Rich Musings

Scottish Independence—Why Not?

2014-09-02T17:29:00.002+01:00

The Scots are a different people than the English (or the Welsh or Irish, in fact). Or, as I wrote to a friend of mine.....

Like you, I am an expatriate within another country, and like you I have great respect and hopes for the future of my adopted land, even though my heart will always remain in the land of my birth (for me, the USA, for you, Eire). Where we differ is that I consider my adopted country to be Scotland and you The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

As do you, I visit the other parts of UK of GB&NI regularly, and every time I do so I feel that I am entering a different country, and while the transition is not as dramatic as it is when I cross the USA-Mexican border, it is palpable, even if more gentle. Much like when I crosss from the USA to Canada. Many things there are the same, but many things are not, and I never have gone there and not felt that I was in a foreign country.

Analogies all have their faults, but comparing Scotland and its relationship with the rUK to Canada's relationship to the USA offers some important lessons. As is Scotland, Canada is a proud and prosperous nation who sits in the frozen north and has a border only with a much larger nation (population wise) to the south. As does Scotland, Canada has a history which includes a long period where they were politically and economically attached to this larger and more tropical nation. As hard as it was for those Colonials who eventually chose to create their own nation to the South, Canada had a much harder time developing and exerting its character given their isolation, the fact the pesky French owned a big chunk of their land (Quebec) and the fact that to the South they had noisy neighbours (the USA) some of whom desired all of their land.

How could Canada exist and prosper and be proud when all the hack economists say they would be “better together” with the USA. Oops, I meant Scotland and the UK..... Or was it the UK and the EU? Or the EU and the Western World? Or the Western World and the UN? Who is more of a country, Iraq or Scotland? Nigeria or Scotland? North Korea or Scotland? Catalonia or Scotland? Ukraine or Scotland? Syria or Scotland? The UK or Scotland?

I’ll take Scotland, any time, and hopefully very soon.

When she sings of "He" think of Obama and when she sings of "she" think of the electorate,,,,,

2012-11-05T18:50:00.004+00:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yg_nJFMRP_0

Yet another reason.....

2012-11-05T18:38:00.002+00:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rsB6CBMnDw4

2012-11-05T18:33:00.001+00:00

One expression of why I will not be voting for Obama tomorrow.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc0m7e4UnIY

Greatest golfer of all time--RIP

2011-12-19T13:33:00.000+00:00

Kim Jong-Il, of course. One round of golf in his life. 38 under par with 11 holes in one, and he enters the choir celestial without a bogey to his name. Magic....

December 10 2011

2011-12-10T13:58:00.000+00:00

The paranormal hurricane winds have come and gone and all that is left is a cold fog outside of my window. A stray grey and white cat emerges out of the fog and crosses from one cold bush to another and then is gone. 40 miles away a good friend is dying, and I may or may not see him before he too is gone. Tomorrow will be a happy day for my family as we get together to celebrate the festive season listening to my eldest child singing complex songs of joy with a great choir, but there in Dundee we will be only five miles away from my friend and his family as they continue to prepare for lifetimes of loss. My friend and I played many games of golf together over the past 30 years, the last one only a month or so ago, but if we play another one it will be a miracle. Even if there is such a miracle, life is still a bitch.

It's rare that one has a casual and friendly chat with an ex-Heavyweight Champion of the World

2011-12-05T19:56:00.000+00:00

...but that's London, or at least that's the way it was for me yesterday.

Liverpool Station. Trying to get on the tube to meet a friend for lunch and then some colleagues for afters. Flummoxed by the crowds hovering around the ticket machines, I look around and spot a big guy rocking a baby in a pram and ask him "Are you part of the queue?" He says "No" and then looks at me like I was an alien (which of course I was, at least in London) and thunders, "You're an American. Why do you say, 'queue?' Where are you from, anyway?" I tell him "New England" and he says, "A northerner! I'm from Philly." We shake hands, exchange a few bits of who we are when a machine gets free and I try to grab it, only to be frustrated by the options involved. I forget the man and get in another queue to eventually talk to a ticket seller, who puts me to rights, and as I start to walk away, I see my friend, still standing there with the pram and the baby. We talk again, and he's amazed that I've lived in the UK for 20 years. I ask him if he's visiting, and he says yeah, but we come over every few years--got some good memories. Like what? Like knocking Frank Bruno out when I was the Champion, he says--yeah, some good memories. I'm dazed and he sees it in an instant. He offers his hand again. "I'm Tim Witherspoon." "I'm Rich Goodale." We talk a bit more before we part. Ali nicknamed him "Terrible." For once, Ali was dreadfully wrong.......

That's Fife (part Deux)

2011-12-01T19:27:00.000+00:00

One of these days I'm going to write up recent experiences such as the London Heathland, Trumpoplis in Aberdeen, etc. but as long as my good freind John Kirk keeps steering me towards music I can't think of anything better than to pass on something ffrom my local pub band--a drummer, three ukuleles and a broad--all that a great pub band should be......

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNnC0g8CMmk&feature=related

The Kingdom of Fife

2011-11-25T10:04:00.000+00:00

As I head out of Fife for a short stay in East Lothian, I'll have the song below running through my heid and bringing me back home soon.

http://www.forthone.com/radio-forth-awards-2011-thats-fife

Existential Thought for the Day

2011-11-16T11:22:00.000+00:00

Yes, death looms increasingly (that's just physics), but the closer I get to there the more I say "WTF, enjoy the life you have and can, to some extent, create." We 60+ ers are all going to be looking up rather than down at the dirt someday, maybe tomorrow or maybe 40 years or more from now. Until then, we have family and friends and golf and food and wine and sunrises and sunsets and the interenet and a helluva a lot more fitness and opportunities than our ancestors did at this age. Let's hope that the dirt we look up at is a golf course. To me, Dornoch. To you?

I wondered who designed Merion.....

2011-11-09T21:45:00.001+00:00

....as well as who put the bop in the bop do wop do bop...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZBSGaWrEn4

...but now that I know, I still wonder, why?

This was one of John Lennon's favourtes...

2011-11-09T20:52:00.002+00:00

Listen and love

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LjxfNxbZM4

As a boy, JL spent summers in Durness. It is a special place in this world, and not far from some wild and great golf.

OK, I'm on a nostlagta roll tonight....

2011-11-09T20:42:00.000+00:00

For those who equate the song "Shout" to Lulu (nd I'm talking about you Euros out there...), listen to the real thing. 1959....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxBQtmLKsVI&feature=fvsr

As to the golf connection, viz. "Animal House" and "Caddy Shack," both created by the late and great Doug Kenney.

A Prelude to writings to come

2011-11-09T19:51:00.000+00:00

I have a lot of golf experiences to post, but before then, let me pass on this very special song that trolled into mey heart tonight:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HiJCAaotdWc&feature=related

So what does it have to do with golf? Well, it reminds me of a morning in a hotel near a golf course when an old lover woke me up by phone and we had both been both tossing and turning after a brief encounter the night before but she was married and I was in a new relationship and nothing more happened, at least up to now....

....pretty much like my second round at Cypress Point.....

Happy Birthday to Me!

2011-10-04T15:05:00.000+01:00

My birthday went swimmingly, and I'm already in full throttle happy pensioner mode, except for the excerpt in the Sunday Times from Michael Lewis' new book, which confirms two of my beliefs i.e.: 1. The Euro (and probably the EU) is fucked, possibly fatally; and 2. Nobody but nobody in charge of the Olde World, from Obamageithnerbernancke through Merkelsarkosybruni to Cameronosborneclegg to Berlusconibungabunga has a fucking clue as to what to do with the time bomb that Greece has become and the rest of the PIIGSS may well soon be (last "S" being our favourite closet Nazi, Switzerland).

Thirdly, whilst I'm not yet out buying gold bullion and AK-47's and moving to Texas, I am gathering my old gold bridges and family heirlooms and thinking about honing my archery skills, and am happy that I am in Scotland, which due to its indolence will probably weather the storm better than Surrey or Silicon Valley. At least the golf here will continue to be cheap and good and I do take comfort that the real world (i.e. China, Brazil, India, Africa, etc.) will be a happier place as they rightfully claim their proper share of the world's wealth, now that they are mostly as competent as are we in exploiting it.

Overall, it is a very good time to be 65!

Golfing in the Home Counties (Another Year, Another Buda Cup....) Part I—The Context

2011-10-04T10:43:00.000+01:00

We were staying at the Devil’s Punchbowl Hotel, in Hindhead, a town so scenic that the Ministry of Transport chose spend tens of millions of squid to tunnel under it rather than expose travellers to its inherent beauty.

Some have called the hotel “Fawlty Towers” but that would be an insult to Basil’s fine, if imaginary, establishment. For Example, it inspired the first mutiny I have experienced in all the BUDAs I have known (and being the founder of what has become BUDA, I have known all of them except last year’s). After two nights of Punchbowldom, there was a mass escape of a small handful of our contingent who were unable to even think of another night in a hotel with mould on the shower ceilings and neither proper beer nor malt whisky in the bar. One legal beagle from Newcastle who will not be named, actually tried to escape the previous night through a fire exit, but that is another story.... Eventually, the gents ended up at Champany’s, an establishment recently favoured by Metropolitan Police Commissioners looking for a freebie, but now largely inhabited by body-shape challenged middle-aged women walking about in white bathrobes and munching muesili prior to their next session of Pilates. And Golf’s Most Beloved figure, of course, who deigns not to stay with the plebs on the rare occasions he is gracing BUDA.... They all missed the after hours of the last night with the cougar barmaid seemingly guzzling vodka from the bottle and kindly bending over from time to time to show us a hint of her thong, but c’est la vie.

All in all it was an average BUDA hotel, but I would prefer to refer to it as “Checkpoint Charlie” or the “DMZ.” For we were near the border of Sussex and Hampshire, two Home Counties whose differences are unapparently far greater that those of the “Big Enders” and “Little Enders” of Gulliver’s Travels. Not only that, but Hindhead reminded me of newsreels of post-war Berlin, as the MOT seems to have repositioned all of its heavy artillery from the tunnel to the center of that small town. As Dr. McCoy used to say—“There’s life there Jim, but not as we know it....”

Was James Joyce a closet golfer....????

2011-09-16T21:12:00.000+01:00

One writing project I have on the go currently is an essay on golf as a series of journeys-- from the minutiae of the microcosmic elements of each shot itself, to the more complex task of playing an individual hole, to the multi-tasking challenges of starting and successfully completing a round, through the broader experiences of: golfing travels; serial experiences on the courses you know and even love the best; all the way through one’s lifetime of golf—from that first contact of club and ball to that inevitable day when you decide (or it is decided for you by higher powers, viz. Bing Crosby) that there will be no golf any more, at least in this life. Personally, this metaphor resonates within me, not only because I find it rich and meaningful, but also as it ties my later life to that of some of my earlier ones in a number of ways. One of those was in my salad days at Stanford when I wasted much of my Senior year writing a thesis on the connections between three of the great journey novels—Gulliver’s Travels, Ulysses and Catch-22. When I was not writing this thesis or squiring young women to the Fillmore and Winterland to watch Cream or Chuck Berry or The Who, I was playing golf on our fine Billy Bell/George Thomas track, for the outrageous price of something like $.35/round. It is not for nothing that 1967-68 in Northern California was deemed to be the epicenter of the “Swinging Sixties.” But what does this have to do with Joyce? Well.... ...let’s do a Cliff Notes/Little Red Book of the great man’s body of work. Firstly, “Dubliners,” which is one of the finest collection of individual short stories ever written by man. There is a broad context to the stories (Ireland) but little linking them together into a more expressive whole. You can love each story, but not love their collection. In golfing terms, this is the modern and naive school of architecture which tries to find and build great individual holes without holistically connecting them together. Take most of Fazio’s work or even Old Macdonald, please... Second in Joyce’s body of work is “The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” This is a great example of juvenilia—the “art” of creating something that gives much more than juvenile expression to something created by a relative neophyte which deals with more mature themes. Viz. Janis Ian’s first album or Pete Dye’s Harbour town, both products of the late 1960’s. We still don’t see much of Joyce the golfer, but when we get to “Ulysses,” well, who knows... ...but then, what do we know? From a random collection of great stories to a much tighter collection of anecdotes, in Ulysses we get a journey that by focusing in on one mundane day in one mundane bit of the world, gives us insights into our souls that is rarely matched. We start with the protagonist of “A Portrait..” then move from there to the journeys of the prototypical hacker, Leopold Bloom, ending up with his debauchery and finally the life affirming sexuality of his wife Molly. This journey can be traced to the Homeric original, but other than socially sad scholars, who really cares Finally, there is “Finnegan’s Wake.” Whereas “Portrait” compresses the country of “Dubliners” into a specific adolescence, and Ulysses compresses “Portrait” into one bland day in Dublin, “Finnegan” compresses all of the previous three works into one dream of one only thinly characterized protagonist, HC Earwicker. One of the things which unites this body of work is the increasing complexity and even randomness of each. Dubliners is simple and pure. Portrait is simple but impure. Ulysses is complex and impure. Finnegan is complex and simple, pure and impure. Just like golf. I do not know whether or not Joyce played golf, but I do know: 1. Finnegan’s Wake was written from 1922-1939. Exactly 18 years. Coincidence? Maybe so, or maybe just one hole per year.... 2. Ulysses took the random number of episodes in the Odyssey and turned them into 18 chapters ( “Telemachus”----à”Penelope.” 3. Ulysses was completed in 1914, just about the time that Hugh Wilson created Merion and CB McDonald NGLA. Yet another coincidence? 4. Joyce attended the Jesuit School, Conglowes. In 1966 Saint Eddie Hackett built a golf course at Conglowes. Divine intervention? 5. The last lines of “Finnegan” are: “..... A way a lone a last a loved along the.... 6. The first lines are .. ..riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and environs.” 7. Put together, Joyce must be talking about Portmarnock, or even any game of golf, which moves outward, away from home and then recirculates back from whence one came. At least that is my humble opinion!	1
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Gold, Virgins and Golf--price versus value

2011-08-20T13:18:00.000+01:00

A good friend of mine recently e-mailed me attaching an article which quoted Warren Buffet regarding the the inherent value of gold. The "Sage of Omaha" pointed out that all the gold so far "discovered" by man would amount only to a cube of 67 feet. Another similar calculation I have read translates this to the more accessible analogy of a football field covered with ~ 5' 7" of gold.

We can take this analogy further if we assume that people of the height of 5' 7" occupy (fairly uncomfortably) each square foot of that midasesque field. Under that assumption, there is room for only 54,000 souls. Now let us assume these 54,000 souls represent the totality of all the desirable virgins in heaven (not an unreasonable assumption given current mores), and if you allocate 72 of this totality to all martyrs of certain religions, you come up with a total 750 slots for those who desire martyrdom. For sure, this pool of virgins has been depleted for many centuries, and the annual intake of virgins can sustain no more than a very small number of martyrs. The vast majority of these poor souls (the martyrs) must be highly disappointed when they arrive in heaven to find that their chance of finding one virgin (much less 72) is more similar to the chance of a sperm finding an egg than to a prospector for golf in the Aussie outback finding one ounce of gold. But, then again, there are those who say that faith makes all things possible......

Buffet goes on to compare the current value of that relatively little cube of gold at its current price (~$7 trillion) to what you could alternatively purchase if you owned that mythical cube. The answer equates to the top 10 companies in the world (Apple, Exxon, Nestle, IBM, PetroChina, BHP Billiton, etc.) PLUS all the arable farmland in the USA, PLUS 2-3 £trillion in pocket money. Or, if you believe that you are the only holy person who has ever lived on earth, 54,000 virgins at your disposal--one time only, please....

I was Oscar Wilde who coined the meme "The ______ knows the price of everything and the value of nothing." Wilde filled in the blank with the word "cynic," but in the century or so from his death, the blank has been tellingly filled in by others with nouns such as "banker," politician," "journalist," "attorney," "doctor," and "welfare recipient"--all with some justification. I would add, for most of the readers of this blog the noun "the average golfer."

To the average golfer, the higher the price, the more valuable the course--or the golf clubs, or the implements or the balls, or the lessons, or the other appalling fashions that they are addicted to. Yes, if you were to inherit Buffet's mythical cube of gold, of course you would slice off slivers to play Pebble Beach or Morfontaine, or for a week at Bandon or East Lothian, or for lessons from Bob Rotella or Butch Harmon, or to buy a few houses overlooking Royal Dornoch, but....

..... once you had gorged on those and other fantasies, where would you spend you time? You might have effectively unlimited money, but you will not have unlimited time. Do you want to spend that time moving from venue to venue--striving like Ulysses to find perfection--or do you want to find a venue that gives you more satisfaction than most others and spend more and more of your limited time or earth there and then?

Food for thought--hopefully.....

Royal Dornoch August 10, 2011--Dante's 10th circle of hell.....?

2011-08-11T16:33:00.001+01:00

Firstly, sorry for being away for sometime, but I had promises to keep...

...such as helping run a wee golf club here in Scotland, starting a business venture, and family holidays, including a wee mini-break up in Dornoch earlier this week. I am usually in Dornoch this time of year and usually playing (25 or so of the past 30 years) in the supreme "Major" on the club calendar, the Carnegie Shield. 4 days of stroke play qualifying (2 days each for the 9+ handicapppers and the 8 and under--usually down to 5 or so in the + category), and then 3 days of match play for three groups (scratch, 8 and under off handicap and 9+ off handicap). It is a superb event, and when I watched the low handicappers play their first round in a moderate but tricky cross wind, with only 30 of the 150 players breaking 80 (10 over), there was a wee twinge in my conscience that almost made me try to get a late entry (to hell with the family!), but I resisted it and a friend who was a better player than me took the slot which did become available. He shot 95. Hmmmmm.....maybe the course was more difficult than it looked to the naked eye.... So, I thought "I'll go out tomorrow and follow a a few players to see what's so tough about the place this year," and I would have if it had not been pissing down with rain when I woke up the next morning.

In Scotland, when it rains like that, about the only things that one can do profitably are drink, make love, and look for fish. As Meatloaf once said--two out of three ain't bad, and afterwards we went back to Dornoch to watch a bit of the golf, and the rain had gotten heavier and was now accompanied by a freshening wind, dead in the face off the first tee. The 7-8 handicappers huddling on that tee looked no more capable of reaching the 330 yard first hole in two than did the emaciated salmon at the Falls of Shinn seem with a hope in hell of reaching the spawning areas a mile or so upstream in the face of an increasing torrent or water increasingly brown from the peat. So, we had another drink in the clubhouse, and from the windows in there we saw the last 3 of the 150 framed against the sea across to Portmahamock, looking each like the Bishop in "Caddy Shack," investing their faith in hope rather than experience. I felt greedy knowing that I had squeezed 5 hours of potential agony out of that day, but also vaguely envious of those who had chosen to endure the agony that was Dornoch then and there.

As it turned out, the carnage was almost total. Only 4 of the 150 players broke 80 that day and a normally mediocre gross score of 168 for the two rounds (28 over par) was all that was needed to make the 32 player draw in the scratch match play. Still, I felt I had made the right choice, at least until I turned my gaze from the tee to the path leading from the 18th green to the clubhouse. Every 10 minutes or so three players and their equally wet entourages would come into view through the mist and without fail they would be smiling. It was impossible to distinguish a 78 from a 108, and turning back into the clubhouse the same phenomenon seemed to be at work. Smiling, happy people having fun. The 108 shooter offerring to sell his 4 on the 17th to anyone. The 78 shooter laughing about his luck and laughing with his playing partner who had had none.

Dornoch yesterday was less hellish than divine, and more of a comedy than a tragedy. It was the way golf ought to be and too rarely is not. I wish I had played......

Archerfield and the Renaissance Club and .......

2011-05-30T11:36:00.006+01:00

Right smack in the middle of the prime golfing country of East Lothian--between North Berwick and Muirfield—lie several golf courses built over the past two decades. I played one of them for the first time last Tuesday, and later in that day had a tour of another which I had played several times before. “Compare and contrast” is one of the catchphrases of classical analysis. I’ll do my best.

A very early morning start with two friends from Fife got us to the Archerfield Links early for our 8:30 tee off time, generously provided to us from a long term golfing companion and friend who had won the tee time in an auction for his favourite charity. AL is an impressive complex, with two championship-length courses and world-class practice and après-golf facilities. With the ProVI’s stacked pyramid-style on the driving, chipping and putting areas, I could have been at Bandon. Within the locker rooms I could almost have been at Champions; within the pro shop at Sawgrass; and in the grill possibly at Club XIX at Pebble Beach.

The course that we played was the Fidra, named after the island that lurks to the northwest but is rarely seen from the course. It was the first of the AL courses, and two games of two halves (as they say in soccer, here in old blighty). The first half of the two halves was the course itself, which was apparently the first of the two to be built, and shows it. It is clearly cut, rather than crafted, through the trees that existed when it was built, and the complexities that distinguish the not-so-good from the good and the good from the very good and the very good from the great, are rarely evident. These complexities/subtleties lie in how well the architect intrigues players of all talents and goals to question and then chose to challenge (or not) their capabilities and ambitions. Not much of that, at least in the first 9 at Fidra.

That being said, the playing within the corridors of the conifers, particularly on a day when we had a respite from the heavy winds blowing over from the USA was a pleasant surprise. When you have been spending the past 3 weeks when from 150 yards you have either been trying to cut/punch 4-irons or hit dead sand wedges150 yards, a game where you could swing freely was refreshing. Even though the greens were far too often the bog-standard uninteresting upturned saucers such as infest Rustic Canyon.....

....that being said, the back 9 of Fidra has some very interesting holes, with more movement, more elevation and more conundrums to the strategic player. It could be made into a very good course, with the right architect and the right imagination of the owner. Also need some TLC is the conditioning—acceptable, but not up to the standard of the club and its facilities.

After a fine pub lunch at AL, we three wee Fifers took advantage of a tour of the Renaissance Club (RC), which abuts both AL and Muirfield, courtesy of Simon Holt. I had played 3 rounds there in 2009 and been very impressed. My two friends were virgins to the place and were generally astounded.

The first thing I noticed was the condition of the course—the grasses, the bunkering, the je ne sais quoi. Two years ago, RC was an unfinished gem, much as Kingsbarns was when I first played in the early Noughties and Castle Stuart was when I played it last month. Now, it is a seriously superb course, with fine grasses growing confidently on the fairways and greens and bunkering that is less naive and penal than when I saw it last. The rough is a bit too Muirfieldy now for my tastes, but I am sure that too shall resolve itself into a do for the green staff and the owners. As for the “je ne sais quois?”—it is a course that needs and demands to be played. There are a few bits that boggle my mind in a WTF sense—an overly stylized washboard green here or there, a few bunkers that are not obviously penal enough from distance, some overly extremely effectively narrowness from some tees, don’t yet "get” the 18^th.

But, what can I say? Play it or belong to it, or both. Above all it is aspirationally a Club, in the classic Scottish sense—no necessarily financial, but spiritually. And there may be more....

....as the back nine of RC provides intriguing views across the Forth to the Kingdom of Fife, but also acres and acres of land between it and Fife that upon which the Club can, and may well, build even a greater course. There has been much speculation about where and how this land will be used, and the answer to that speculation is that it will be decided by the members and the developer and the architect. Having walked all the land involved with Simon, all I want to say now is that this will be not a simple 3 hole swap, but one that will challenge not only possibly the finest golf course architects on the planet, Tom Doak, but also the members and the owners as to “what we’ve got now is great, why change?”

All I can say to that is look at Dornoch, or the Old Course, or Muirfield, or Pine Valley or Merion or Pebble Beach.. None of the greatest courses I know of has ever NOT changed. Go for it!

Good Morning Romania!

2011-05-24T09:23:00.000+01:00

Yesterday, Romania occupied 3rd place in the source of clicks onto this blog, after the US and the UK. I must confess that I know nothing about golf in Romania, except in the generic sense that golf in Eastern Europe seems to be booming. So all you Romanians out there, please click the "Comment" button or e-mail me privately to tell me what is going on in your fine country, golf-wise or otherwise. I really do want to know.

Thanks

Rich

Nae wind, nae golf?

2011-05-22T22:37:00.002+01:00

This old Scottish adage is, well....old.

Yes, wind does add to the golfing experience, particularly on links courses playing fast and firm whereon one can at least partially counter the effects of wind through the judicious and skilled use of trajectories, spins and angles. However, does the inverse of that adage also work, i.e. “Golf is golf, if and only if there is wind?”
I ponder this after a week of golf here in Scotland in which wind was not only the prevailing element, but nearly the only significant element. As the near gales continued and even intensified, concepts of “architecture” made way for strategies of survival.

First on the itinerary was North Berwick on Monday, played with two good friends, first off the tee at 8am, and with hardly a cloud in the sky—probably because any self-respecting cloud would have self-dissipated in the 4-club wind. My naive companions hit long irons or rescue clubs off the tee at the 280 yard 1^st and faced another shot of similar calibre to reach the green. None of us came close to hitting the second with two woods and on the third my best drive of the day left me with a full 3-wood to the green, which I of course smothered left, and the 4^th (185) was a full 3-wood, and, well you get the picture.....

Of course the camaraderie was great, and the surroundings stunning, but I can’t help thinking that the outward ½ was more flog than golf. And then we turned downwind at the 10^th and found seemingly perfect shots flying over the green or reaching bunkers that on ordinary days would be just a foozle for the third shot of a hacker. The 13^th (Pit) was impossible, even if one drove to within spitting distance of the wall. The Redan rewarded only a straight long shot through the green—there are no kickplates to aim for when the wind is strong from behind. The goofy 16^th was even goofier when you were trying to find a way to hit a wedge downwind to a left hump green. At 17, even a long drive required a punch and bump 9-iron into the bank just above the slit trench bunker to even hope holding the putting surface. The most likely outcome was a chip from the side of the first green or somewhere else 30-50 yards past the hole. 18 was driveable with a rescue club, but so what? Great course but tae mooch wind nae gowf. IMHO.

Thursday/Friday was a 36-hole Senior Open at Royal Montrose. Lots of talented grumpy old farts in the field, but again in a wind that made survival for those of us with mid-high single figure handicaps the primary objective. Montrose is a very good, but not great course which depends largely on largely random bunkering to make the test one of knowledge and/or creativity rather than intelligence. You drive up on the 1^st to a skyline green, and then go north along the dune line for 5 holes, and what a dune line it is! Go to the edge to try to find a sliced tee shot, or just to look, and vertigo will overcome any desire to find your ProV1 or see a naked sunbather on the beach. Strongly downwind (as it played a few days ago) birdies should have been had, but finding the right sort of wedge approach was always problematic. Too bold and your pelota would bound through the green into linksland gunge. Too spinny and you would find your ball gripping when you wanted it to release. And then back into the wind....

....it was all outward nine at NB again. Drive and another driver (or 3 wood) and then try to chip and putt for a par. It’s golf, Scotty, but not as we know it..... Of course, the Senior studs shot 145 or so, but that the difference between Ex- or Wannabee- Walker Cup players and people like you and me, as Papa may or may have not said to F. Scott Fitzgerald about another sport in another age.

Finally, 36 holes on Sunday at Aberdour—the first 1/2 of our 72-hole marathon to determine the Club Champion. The first hole tees were moved forward to 150 yards, but even downhill only a well struck 4-iron could make the green. Of the 120 or so first shots on that day, many more found the Firth of Forth 40 yards to the left than the green. One of my playing companions, a big hitter, stiffed it onto the 160 yard 7^th, but from the 8^th tee, 200 yards into the wind and 30 degrees to the left. It all seemed impossible to mortals such as me, but our defending champion shot 140.

The moral of this story? Unless you are really, really good or an unreconstructed romantic and/or masochist, do not wish silly things such as “meer wind, Old Tommy, meer wind!”
ADDENDUM--Today, Monday, the rain is vertical and 70MPH winds are forecast. Nae Golf!
ADDENDUM (part deux)--Forth Bridge and Road Bridge both closed. Eldest daughter stranded in Edinburgh, youngest one barely made it across the Bridge on the last train after texting us "We're all going to die!"

Castle Stuart, Nairn and Dornoch (addenda)

2011-05-17T09:28:00.000+01:00

My previous post ended with a soupcon of my experience playing the Open Medal at Dornoch on the first of May, and after a week or three of reflection I thought I’d add more about all three courses, in reverse order. Starting with Dornoch.....

.....to be fair, its superior conditioning then compared to either Castle Stuart or Nairn was surely partly due to the fact that the May Day weekend is host to the first “Major” on the RDGC calendar, The Burghfield Open, and the Club always strives to present the course as best as possible for the 180 person field of that event. The blooming gorse linked to the deep greens and blues of the land and sea and light blues and whites and oranges of the sky, can be even more spectacular than the azaleas and magnolias and dyed creeks and ponds of Augusta three weeks earlier in Georgia.

They surely got it right this year, and even though the grass was cut to the edge of early spring viability, it looked healthy and vigorous enough to expect even greater things later in the year, as increasing warmth and sun practise their magic on the water still embedded in the soil. Divots exposed nothing beneath the thin layer of fine grasses than sand, unlike Castle Stuart and Nairn where dark soil could be exposed by only the gentlest of gouges. But as Joe E. Brown once famously said, “Nobody’s perfect!”........

.......the quality and character of the sand in Dornoch’s bunkers continues to be a major bummer. 5-10 years ago, for whatever reason, the Club decided to replace the lovely fine sand that complemented the fine sand incorporated in the fairways and the greens with ugly, thick, wet sand, imported (I believe) from afar, that made balls going into bunkers stick to the edges rather than roll gently away, bury rather than caress, and bring far too much gouging into the equation of escape compared to finesse. I played North Berwick yesterday, and the sand was a delight—both light and compact and inviting and rewarding the proper links bunker shot for recovery, or even genius. Seve would have loved yesterday’s North Berwick bunkers but for the Dornoch bunkers all I can imagine him saying is “Que!?”

Taking us back to Nairn, the sand in their greenside bunkers is properly linksy, so they have that going for them. As to the rest of the conditioning I and my pals experienced, I’m willing to accept that in the late spring, some courses choose to promote growth rather than playability, focusing on the latter only when there is enough proper grass to play around with. I must admit that I was going to give them a free pass given that the next Curtis Cup is being played there, but now that Google tells me that this will not occur until 2012 (rather than the 2011 I had stupidly assumed), that pass is withdrawn. I must get by Nairn again when I’m next up North (August at the latest). Hopefully I’ll be able to see these storied greens then. If not, they will remain to me only a Shangri-la.

Finally, a few more thoughts on Castle Stuart. They do have an excuse for the state of their grass—they will be hosting the Scottish Open the week before The (british) Open in July and I’m sure are following the time-honoured “grow as much as you can and then cut as often and as lovingly as you can” strategy. My only open question with CS now is how sustainably linksy are their fairgreens. I think they sand-capped the agricultural land they used on holes 4-9 and 13-18, and if so, maybe they scrimped on the Old Tom Morris adage when he was modernising the greens at the Old Course of “Saund, Honeyman--saund , saund and meer saund!” At Parsinen’s first Scottish venture (Kingsbarns), they mixed the farmland soil with local sand to get a mix that imitated proper links soil. I’ll be playing at KB in a few weeks and will be interested in seeing how well those fairways and greens have matured since I was last there 2-3 years ago. I hope for the best, and if this wish is granted, I’ll wonder about Castle Stuart, and whether or not they got their soil preparation right. I really hope so there too, as the routing and design of the individual holes at that course are so inspired, that it deserves agronomical excellence.

I’ll probably post more on this latter topic after my next play of Kingsbarns.

Castle Stuart, Nairn and Dornoch

2011-05-10T16:35:00.000+01:00

Throughout one’s life one travels from point A to point B, whether it be golfing or just life itself. In either case if interesting these travels usually involve a return to point A and then back again to point B and and even C and beyond, sometimes never again fully returning to point A. Like my life—from New England to San Francisco to Florida to Fife and never (yet) to fully return....

The last week of April took me away to Castle Stuart with 11 friends from my home club, Aberdour. This was the 5^th iteration of an event that originally commemorated the 50^th birthday of one of our dirty dozen, and golf course architecture-wise the most challenging and most interesting so far. We all left Fife as the cock crowed, in various vehicles, then re-assembled Terminator 2-wise in the Castle Stuart clubhouse at ~ 10:30am. For the end of April, it was a glorious day east of Inverness—not a cloud in the sky and enough of a soupcon of wind to know that our round was going to be interesting as well as pleasant. The art deco clubhouse was warm, friendly and redolent of finely prepared bacon rolls. We rested, we munched, we chatted and then roused ourselves to the massive putting green sloping down towards the Moray Firth, and by 11:30 we were off the 1^st tee hard by the shore, with a friendly East wind at our back. This was the 3^rd time I had toured Castle Stuart, but as the first one involved a buggy ride around the still growing -in course and the second a spot in a promotional event from the front tees--from the white tees, in competition, this round truly popped my cherry.

The routing of Castle Stuart is unique (certainly in my experience, and probably in the experience of anybody in the world). The first three holes along the shore go E-W, and then start climbing back up to the level of the putting green, crossing back and forth and up and down until you reach the clubhouse again at the 9^th. The second 9 starts again at the bottom of the land, with shared tiger tees with the 1^st and going out 3 holes then again W-E and then up to the main level and some more journeys around the compass until you arrive back underneath the clubhouse at 18. It is a tale of three sixes, with one of them divided in two. As complicated as it may seem even from my learned (?) description, it ebbs and flows beautifully, and seems contrived only in the long march up to the 13^th tee. The free sodas ½ way up that climb are welcome, but a shot or two of Macallan might be more appreciated by some of their more elderly customers.....

As clever as the routing is, the collection of holes includes designs which are not only clever, but inspired. The first is a driveable par-4, but long enough and with enough lateral danger to make most players capable of getting on in one layup. Then, much like the 1^st at Dornoch, you find that the second shot is not as easy as you think with its humps and hollows on the approach, particularly downwind and when the course is running fast and firm. 2 is screams “eagle” downwind, but if you miss the spectacularly narrow green, a 5 is hard to get, and even if you hit the green in two a 5 is a good score. Three is a marvellous truly reachable par-4 with an obvious narrow gap between two semi-centerline bunkers, but if you miss left, Rye-like eyebrow bunkers on the bank of the green confuse any chip and run strategy. The 4^th is the first of the “framing” holes—a 200 yard par-3 hit uphill to a green standing wobbly in front of Castle Stuart itself. It is hard to lose a ball on this hole (as I and other found after semi-hoseling long irons to the left,) but neither is it easily hittable. It is a hole that needs more playing to begin to understand--much as many of the holes on the course.

I’ll save individual more hole descriptions and overall course comments for later...... The après-golf in the clubhouse was pleasant. A fine soup and above average sandwiches and a pint or two all went back well and we all went back to our hotel, the Newton in Nairn.

We were on a deal there, a very good deal (2 nights B&B, 2 rounds at CS one at Nairn) for ~$450. The Newton turned out to be a semi-modernized/semi-faded grand old country house that had been transmogrified into a semi-shabby chic period place/semi-20^th century conference facility. The rooms were Holiday Inn standard fine and the breakfasts unmemorable. The only 3*** part of the experience was the showers. Best I have ever seen in Scotland and even putting Merion to shame. Charlie Chaplin apparently used to stay at the Newton for 2-3 months every summer. It must have been in the silent movie era, as any serious conversation or revelry seemed to be verboten at the Newton.....

Next day’s golf was at Nairn. Now I have always had a love/hate relationship with Nairn Golf Club eve r since my first visit there in 1979. I loved the fact that there was apparently another pretty good golf course up in the Highlands, but hated that fact that every time I played Nairn my reaction was ????, or more recently WTF!!!??? Lots of decent golfers talk of Nairn’s greens as if they were maintained by Willie Mosconi, but I had never seen them in anything other than mediocre condition. This time, it was different—the greens were abominable, and the other parts of the vegetation (i.e. fairways and rough) were agricultural rather than superintended. All these depressing factors forced me to look at the architecture, and what did I see except:

--fairway bunkering that was entirely penal. Hit it into a pot, try to lob wedge the ball out, hit a 180 yard approach shot and then hope you can get up and down for bogey. Fun? Not.

--a routing that was effectively a completely inferior anti-Castle Stuart. 15 holes on a mostly featureless flat plain, then three holes into the trees. Maybe 2-3 of the greens were interesting (compared to CS)

--wannabe-a-championship-course gained by either smoothing out flat bits of turf behind current tees or creating a Bataan Death March into the trees (viz. 17 and 18).

The clubhouse is very nice (and being expanded yet again). They could of course use their surpluses to improve the course but the members do not seem to care. A classic “member’s course” that should not be on anyone’s “Top Whatever” ranking. But it will be, because amongst its members are some of the great and good in amateur golf.....

As for our two nights in Nairn itself, it is a faded seaside resort that has nothing economically to resort to these days, as far as we could see. Avoid like the plague.

As for my two days après-buddygolf, it was in Dornoch, with my wife and sprog #2. I played the golf course on Sunday, in a medal, and its conditioning made Castle Stuart look like the newbie that it is. The green were seriously better any I have played this year (including the 4 course at Bandon). You cannot compare them to Nairn’s—it would be like comparing apples to rotten apples.

Finally, at Dornoch I was privileged to play in the Sunday medal with the best golfer I have ever seen play Dornoch. In a strong wind he shot 74 which should have been 68. He stiffed 2iron/6iron both into the wind on 7 and downwind on 14.

Watching a great golfer play a great golf course is as good as it gets, unless of course you are that great golfer........

Adios Amigo

2011-05-07T12:20:00.000+01:00

The best match I ever saw was Seve vs. Lehman at the 1995 Oak Hill Ryder Cup. The stroke play mentality machine at his best vs. the creative genius at his best and worst. Shame that the "card and pencil" man won, but watching Seve lose was akin to reading Moby Dick for the first time--you knew the whale was going to get him in the end, but what tragic beauty watching the inevitable failure of the chase.

Rich Goodale, Feb 2003