MOMENTS, MEMORIES AND MADNESS with STEVE CAMERON: Unplayable lies, and other lies and tales of golfing in Scotland
That picture is a bit misleading.
Yes, the one there to the upper right.
(I’m pointing my finger in that direction, in case it helps.)
The only things truly factual in the photo would be that, yes, it’s me standing at the fence and, yes, the famous links of St. Andrews make up that wide expanse of grass behind me.
But right off the bat, the glistening green of the 18th fairway — and the 17th beyond that, in the shadow of the Old Course Hotel — give you the impression that golf in Scotland is played on lush turf with beautiful lies every time you step up to a shot.
You know, much the same as we enjoy here in the States.
Trust me, nothing could be further from the truth.
I had the joy of living nearly four years in Scotland, the country where my mother spent most of her childhood — and where conversation in a pub, especially later in the evening, cannot be translated into any known language.
IF YOU play enough golf in Scotland (and it’s hard to escape it with an available course around every bend in the road), you need to hit shots that don’t come with the lessons you purchased here in the Northwest.
Unlike the artificially landscaped courses so common in this country, in Scotland golf always has been adapted to the land.
If a course was laid out on sandy links land near the North Sea, for instance, then your issue is learning to hit shots from that kind of soil.
There are places where only a naïve tourist would attempt to land a soft 6-iron on the green.
That shot, looking gorgeous while in flight, could easily take one monstrous bounce near the pin and crash into a full stand of gorse behind the green.
And gorse, while in beautiful yellow bloom part of the year, is Mother Nature’s revenge for the Scots inventing golf (believed to be in 1515 at St. Andrews) in the first place.
Gorse has thorns everywhere, and not the kind that can be brushed aside with a 3-wood.
If your ball sticks somewhere in that mass of yellow, you don’t even bother. Take a penalty stroke for an unplayable lie and hit again.
Of course, you might be only 30 feet from the hole and have to take that blind next stroke with a full 9-iron from somewhere behind a small forest of gorse, but…
Hey, you paid dearly for the Scottish experience, so try to smile and enjoy it.
THERE’S just no way I can really explain golf in Scotland — not in a measly thousand words or so.
Maybe there ARE no words, and the only way to understand it is to go play. Even then, you can’t get the full treatment as you would actually living in the country and playing in the various (and wildly varying) regions of this little nation.
For instance, for most of my stay in Scotland, I lived on the north coast — about halfway between Aberdeen and Inverness, and I became a member of the insanely difficult Strathlene Golf Club.
That’s not to say there were all horrific moments at Strathlene.
A lot of the front nine is perched high above the Moray Firth (we’d call it a bay), which opens to the North Sea and where dolphins leap happily from the waves — so close that even in a country where no dawdling is allowed during a round of golf, back-ups are forgiven on No. 2 at Strathlene because pods of dolphins often put on a glorious show directly beneath you.
Ah, but the golf itself?
OK, then, No. 4 is a par-3 that’s listed at around 185 yards — which is a lie, since the green sits on top of a mini-mountain that stretches the yardage to about 220.
That tiny green is surrounded by ankle-high rough, the pin is almost always in the front and everything slopes to the back. In other words, your pitch shot from the side of the hill after the tee ball is shot simply WILL roll into the miserable foliage at the back of the green.
The locals say they’d buy pints for the house in exchange for a treasured bogey on No. 4.
I’VE ALWAYS been amused by a pair of par-4s, Nos. 8 and 9, which run side-by-side and each are listed at around a healthy 440 yards.
The prevailing winds run east or west — sorry, those are your only two choices — and so do these two holes.
Therefore, one of them is going to play about 550 yards.
The other will, yes, play much shorter, but with that howling wind at your back you have to land an approach shot about a hundred yards short and hope it bounds onto the green.
Then stops.
Good luck, mate.
I think my favorite anonymous course to take a visitor from America was Hopeman Golf Club, another track that runs along the Moray Firth.
There is a par-3 at Hopeman – the infamous No. 12 – that plays steeply downhill.
In fact, you leave your clubs by the tee box for the trek down to the green and carry only what you need, almost always a putter and the most lofted wedge in your bag.
Oh, did I mention that there are no electric carts allowed in Scotland, I suppose on the theory that the game was made for walking and that’s how it must remain.
BACK TO No. 12…
The normal wind comes from the west, which means that to hit the green you must aim straight out to sea — toward Greenland or whatever the hell else might be in that direction.
You have to trust that the wind won’t die down or ease up a bit, and even if the gales DO blow your ball back toward land, the green is smallish and surrounded by every kind of tangled weed that exists in Scotland.
Ah, and the green is also tilted severely left to right (as if you don’t have enough problems already), and I can promise you that any chip from the left — and even some putts from that direction — are headed for the junk on the right.
It’s a tough walk back up the hill after you’ve been embarrassed by No. 12.
And by the way, the 16th at Hopeman is essentially unplayable unless there’s a 40 mile-per-hour wind at your back and you play the long, tilted, uphill-and-then-downhill fairway with the perfection of a brain surgeon.
Everything down toward the sea on your right — the way the fairway slopes — is an unplayable lie and a Titleist lost in the gorse.
No, don’t even think about safety up on the left. That’s out of bounds.
Wind against you?
It’s a par-6 (at least), and you’ll drop to your knees in gratitude to write that double bogey on your card.
EVERYONE asks the locals for a favorite Scottish golf story.
Since I lived in the country long enough to be almost-a-local, I hear the same question.
I think my favorite involves Tiger Woods in the British Open at Carnoustie.
There’s just no way to explain Carnoustie except to say that on days when the wind is up, it will make you cry for your mama.
And the wind is ALWAYS up.
The rough along each fairway isn’t thick, it’s tall and thin — which is to say, it wraps around the shaft of your club and yanks your spine sideways as the ball moves about 3 yards.
In mid-summer during the Open, fairways are the consistency of bricks, meaning that the pros must get their drives out there to shorten approaches (but fairways are laid out in such a way that with slight turns, they come to an end like airplane runways).
Plenty of great drives go just a wee bit TOO far, and now you’re talking about crooked numbers on scorecards.
Anyhow, Tiger practiced hitting irons on a lot of par-4s during the week — including No. 1, where the tee box sits in the shadow of a massive hotel.
Fans jam onto balconies along that side of the building to watch the players tee off, and naturally Tiger drew a massive crowd for his first tee shot on Thursday.
As he had planned all along, Tiger hit a 4-iron — but he pulled it severely to the left, and it bounded toward a little burn (creek) that runs parallel to the fairway.
Tiger watched in horror as the crowd parted to let his signature Nike ball hop and hop and hop.
Finally, he turned and said to no one in particular: “Did it reach the creek?”
From up on a hotel balcony, a teenager hollered back…
“Aye, and it’s already for sale on eBay!”
If you have a good tale about golf in Scotland, by all means pass it along to: scameron@cdapress.com.
We’ll take another trip across the pond sometime soon, and we’d love to use your stories.
Email: scameron@cdapress.com
Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns appear in The Press on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. “Moments, Memories and Madness,” his reminiscences from several decades as a sports journalist, runs each Sunday.
Steve also writes Zags Tracker, a commentary on Gonzaga basketball, once per month during the offseason.
