The Ultimate Golf Book

Houghton Mifflin Company

Excerpt

Chapter 1
Scotland

Golf began in the dark—in a hole actually. Some dissipated
characters in medieval Scotland were out on the dunes one afternoon
with their het kolvin sticks, slapping a ball around. One of them
aimed at a rabbit burrow or a sand-filled crevice. When the ball
toppled in, golf was born.
Golf historians are equally in the dark. Looking for a link
to the stick-and-ball games of continental Europe, they pore over
Flemish woodcuttings and sketches by Rembrandt of men in wide-brimmed
hats using a bladed stick to roll a ball the size of a melon across a
courtyard. Researchers are similarly enchanted by the French game of
jeu de mal, which employed a flexible wooden mallet and a wooden
ball, and by the Belgian game of chole, in which teams of players hit
wooden balls through a designated door or gate up to a mile away.
(The Dutch word tuitje, for the small mound of earth upon which the
ball was placed for the first stroke, is an obvious forerunner to the
golfer"s "tee.") Masters of the obvious have pointed out that a Low
Countries variant of chole, called colf, was played in the shade of
windmills as early as the thirteenth century.
Here we have a case where the lexicographer trumps the
historian. The Oxford English Dictionary defines golf as "a game of
considerable antiquity . . . in which a small hard ball is struck
with various clubs into a series of small cylindrical holes made at
intervals usually of a hundred yards or more . . . with the fewest
possible strokes." No one reading this definition can miss what
separates golf from all the other games employing clubs or mallets
and small hard balls. It"s that little dark place where the ball goes.
Once we accept that golf is about holes in the ground, we can
reflect on the fact that the holes are dispersed over a vast natural
terrain. For that we owe King David I of Scotland, a twelfth-century
monarch whose idea of a good time was cathedral building. It was on
David"s watch that the previously forgettable fishing village of St.
Andrews, on the North Sea between the Eden estuary and the River
Forth, became the ecclesiastical center of Scotland. As a sop to the
local folk—a hodgepodge of Picts, Celts, and assorted Norsemen—David
decreed that certain lands be set aside for the free use of ordinary
people. These commons or greens included some worthless tracts
of "linksland"—places where rivers meet the sea, producing a rugged
dunescape of sand and wild grasses. Neither David nor the common folk
foresaw a recreational use for these lands—or knew, for that matter,
what "recreation" was. The linksland was simply a place where any
Angus or Owen could set snares in the dunes, hoping to capture a
rabbit for the dinner pot.
Nevertheless, King David"s decree established a pattern of
land use that allowed for the development of golf, first at St.
Andrews—where in 1552 Archbishop Hamilton affirmed the right of all
to use the links for "golff, futball, schuteing [and] all other
manner of pastime"—and later in the lowland shires along the Clyde
and Forth estuaries. It would also give the Scots about 750 years to
perfect the game before the rest of the world took notice.
What the Scots came up with was a sport that requires minimal
exertion and no physical risk but demands that the players police
their own conduct to a degree unknown in most other games—or in life,
for that matter—while enduring whatever discomforts nature dispenses
in the form of wind, rain, heat, or cold. We need only glance at the
first thirteen rules of golf, set down by the Honourable Company of
Edinburgh Golfers in 1774, to see how golf answers the Calvinist
demand for sufferance in the face of sustained ill fortune. "If you
should lose your ball by its being taken up or any other way," reads
rule eight, "you are to go back to the spot where you struck last and
drop another ball and allow your adversary a stroke for the
misfortune." Rule eleven imagines an even more dire circumstance: "If
you draw your club in order to strike and proceed so far with your
stroke as to be bringing down your club, if then your club should
break in any way, it is to be accounted a stroke."
The game"s gloomy rules owe in part to Scotland"s national
temper, which was formed through centuries of gory conflict with its
neighbor to the south, England. James IV of Scotland, who died in
1513 at the battle of Flodden Field, was a casual golfer. His
granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots, celebrated the violent murder of
her estranged husband, Lord Darnley, by playing golf at Seton with
the Earl of Bothwell, the man suspected of arranging Darnley"s death—
and then, some years later, Mary herself lost her head at the order
of her cousin Queen Elizabeth I of England. Thankfully, by the
seventeenth century the crowns of England and Scotland were unified
under the Stuarts, and golf temporarily replaced war and the
executioner"s axe as the arbiters of aristocratic disputes. The Duke
of York settled a quarrel with two English noblemen in the 1680s by
challenging them to a money match on the links at Leith, and like
many a hustler after him, the duke showed up with a suspiciously
talented partner: a shoemaker with a good swing and a sure putting
stroke. The shoemaker, John Patterson, earned enough from the match
to build a home in Edinburgh that stood for almost three hundred
years.
As durable as Patterson"s house is the concept that allowed a
duke to partner with a shoemaker in the first place. The Scots
developed the idea that golfers constitute a society separate from
their stations in ordinary life. A king, although sovereign in the
realm, could play golf with and respect a tradesman. The tradesman,
in turn, could gather with gentlemen of like interest to form a
golfing society or club. The first of these societies, the Honourable
Company of Edinburgh Golfers, organized itself at Leith Links around
1744, and a similar group formed at St. Andrews a decade later.
Neither club owned a golf course—the common land still
belonged to all—but the clubs staged competitions and other group
endeavors. The pattern was set in 1744 when the town council of
Edinburgh offered a trophy in the form of a silver club; the winner
of the annual competition at the Leith Links assumed the title
of "Captain of Golf." St. Andrews adopted the Honourable Company"s
rules and took the club competition a step further by awarding each
year"s winner a silver golf ball, which was then attached to the
silver club. With time, the silver balls hung in grapelike clus-ters,
leading to a curious ceremony called "kissing the captain"s balls."
The golfers who were the first to gain royal sanction came,
however, from neither Edinburgh nor St. Andrews; for reasons known
only to King William IV, that honor went, in 1833, to the upstart
Perth Golfing Society,...