{"id":898,"date":"2009-12-21T11:33:52","date_gmt":"2009-12-21T18:33:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jeffwallach.com\/?p=898"},"modified":"2011-02-27T15:24:22","modified_gmt":"2011-02-27T22:24:22","slug":"fear-and-loathing-mostly-fear-in-st-andrews","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/golf\/898\/fear-and-loathing-mostly-fear-in-st-andrews","title":{"rendered":"Fear and Loathing (mostly fear) in St. Andrews"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\"St<\/div>\n

The morning was cold and a cutting wind blew over the Old Course like a knee in the groin.\u00a0 As my friend and fellow golf writer Tom Harack and I watched a couple of guys we knew teeing off on the first hole of the most famous golf layout on the planet– a gorgeous, rugged place of power and pilgrimage, a sacred place of homecoming and deep emotion– we huddled close in the freshening breeze and whispered \u201cMiss it.\u00a0 MISS IT!<\/strong>\u201d at their back swings.<\/p>\n

Despite the weather a ragged gallery clustered around the first tee: golfers awaiting their times, caddies milling about smoking, townsfolk shuffling off to work, and endless brigades of tourists circling the Royal and Ancient Clubhouse in goofy wonder, toting shopping bags full of logoed sweaters and drink coasters, club-head covers, tee-shirts, tartan neckties, boxer shorts, jock straps, condoms, hollow-point bullets, and Lord only knew what else, all sporting the famous St. Andrews crest.\u00a0 They stood in awe, these spectators, with quiet smiles on their lips and envy blossoming in their hearts, all of them, I think it is safe to say, repeating– consciously or not– the same mantra: \u201cMiss it.\u00a0 MISS IT!<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n

I began developing this bitter and cynical attitude toward St. Andrews several years ago when I visited Scotland to gather material for my first book.\u00a0 My friend Tom Liszewski, who runs an excellent golf travel service called Golf Vacations, in Boston, was kind enough to set up my itinerary.\u00a0 Although Tom managed to book complimentary tee times on eleven great golf courses throughout Scotland (many of which he arranged for me to play with club Secretaries, or other dignitaries); and although he scored free hotel rooms (including a suite at the Balmoral in Edinburgh that was so large I got lost looking for the bathroom late one night), Tom was unable to secure anything from the powers-that-be at St. Andrews besides a snooty letter.<\/p>\n

The circumstances surrounding this current visit did little to improve my attitude.\u00a0 In spite of the fact that I\u2019d traveled more than 6000 miles, on three airplanes, in coach<\/span>, and then climbed aboard a bus for a three hour ride to spend a mere four days in St. Andrews; regardless that I was a guest of the posh Old Course Hotel, which practically straddles the famous Road Hole; and without consideration that our group of golf writers had been invited here specifically to write about and promote golf in St. Andrews, the reigning powers wouldn\u2019t even guarantee us a tee time on the Old Course.\u00a0 St. Andrews also threw bunker sand in our faces by insisting that we\u2019d have to pay the greens fees–if they even deemed us worthy to jab our spikes in their grass.<\/p>\n\"St\n

Throughout my life I have always felt as though I am somehow special, and that rules don\u2019t apply to me.\u00a0 My mother confronted me with this fact several million times during my childhood, and though it pains me to say so, my mother was right.\u00a0 So when St. Andrews royally kicked me in my egotism for the second time I grew angry and vengeful.\u00a0 But behind these easy emotions, of course, cowered fear and helplessness over a situation in which something I so badly wanted lay beyond my own control– an experience that most avid golfers can probably relate to.<\/p>\n

After our companions hit successful tee shots on the first hole of the Old Course and chased happily after them, and still a half hour before Tom\u2019s and my own tee time, I asked the starter if there wasn\u2019t someplace we could retreat indoors to get warm while we waited.\u00a0 From inside his toasty booth he raised a steaming mug of tea in mock \u201ccheers,\u201d threw his head back, and laughed like one of us was insane.<\/p>\n

(Okay; he actually told me I could walk half a block to the Woolen Mills Store, but I distinctly noticed that he said this with an ATTITUDE– though maybe that was just his accent).<\/p>\n

Scotsmen have been playing golf on the location of the Old Course in St. Andrews for over 500 years.\u00a0 In 1552 a local Archbishop passed a decree granting the townspeople the right to pursue \u201cgaof, futeball, and shuting\u201d on the local links in perpetuity.\u00a0 Although the Archbishop wasn\u2019t much of a speller, his word was law.\u00a0 Approximately 60% of the available tee times on the Old Course are currently reserved for town residents, who still play there as if it were a semi-private club.\u00a0 Which in fact it is.<\/p>\n

But chances are that you\u2019re<\/span> not a Scotsman.\u00a0 So if you\u2019d like to play golf on the most famous course in the noosphere, good luck.\u00a0 And get in line.\u00a0 If you didn\u2019t happen to book a tee-time a year in advance, the only way to secure this rare commodity is to enter the daily ballot.\u00a0 Every afternoon, the mystical powers at St. Andrews randomly select lucky balloteers to fill open tee times for the following day.\u00a0 While the chances are good that you\u2019ll get on if you\u2019re in town for a while, it is also entirely possible that you won\u2019t.\u00a0 Although I\u2019d been working hard not to measure myself by such external circumstances, I couldn\u2019t help feeling that my success or failure in the ballot would provide a physical manifestation of my accrued golf karma: only a loser would travel so far to come here and not even get on the course.\u00a0 Detachment was not an easy lesson to master.<\/p>\n

Learning that we had to enter the ballot fattened me with further anger and disdain, and elicited that spoiled-brat head shaking that my mother tried so tirelessly to cure me of.\u00a0 But I have since come to realize that while the ballot system is as arbitrary as sacrificing a virgin to the volcano Gods, it is perfectly philosophical for the same reason: it allows Providence to decide whether we are, in fact, worthy of playing golf on the game\u2019s most sacred layout.\u00a0 And that is the pure and unarguable beauty of the system.\u00a0 That it remains– just as our best golf rounds most often do– beyond willful control.\u00a0 I had no choice but to throw a tantrum or let go– and I wasn\u2019t entirely sure which constituted a better course of action.<\/p>\n

On our first afternoon in St. Andrews, Tom Harack and another golf writer and I played a joyful, disorientedly jet-lagged round of golf on the town\u2019s Jubilee Course, finishing just as the stone-gray buildings and the blue sea sopped up the last pools of afternoon light.\u00a0 Upon sinking my final putt I skipped back to my room in anticipation only to discover that we had not, in fact, been awarded a tee time on the Old Course for the next day.<\/p>\n

So instead, we made our way \u2018round the excellent Duke\u2019s Course, an inland layout designed by five-time Open Champion Peter Thomson, and owned by our friends at the Old Course Hotel.\u00a0 Tom and I competed against two staffers from a now-defunct golf magazine in a $2 Nassau.\u00a0 The course itself pitched and rolled and undulated musically between pines and birches, through varicolored grasses, over burns, around ponds, and past patches of heather and gorse, but all I could focus on was our stupid, stupid bet.\u00a0 Though I\u2019d been hoping to shoot in the low eighties in preparation for breaking through to a new personal best on the Old Course should I merit the opportunity to play there, I would have needed to cheat just to break 100 that day on the Duke\u2019s.\u00a0 And I seemed perpetually married to performance.<\/p>\n

After lunch in the stately Clubhouse, Tom (having earned the new nickname \u201cBunker Boy\u201d) and I caught a ride to the Ladybank Golf Club– an Open qualifying site– to see if we couldn\u2019t rescue the respectable remnants of our games.\u00a0 While this morning\u2019s sorry impetus was to win a $2 Nassau, this afternoon presented me with an even more senseless goal.\u00a0 Although only five of us were playing golf on this press trip, our hosts had promised to award prizes for the lowest score on each course each day, the lowest overall score, and the best Stableford tally.\u00a0 This afternoon, since Tom was the only other golfer (and since his putting stroke seems like a desperate cry for help), I figured my chances were pretty good to turn in the low net.\u00a0 And oh what an admirable role model I\u2019d be!<\/p>\n

I recognized the small, small pitiful nature of my desire to \u201cwin,\u201d yet I still proved incapable of letting go of performance.\u00a0 I played ignominiously and with great self-consciousness, barely noticing the elegant pines, the way the steep bunkers cast rounded shadows, the pewter, cerulean, and orange colors of the sky.\u00a0 At dusk we crawled home to learn once again that we had not been granted the honor of playing the Old Course the next day.<\/p>\n

That night I tussled with a kicky eighteen year-old scotch at the Road Hole Bar in our hotel.\u00a0 Then I ate far too much good food, drank too much Merlot, and excused myself at eleven.\u00a0 But I was too restless to sleep, so at midnight I pulled on some clothes and went walking.<\/p>\n

I ambled out behind the hotel along a shell path that ran beside the seventeenth hole (the Road Hole) of the Old Course.\u00a0 After glancing feloniously to make sure no one else was about, I crossed onto the most well-known fairway in golf, feeling an illicit thrill.\u00a0 I sneaked between the deep bunkers and up to the green.<\/p>\n

Standing next to the pin, with a light rain tinkling and the world dark around me, I felt a weird cocktail of fear and longing and a schoolboy sort of love for the place I was standing.\u00a0 And all at once my anger broke up and drained away.\u00a0 I am not embarrassed to admit that I whispered a quiet prayer.\u00a0 I prayed not for a tee time, or to break eighty, to meet a mermaid, or for my books to sell a million copies.\u00a0 I prayed for the courage to be able to play golf– and to live– without fear.<\/p>\n

My anger, I recognized right then, as the night wind blew over the linkslands, was a cheap suit dressing up the fear of not getting what I wanted.\u00a0 I was mad at St. Andrews because it had failed to recognize me as someone special.\u00a0 As I appealed to whatever spirits ruled this place it came clear to me that I live my life afraid of most everything: of not performing well, or of what other folks might think of me; of slicing a tee shot or blading a pitch or three-putting a green; of letting go of control enough to let someone get intimate; of wearing the wrong shoes or choosing the incorrect fork or spilling red wine on my white shirt. \u00a0And, mostly, of making bad choices and being treated unfairly and not getting what\u2019s coming to me.\u00a0 Yet instead of acknowledging my fears, I disguise them with anger, often fooling even myself about how I really feel.\u00a0 This has been the self-protective and deceitful architecture of my life, and the very thing that many non-traditional golf instructors over the years had tried to help me deconstruct so that I might live more fully, and– incidentally– play better golf.<\/p>\n

Standing beside the wind-rippled flag of the Road Hole as rain percussed around me and clouds obscured the moon, I even feared catching cold or ruining my coat.\u00a0 I tried to let go.\u00a0 I breathed deeply into my solar plexus.\u00a0 I pledged to live differently and more fully.\u00a0 I asked for help, and to be worthy of the honor of playing golf here.\u00a0 I let the rain fall without wishing it would stop, knowing that the rain couldn\u2019t give a rip about what I wished or knew.<\/p>\n

Eventually I stepped toward the eighteenth green, crossed Swilcan Bridge, circled the Royal and Ancient clubhouse, and continued down to where the burn tongued into the North Sea.\u00a0 Looking out over the water I thought about my life and how it had led me here.\u00a0 Some students from the University waltzed drunkenly past and I grew skittish, afraid they might speak to me and interrupt my solitude.\u00a0 I tightened, then laughed at yet another example of my fear.<\/p>\n

After listening to the breakers playing a beat of whoosh-whoosh-boom against the shore, I retraced my steps back toward the hotel.\u00a0 Walking across the shared first\/eighteenth fairway I felt the soft turf relenting under my shoes.\u00a0 And then, looking up, I spotted a pair of headlights advancing toward me down the path adjacent to the hole.\u00a0 From atop the vehicle a searchlight swept back and forth over the links, combing the grassy expanse with light.<\/p>\n

The car was still two hundred yards away, and as it crept steadily closer I knew I had enough time to sprint for cover, to throw myself down in a bunker or press my body flat against one of the rolling mounds that made for such difficult lies.\u00a0 But I also recognized that I was being tested.\u00a0 I understood that the challenges of this golf course were not limited to hitting a ball with a stick.<\/p>\n

As the vehicle closed the gap between us, everything in me shouted flee! run! hide! get out of the way before you\u2019re exposed!\u00a0 But another voice– calm, unfamiliar, slightly officiously super-hero like– reminded me there was nothing to be afraid of.<\/p>\n

Run, moron! the first voice hollered.<\/p>\n

I sunk my hands into the pockets of my field coat, squinched my eyes at the darkness, and strode ahead.\u00a0 I kept walking, though fear and adrenaline protested my aplomb.\u00a0 Just before the searchlight illuminated my terror and horns blared and security sprinted across the sacred grass to tackle me and drag me away, the light simply went out.\u00a0 The vehicle drove close, closer, parallel, and then past me.\u00a0 And then the light went back on.\u00a0 I strolled back to my hotel, laughing, and slept hard.<\/p>\n\"St\n

The next morning, my Scottish friend and former college soccer coach John Wallace, whom I hadn\u2019t seen in fourteen years, drove down to St. Andrews from his home in nearby Fraserburgh for a day of golf.\u00a0 He and Tom and I rode over to Crail and played the gorgeous links course there in wind and sun and hail and cool rain, smoking good cigars, telling old stories and inventing some new ones.\u00a0 On the first tee I relinquished the score card to Tom and stopped chafing about numbers– even when I hit into a deep bunker on the ninth and flailed on several shots before escaping.\u00a0 Even after slicing my drive into the ocean on an easy par five.\u00a0 Even after three-putting a flat green.\u00a0 I simply valued the camaraderie, the chance to play this beautiful game with friends who lived far away, and whom I might not see again anytime soon.\u00a0 I just played.\u00a0 Played<\/span>!\u00a0 Like a boy.\u00a0 I shot 89, Tom informed me, as we sped home for a quick lunch before venturing out on St. Andrews\u2019 New Course in the afternoon.\u00a0 The voices of my many coaches were lost in the simple purity of surf crashing on the beach.<\/p>\n

We teed off at just after 3:00 and the starter warned us we wouldn\u2019t have time to finish, but we agreed among ourselves to canter briskly between shots.\u00a0 Somehow hurrying from lie to lie improved our games.\u00a0 I sunk several long, unconscious putts.\u00a0 We all hit the green on a 225-yard blind par three into the wind.\u00a0 We golfed back toward town beneath an engaging drama of clouds and light, rainbows and salty air.\u00a0 We finished chilled and wind-burned and happy as could be, all lipping out cross-country putts on the 18th green as the sky darkened above us.\u00a0 We veered directly to the Jigger Inn for two rounds of Lagavulin\u2019s peaty single malt chased by Scottish ale.\u00a0 The day had delivered everything that golf could promise: heroics and tragedy, good friends, moody weather, laughter and connection, and a sense of tramping proudly on and belonging to this great, great earth.\u00a0 I shot 85, Tom told me after adding our scores in the bar.<\/p>\n

Entering the warm haven of my room at the Old Course Hotel with an equally warm buzz, I anticipated nothing.\u00a0 I suddenly possessed everything a man could desire.<\/p>\n

But a message awaited me: \u201cCongratulations,\u201d it read.\u00a0 \u201cYour tee time on the Old Course is reserved for 10:30 tomorrow.\u201d<\/p>\n

On the first tee of the Old Course I torqued and stretched and tried to loosen up in the clenching wind.\u00a0 I teed up a spanking new Titleist and considered the widest fairway in golf.\u00a0 I acknowledged again that I had lived much of my life out of fear, and I prayed for the grace to play this round of golf free from such worry.\u00a0 I stuffed my notebook in my bag, understanding that it was far more important to live in the moment and really experience playing this golf course than it was to ponder what I might write about the experience later on.\u00a0 I have hidden behind my notebook for nearly twenty years, safely insulated from my own life by intellectual abstraction.\u00a0 Today I vowed to pull that curtain aside.<\/p>\n

I launched a beautiful tee shot high into the prevailing wind and watched it sail above the fairway.\u00a0 Then I hit a lofted wedge over Swilcan Burn and onto the back edge of the huge green.\u00a0 From that distance I was content with a three-putt for bogey.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t remember much of the next seven holes; they were pure beyond description, and to talk about them somehow takes something away.<\/p>\n

I would like<\/span> to tell you that my life changed on the Old Course that day, that I subdued a demon that had rode piggy-back on my consciousness, strangling spontaneity since I was a boy.<\/p>\n

I will<\/span> tell you this: standing on the eighth green after snaking in a long putt to save par, I realized that I was two over, and something opened up in me like a sky suddenly pouring rain, and I started to cry.\u00a0 Cry!\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t stand still.\u00a0 My hands numbed with cold, and as I went and peed in the gorse while we waited for the group ahead of us to move out of range on the ninth hole, I recognized that I was having a career round, that I\u2019d parred six out of the first eight holes and nearly parred the other two.\u00a0 Chilly tears broke sharply over the upper tier of my cheekbones.\u00a0 I cried– with joy for what had just happened, with fear, and with detachment from fear, all the while realizing that I would not get what I wanted.\u00a0 Not yet.\u00a0 Not today.\u00a0 I let go in a way that I cannot explain, accepting something that on this day ruined my excellent chance to break eighty because it was too precious to hold onto.\u00a0 I celebrated the magic of St. Andrews with a good cry and tossed anger and control into the October wind like blades of grass.<\/p>\n

On the ninth tee I knew<\/span> I was about to chunk my drive fifty yards ahead into the heather.\u00a0 But I swung hard anyway, without fear or attachment.\u00a0 The ball flew exactly where I\u2019d expected.\u00a0 My heart sailed off in the air currents, floating high and then dropping like a stone.<\/p>\n

My caddie advised me to execute a practice swing in the heather to feel how it would grab my club.\u00a0 I did so, thinking: so what if I miss?\u00a0 This is golf.\u00a0 A game.\u00a0 Enjoy the challenge.\u00a0 Let go.\u00a0 Be free.<\/p>\n

It was the one of the last such pure and joyous shots I hit that day.\u00a0 But I didn\u2019t fucking care.<\/p>\n

\"St

All photos \u00a9 Linksland.com.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The morning was cold and a cutting wind blew over the Old Course like a knee in the groin.\u00a0 As… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":900,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3232,3600,4785,5048,5541,9,1483,1694,2226,17],"tags":[944164,944172,944161,3856,3483,5586,5587],"class_list":["post-898","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-st-andrews","category-world-golf-tour","category-connoisseurs-scotland","category-alternative-golf-assoc","category-black-butte-ranch","category-golf","category-kalos","category-haversham-baker","category-perrygolf","category-courses-and-travel","tag-golf","tag-st-andrews","tag-travel","tag-the-old-course","tag-old-course-hotel","tag-irreverent-golf-story","tag-road-hole"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2009\/12\/St-Andrews-Old-Course-2nd-Linksland.com-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1019,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions\/1019"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}