TOM

By Tom Bedell

Steve Eubanks shows good form teeing off on the Kintyre eighth.

Two teammates, Hal Quinn and Steve Eubanks arrived last night, and we played a practice round this morning on the Kintyre course, and another in the afternoon–with later arriving teammate and our captain, Tom Mackin–on the Arran course.

Without a perfect tee ball, the approach to the eighth green on the Kintyre course is a blind shot.

The day sadly revealed that if the team had to rely on my apparent skills, we could all go home now.

There are higher hopes for next year’s 138th Open Championship, the fourth that will be held at Turnberry (on the Ailsa Course). Each of the previous three were considered thrillers, particularly the first.

The 1977 Open Championship has legendarily become known as The Duel in the Sun, thanks in part to the largely benign weather conditions, but more due to the epic battle between Tom Watson and Jack Nicklaus, the match played like a twenty-round boxing match, each man refusing to stay down. Indeed, the tournament came down to the last shot, with Watson prevailing by a stroke and setting an Open record for the lowest aggregate score, 268.

Watson prevailed in 1977.

The golfing prowess of the pair was such that the third place player, Hubie Green, was ten strokes back of Nicklaus, causing him to utter the immortal line, “I won the tournament I played. They were playing in something else.”

Competitors in 1986 must have thought they were playing a different course from 1977. The balmy weather conditions then were replaced by a cold and raging wind in the first round. One player, Ian Woosnam, shot an even par 70. The other 152 players finished the day 1,251 stokes over.

Alistair Nicol, whom I’m playing against tomorrow, wrote about the 1986 Open thusly: “When the golfing circus came to Turnberry in 1986 they found the most perfectly manicured course in recent Open history, probably the best-ever in fact. The rough, however, was ferocious and far too many players, it seemed to me, were at least three down as they stood on the first tee.”

The second day’s weather was slightly better. Greg Norman, near the head of the pack with a 74 after day one, was much better. He tied the record for the lowest round in an Open Championship with a blistering 63 and a two-stroke lead overall. (The mark had been set by Mark Hayes in his second round at Turnberry in 1977.)

Second round record-setter Greg Norman celebrates his win appropriately enough, with a go at the pipes.

Though his lead fell to one stroke after the third round, Norman never relinquished it, and waltzed to a five-shot victory on Sunday for his first major.

In 1994 another down-to-the-wire match was played in mostly fine weather, and after two rounds the leader was none other than Watson. But he faltered in the final round, which began with about a dozen players still in the hunt.

As the day developed, the Championship looked to be heading Jesper Parnevik’s way. He arrived at the final hole with a three-stroke lead, but left with a two-stroke margin after a bogey.

By then, only Nick Price had managed to stay within sight of Parnevik (literally, in the group behind). Price birdied the sixteenth, and then managed to reach the par-5 seventeenth in two, although forty to fifty feet away, facing a downhill, curling putt. It dropped for an improbable eagle, Price made a wild leap into the air, and when he landed he had a one-stroke lead. A par at the last put the claret jug into his hands.

The Price is right.

Price matched Watson’s 1977 score of 268, although Norman had set a new record for low aggregate the year before at Royal St. George’s, 267.

Turnberry’s turn in the Open rota was put into abeyance after the 1994 Championship until the roads to the resort could be improved upon, and that’s been done with the construction of the M77.

Having warmed up some in recent years with the 2002 Women’s British Open (won by Karrie Webb) and some Senior British Open championships (Watson won in 2003 for some nice symmetry, and Loren Roberts in 2006), the stage is as well set for 2009 as it is for tomorrow’s opening tilt of the Ailsa Cup Match.

By Tom Bedell

Arms of the Marquess of Ailsa

On his Turnberry estate, the Marquess of Ailsa, a former Captain at Prestwick Golf Club (home of the first Open Championship in 1860), had the Royal Troon professional Willie Fernie design a layout that opened for play in 1901.

The Marquess soon agreed to a take-over by the Glasgow and South Western Railway, which led to the construction of the resort hotel in 1906 and a long history of competitions at Turnberry. But the two courses on the site, the Ailsa and the Arran, were pressed into service as an airfield in both world wars.

The Ailsa course reemerged in 1951, designed by P. Mackenzie Ross. Donald Steel redesigned the Arran course, which opened in 2001 rechristened as the Kintyre Course (which I played today). A year later a new par 4 and par 3 Arran course opened as part of the onsite Colin Montgomerie Links Golf Academy.

I wandered over to the Academy in the morning to try and iron out, so to speak, my sideways problem. It didn’t help, and I approached the first tee with trepidation, since the Kintyre course imposes difficulties the Ailsa course is less prone to—more narrow fairways and more profuse gorse, which gobbles up offline shots with prickly efficiency.

The gorse, an evergreen shrub, is in full yellow flower, redolent of coconut. The blossoms will fade by June, but the toothy bush will remain, and the abundance of it on the Kintyre Course makes for many a daunting tee shot. Hit one into the gorse, and you might as well hit one into a lake, except the penalty is stroke and distance.

The rough on the Kintyre Course is deep and penal, too. I nestled many a ball into it today, and getting it out was akin to another penalty shot. And first, of course, the ball had to be found. Luckily, I was playing with a 16-year-old named Chris Todd from the Northern Ireland town of Green Island, outside of Belfast.

Chris, aside from being a fine player, had a keen eye for following wayward shots, and kept me from losing a single ball all day, despite the (only occasional) odd shank or pulled drive.

Chris Todd lines up a shot on the Kintyre course

Our playing mates were Tom and Margaret McCoy from Newcastle West, members of Ballybunion. So for me, it was an Irish day in Scotland. They told me the hotel guest green fees were £140 for the Ailsa Course, £80 for the Kintyre.

We had a grand time on a lovely day, even if the prevailing haze again cloaked the Ailsa Craig, and suggested the old line, “If you can’t see Ailsa Craig, it’s raining. If you can see it, it’s about to rain.”

To be honest, my last three trips to Scotland have been blessed with abundant sunshine, and I probably shouldn’t jinx it by mentioning it. But it looks like the days ahead will be sunny and clear as well, so the old expression that, “If there’s nae wind and nae rain it’s nae golf,” is nae quite holding true so far. Wind there has been. Of rain, nae a drop.

By Tom Bedell

Robbie Burns’ natal cottage

I’m in Robbie Burns territory, the birthplace of Scotland’s national bard just up the road in the town of Alloway. Burns will get his due in a few nights’ time, but I can find no evidence that he ever actually played golf, or gowff, despite these lines, perfectly descriptive of the game:

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft agley,/an’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,/For promis’d joy!

One of the world’s loveliest golf courses, the Ailsa Course at the Westin Turnberry Resort here in southwest Scotland along the Ayrshire coast, is the site of the 2009 Open Championship–reason enough for a team of U.S. golf writers to try out the course by going head to head against a European squad.

Clearly this must leave one team joyful, celebrating with a wee dram, while the other writhes in grief and pain, drowning its sorrows with a wee dram.

But the competition is yet to come. Since I have to leave the event a day early, I arrived a day early, making the hour plus journey from Glasgow airport to Turnberry in the agreeable company of driver Ricky Fulton, formerly of the Royal Navy for 30 years, and hence up on his military history.

He pointed out, as we drove past the Fenwick Moor, that in May of 1941 Hitler’s second-in-command, Rudolph Hess, crash-landed a Messerschmitt in Fenwick Moor while on a bizarre personal crusade to sue for peace.

Otherwise, Fulton opined, “The only things that grow on Fenwick Moor are trees and sheep—or haggis on legs, as I like to call them.”

The Brig o’ Doon

Fulton took me on the scenic route into Alloway, past Burns’ natal cottage, his parents’ gravestones, the Brig o’ Doon (literally, the bridge over the River Doon), which figures prominently in his long poem, “Tam o’ Shanter.”

Fulton said, “Turnberry is actually closer to Northern Ireland than it is to Glasgow. It’s about 60 miles from Glasgow. But across the Firth of Clyde to Ireland is about 40 miles.”

On this hazy day, Ireland wasn’t visible at all, and neither was the totemic Ailsa Craig, a volcanic mound ten miles off the coast, but no scenic discount kicked in.

I played a jetlag round on the Ailsa course with John Butler from Houston, Texas, who told me he had paid something over £200 to play. With the current horrendous exchange rate, that’s more than $400 dollars, pricey for any round of golf. (According to the website, it was the highest rate going, for a weekend non-hotel guest in prime season.)

John played fairly well for his first go-round in Scotland, despite some eye-opening and repetitive work in the revetted pot bunkers. But say he had shot 100—that would have been about $4 a stroke. (“Count the lost balls,” John said, “and some would have been $8 a stroke.”)

A bunker oddity at Ailsa’s tenth hole

That’s some serious money, perhaps enough for a down payment on those new wood floors John’s wife has been yearning for. But he was well-armed with well-worn excuses: “It’s not every day you get to play a British Open course,” never mind that he was going to try to play the Old Course at St Andrews the next day. Another was, “I may never pass this way again.”

I think I’ve used that one myself. But, here I am again, having attended a similar event here back in 2003. That was my first time to golf in Scotland, and after a jet-lagged round at Royal Troon, the Ailsa course blew me away.

It was no less agreeable today, although my decent start gradually unraveled. By the time we reached the fifteenth tee I was able to point out to John the faint outline of the Ailsa Craig, but I was now deep into a double bogey shankfest. I chalked it up to fatigue, thereby bypassing excessive grief and pain.

Turnberry has a good deal of intriguing history attached to it (more of which to come), much of it well-documented on the clubhouse walls. There are also display cases of antique clubs designed by Old Tom Morris and other ancient artisans of the game.

There was one club, circa 1905-1910, that caught my eye: the Plain faced anti-shank lofting mashie. It looked amazingly like the F2 wedge now on the market from Face Forward Technologies. La plus ça change…. I had an F2 once, and now I’m wondering why on earth I gave the club away without checking out its anti-shank lofting capabilities.