been as stressful as I ever felt a place. But when fans filed, wondering what might have happened, something opened up that you might not have seen.
An hour after Smith hit the four best games of his life at No. 17 to win the biggest league championship of his career, kids jumped into the Road Hole bunker and patrons walked the field. . Anyway, it was Sunday, when St. Andrews is a park. Golf in the Kingdom.
LIV is a kneeling test where everything else in golf is measured against it right now. The most disruptive entities always occupy that spot, for that is their point of existence. It’s hard to experience anything in golf without hearing about LIV as part of the scene. The loud, loud, but really fun golf that LIV touted was the complete opposite of the idea of Golfing in the UK.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s very manufactured. Golf in Scotland can be described in many different ways. Is produced Definitely not one of them.
I’m not the first American to have my heart completely drawn to the Kingdom. Kevin Van Valkenburg told me it would be the trip of a lifetime. I believe him, but I couldn’t understand the experience or the feeling until I sat at the train station just outside St. Andrews on Monday evening as I return to Edinburgh for the long journey home. I FaceTimed my kids, the kids wanted to see the train come into the station, and then I put my phone away and just sit and feel the Kingdom. Beyond the tracks are fields of purple flowers and a summer sun that never seems to go out. The flags with the number “150” on them were pulled tightly behind my back, and I was knocked down with them all.
If we are, as has been said, formed from the dust to which we will one day return, the earth has a more intimate connection with our souls than we realize. Perhaps the best way to describe golf in Scotland is that it is not suitable for dirt. So rarely in 21st century life do we have to grapple with soil. While golf isn’t exactly strenuous on a farm, it can be as close as some of us get. What a great joy and humble effort it is to be engaged in combat with a place you know you will never conquer.
Proof that Monday’s scoreboard is wiped clean, even championships come and go. But golf remains, and it lasts.
Golf creates humility for a million reasons, but the most obvious one is one that we rarely acknowledge. Even if we do, it’s still just subtlety, which is probably an indication of how golf is played in this country. What really makes sense to tag a tournament with memories like the 150th Open Championship is the overwhelming sense of the venue. We don’t number championships in most other sports, but we do in golf because it’s a nod to the earth and the fact that the ground still stands and it will.
Sports venues live and die, but golf – and specifically Kingdom golf – is special because you can’t destroy what you haven’t built. In other sports, we bend everywhere to our collective will. In golf, place bends us.
In 150 years – ostensibly at the 300th Open – everyone present at this year’s tournament will be gone (well, except maybe Bryson DeChambeau). Back to the dust. This is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about, however, the earth – like an echo of eternity – will last and will always be. As long as that holds true, some kind of golf will be played on the ground that both Old Tom and Young Tiger (and millions of others) have walked.
In a year when golf felt like nothing more than a commodity, Scotland is a reminder that while professional golf may be racing down that road, golfing itself is not.
Something Homa recently said on No Laying Up podcast has repeated in my mind hundreds of times since: “Sure you can buy a trip, but you can’t buy my goals and dreams.”
It’s something you’ve probably heard over the past few weeks: “[Insert entity here] trying to buy golf. “It’s a fool’s chore, though, as this isn’t a purchasable game.
In 1457, James II enacted an Act of Parliament attempting to ban the game, deeming it “unprofitable” for a Scottish military defense against England. James II enjoyed practicing archery as an alternative to his people. Two more bans were issued earlier that century, but no evidence they actually hold. His grandson, James IV, tried to enforce the ban but eventually gave up and entered the game on his own. Golf has always been inevitable because the land has begged us to play it.
Who knows what the next 100 years or 100 days or 100 hours have to do with the future of professional golf. It is certainly true that in 100 hours, 100 days and 100 years from now, this place – and the mighty force behind it – will continue to capture the imaginations and desires of its people. As long as the Kingdom stands, our temporary joy in its goodness will continue.
Golf, it turns out, is not for sale. It belongs to the earth and everyone in it.
