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.

By Tom Bedell

My man Fish, cigar aficionado that he is, would have enjoyed my recent trip to the Dominican Republic and Roco Ki, the emerging resort community on the country’s eastern shore. Not only were the cigars being hand-rolled on the spot, but everyone and their mother were smoking them.

The cigars were just an amenity, of course. The point of the visit was a preview of The Faldo Legacy Course and the Westin Roco Ki Beach & Golf Resort, which will initially anchor what will ultimately be a whopping four-course development with luxury real estate offerings. Actually, the real estate opportunities are already being snapped up. Tee times and hotel reservations may still be a bit premature. The course should be finished in August, and designer Nick Faldo will show up for the grand opening in December, when the hotel is scheduled to be completed. Stay tuned.

We played eight holes of the course for a few go-rounds, doubling up on what will be hole seventeen. This is an easy par-3 from an elevated tee, a mere 120-yard poke. Easy, at least, for blind golfers. The sighted will have too much information to contend with, on what promises to become one of the most photographed holes in golfdom. So why not get started?:

Feel something tightening up? What should be a fairly simple wedge shot is now complicated by sea, sky, rocks, wild vegetation, crashing surf, wind, and a long mental history of twisted swing thoughts. Probably a good time to swing fast and look up. Maybe the view from a helicopter will help?:

Well, maybe not. Still the shot is more visually than technically daunting, and easier from an alternate tee box that doesn’t require crossing that yawning rocky gap. But that initial view is from a tee box shared with the eighteenth hole. Turn around and another startling tee shot is at hand, this a par-5 that crosses the sea twice:

A look at the unfinished holes suggest that Faldo really puts the hammer down on the course from the fourteenth hole onward and finishing up with these two beauties, but it will be a resort course, and hence the right tee choice should yield safe options for all.

Faldo first visited the property six years ago. The six-time major winner felt the property was exciting, with its Cambodia Meets the Monterey Peninsula look, but took on the project with a certain amount of apprehension. According to Nick Edmunds, the managing director of Faldo Designs, the chief said, “If we don’t create one of the world’s great golf courses here we will have failed.”

Time will tell, but Faldo also said that hole seventeen, in the wind, “Will be one of the most enjoyable sixes of your life.” And he was right about that.

By Tom Bedell

(Photo by Will Doak)

After heavy snows in December and on New Year’s Day, the club of choice here in balmy southeastern Vermont has been the ice scraper or snow shovel. This is actually tolerable for awhile. It’s not bad to take a vacation even from golf, to head out in the backwoods on snowshoes, pondering animal tracks instead of tracking a wayward golf ball. Or to strap on the cross country skis and ponder a different sense of balance than the usual worries about reverse pivots.

I began writing about golf more than a decade ago, and ten years ago precisely for the local daily here in southeastern Vermont, the Brattleboro Reformer. What it pains me to admit is how little my game has improved overall in that time.

Then as now, I’m still struggling to break 90 on any kind of consistent basis. Worse, I’m ten years older. According to the National Golf Foundation, which provides statistics to the golf industry, I’m still pretty much an average golfer: “The average score on an 18-hole regulation golf course was 98.3 in 2005. Average score was 96.4 for men and 108.1 for women.”

The average score has changed little over the years despite the improvement in equipment, except for those at the top of the game. (The rich get richer.) That’s because there are always new and lesser-skilled players joining the throng, says the NGF.

The organization also said, in a chilling note, that, “…average score increases as golfers age, which tends to balance out better scores by younger players.” Great. But I’ll try to keep my ripening envy in check. Attempting to keep up with the youngsters will surely promote fierce and hurried swings, and more trips to the backwoods.

Barely one in five adult golfers breaks 90 in an average round. One might presumably take some comfort in this, but all the caterwauling out on the course suggests otherwise. Only about one in five golfers maintains a handicap, and the average is 15 for men, 23 for women. There, alas, I’m currently slightly above average, despite flirting with 15 last season.

Still, I have in no way accepted that I’ve begun my inevitable golfing decline. I’m still convinced I can improve, especially if I work on my short game. There’s always hope.

Ten years ago I wrote the following, all still utterly true: Every winter, my golf game improves considerably. This is because I think about it, rather than actually play it. When I think about golf, I’m quite the strategist, and see clearly how simple a game it is. With superior course management in mind; with my easy swing, honed through endless repetition from December through March; with my steely putting, sharpened by countless rolls across the living-room carpet; with mental images in mind of holes actually played though actually lying in bed at night, I survive winter buoyed by hope.

Why do we bother?

We bother because we love the game, of course, and because we’re driven by hope. The legs may be the first to go, but lose hope and we’re lost indeed. The NGF noted 15,990 facilities with at least one golf course in the U.S. at the close of business on December 31, 2006. Of those, 11,608 were public courses. All the fields of hope.

In terms of travel, I was probably slightly above average again last year. I played in five countries, most exotically in China, most thrillingly in Scotland.

Both trips could bear long tales at another time. In Asia I played about a half-hour north of Hong Kong at the Mission Hills Golf Club, and it was the experience at a place like this that the term mind-boggling was meant for. Except there isn’t quite another place like Mission Hills, the world’s largest golf facility, with 12 courses, more than 4,500 acres (roughly equivalent to five Central Parks), three clubhouses (one the largest in the world at 650,000 square feet), three golf academies and a Chinese menu of resort facilities.

There are 10,000 club members at Mission Hills. Yet the logistics of moving members or guests around the site seem staggeringly efficient. Our group would show up at our appointed course staging area to find the uniformed, red-clad ranks of the 3,000-strong caddy force ranged at attention, all women in their mid-twenties and indefatigable in their golfing duties. Mission Hills hosted the Omega World Cup of Golf this past November, and will continue to do so through 2018 on the Olazabal Course, each of the dozen tracks sporting name designers–Nicklaus, Norman, Faldo, Ernie Els, Annika Sorenstram, Vijay Singh, Pete Dye and so on.

The stars had varied input on the designs. Most were done in collaboration with golf architects Lee Schmidt and Brian Curley out of Scottsdale, who created some real wizardry not only in the consistently high quality of the courses but in their sense of variety. But while I saw nine, I played but eight, so a return trip seems essential.

I went to Scotland in April, and it wasn’t cruel at all. There was nary a drop of rain the entire time I was there, enjoying an extended stay at the Fairmont St. Andrews and making raids on one great course after another: Cruden Bay, the Jubilee Course at St. Andrews, Kingsbarns, Carnoustie, Crail, not to mention the two tracks right at the Fairmont, the Torrance and the Devlin, and Panmure, a hidden gem.

Still, it would have been difficult to top my initial, jetlagged round, a few hours after arriving in St. Andrews. It might have seemed unfortunate to play my first round at the venerable Old Course in winds gusting to 40 mph, but it actually seemed perfectly apt. When the announcement came over the loudspeaker, “The 3:40 group, play away,” I was thrilled to set out on this venerable golfing ground at last, and never emerged from an exalted sense of thrall.

It helped that I played pretty well, for an average golfer. Heck, if not for a few closing doubles, I might even have broken 90.

Old Tom on the Swilcan Bridge