{"id":37,"date":"2010-04-25T10:59:56","date_gmt":"2010-04-25T17:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgpnolan.com\/?p=37"},"modified":"2010-05-09T12:00:56","modified_gmt":"2010-05-09T19:00:56","slug":"seafront-beauty-wales-royal-porthcawl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/golf\/37\/seafront-beauty-wales-royal-porthcawl","title":{"rendered":"Seafront Beauty: Wales’ Royal Porthcawl"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

The First at Royal Porthcawl<\/p><\/div>\n

The story is told of a prospective guest player appearing at the office door of Royal Porthcawl\u2019s club secretary.\u00a0 A round at Porthcawl, arguably the finest golf course in Wales, is no small feather in a golfer\u2019s cap, and its guest policy is somewhat more stringent than that of most courses in the British Isles.\u00a0 Thus, the interview with the all-powerful one was not a social call, but a vetting.<\/p>\n

And it was terse.<\/p>\n

Secretary:\u00a0 \u201cWhat do you play to?\u201d<\/p>\n

Supplicant: \u201cTwenty.\u201d\u00a0 Pauses, sensing that at a handicap of 20, his petition was weak.\u00a0 \u201cA good 20,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n

Secretary, in full roar: \u201cThere is no such thing as a good 20.\u201d<\/p>\n

End of vetting.<\/p>\n

Lest the anecdote, apocryphal or otherwise, be taken as the philosophy of Royal Porthcawl writ small, the broader sweep of the club\u2019s history\u2014120 years of it\u2014makes a contrary case. It is amply sprinkled with characters and stories that suggest not a rather puritanical approach to golf, but a place that revels as much in the sensual strain of its past as the plain-spoken classicism of its links.<\/p>\n

Much told is, for instance, the matter of the lady player, who upon approaching the 6th\u00a0green, discovered in the bunker guarding the right side both her golf ball and a couple in the throes of passion.\u00a0 Nothing in the rules as promulgated by the Royal and Ancient seemed to apply (loose impediment, immovable instruction\u2026?) so local mores were invoked: the couple was married within two weeks, and the bunker was filled in.<\/p>\n

Porthcawl also once entertained Walter Hagen, golfer and rake non pareil<\/em>, who insisted that the art of living entailed stopping to smell the roses.\u00a0 According to Henry Longhurst, \u00a0Hagen, on his sole visit to Royal Porthcawl, was told that his tee time next day was 10:30 a.m.\u00a0 Wrong, the club was informed.\u00a0 The Haig evidently planned on smelling the roses that evening. \u00a0He would be at the first tee box at 3 p.m. \u00a0Wrong, the Haig was informed. \u00a0He showed up on time, but Walter Hagen’s was not a style easily cramped. \u00a0He arrived in a glittering Daimler that would have given Gatsby pause, his feet on the steamer trunks, cigar in hand.\u00a0 Attended by most of Porthcawl, he twice went around in 81 shots, including one round in which he crowned his efforts with a butcher\u2019s seven on number 18.\u00a0 He of course failed to make the two-day cut.\u00a0 The citizenry of Porthcawl, nonetheless, was jubilant: it had seen the great Hagen play golf on its links.<\/p>\n

Even the coveted appellation \u201cRoyal\u201d flavors as much of passion as monarchy.\u00a0 The honor, granted to Porthcawl in 1909 by the little-noted King Edward VII, usually included a special association with a member of the royal family.\u00a0 So it was with Porthcawl, which from 1923-1936 counted Edward, Prince of Wales, as its royal patron.\u00a0 The Prince, later to gain enduring fame for abdicating the throne in order to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson, was very much a child of the Roaring \u201820s, well-known for his enthusiastic participation in the hedonistic practices of that decade. \u00a0He lived out his life as a romantic figure, revered in the public eye as a man willing to forgo a kingdom for love.<\/p>\n

To the golf.\u00a0 Apocryphal or not, the story of the club secretary\u2019s high standards has a point to it: Royal Porthcawl has a temper: like that club secretary, it can be a testy, inflexible golf course.\u00a0 From the tips, it measures 6697 yards, from the gentlemen\u2019s tees 6197, playing to par-72 from both.\u00a0 The numbers, of course, mean little: Porthcawl, like all links courses, is meant to be played in the wind.\u00a0 And when it blows, there is nowhere to hide, for the course runs\u2014atypically for a links layout–in a circle, not a nine out nine in vee.<\/p>\n

Porthcawl first catches notice because of its visually striking geography: set on Wales\u2019 south coast, the links look out across Bristol Channel to the slender, low-running pewter finger of England\u2019s Somerset Coast.\u00a0\u00a0 Even a cursory glance at the ground inland from the curve of the beach promises prime golf; a long run of silver-grassed dunes yielding to the roll and heave of linksland. The course is free of trees, touched by, but not choked with, clutches of gorse and broom.\u00a0 The terrain inclines mildly as it moves away from water, high enough for purists to pronounce the holes up top as of a heathland character. No mind.\u00a0 If anything, the elevation ensures that the course delivers on the promise, often made and seldom kept, that the sea is visible from every hole.<\/p>\n

Like many courses in the U.K., Royal Porthcawl began as a 9-hole affair built upon common land.\u00a0 When the limitations of the arrangement became apparent, the current layout was put in place.\u00a0 Over the years, a number of designers, professional and amateur, have tinkered with it, usually a recipe for architectural tragedy.\u00a0 Yet the course today manages to do it all: its distinctive bunkering gives the course a consistent look; no hole repeats another; and its difficult challenge — distance and accuracy both count — is made clear at the outset.<\/p>\n

Porthcawl begins with a flourish, opening with three par-4s parallel to the beach, each hole more demanding than the one before. \u00a0No hooks allowed. \u00a0It begins to bend away from the water with a par-3 of 180 yards, and then after following the property perimeter for several holes (yep, no hooks allowed), it zigs and zags through its theretofore unexamined center in a run of holes that features three strong doglegs.<\/p>\n

As with the fireworks of three fours charging down the dunes to open, the course finishes in memorable fashion: a three hole salvo that presents what good courses do: equal opportunities for triumph and disaster.\u00a0 Cross bunkers on the long 16th, (is there any more elegant hazard than a cross-bunker?) <\/sup>raise the possibility of a card-besmirching six, the par-5 17th, at less than 500 yards, is a genuine birdie opportunity for those who can spank consecutively a drive and an uphill fairway metal, and finally, the par-4 18th, <\/sup>a hole that glories in the view: 334 yards, gently downhill, with Bristol Channel providing the background for both shots.\u00a0 The second shot provides the last touchy moment of the day, for a thin hit off one’s downhill lie will roll through the green, bound for the beach.<\/p>\n

Once inside the small, not terribly distinguished-looking clubhouse, club history and impressions freshly formed begin to forge the golfer\u2019s memory of Porthcawl. \u00a0Hanging on the clubhouse wall is a portrait of the patron monarch. \u00a0A handsome old clock, big, intricately marked, built by a Cardiff craftsman in the 19th\u00a0century, marks the entrance to the grill. \u00a0As surely as Edward\u2019s portrait takes the golfer back in time, the clock\u2019s hands point, as clockhands always do, to the future.<\/p>\n

There is a justifiable relish about the whole thing. \u00a0Be sure to take it all in. \u00a0It’s the province of kings and princes, players of enduring fame, stories transformed by time into local legend. \u00a0There is, beyond the windows of the room, a scene of water, land, sand, the promise of golf. \u00a0In the sanctuary of the clubhouse there is no such thing as a bad round, only a day when the wind raised Old Harry out there, or you were not quite on form. The chairs are overstuffed; bottle green and maroon, exactly as they should be.\u00a0 The windows open onto those opening holes, loping down the beach. \u00a0Drinks are handed round with a far freer hand than were pars. \u00a0Rumination sets in.\u00a0 The elegance of the routing… a shot you won’t ever forget… the tang of salt breezes…<\/p>\n

The clock ticks. \u00a0Wouldn’t it be fine to play this one again tomorrow?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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