Tired of the whole wave gone thing? The one who turned the professional men’s game into a new toy for Saudi investors? The one where US senators drag golf (minus the bag) to work? The one who left PGA Tour star Rory McIlroy saying he feels like a sacrificial lamb in the proposed PGA Tour-LIV Golf partnership?
Rest in peace. This week links golf, the windy and unadorned form of the game, takes its annual turn on golf’s main stage. It’s a chance for golf to retell the original story. The British Open, the fourth and final of the annual Grand Slam events, is upon us.
The guest course this time is Royal Liverpool, also known as Hoylake to those who know the course and its bumpy fairways, turned pale khaki green by the summer sun and brackish air.
British Opens are always played, to borrow a phrase from BBC commentator Peter Alliss, who died in 2020, “in sight and sound of the sea.” They are contested on links courses that are a century old – or much older. Royal Liverpool held its first Open in 1897 and is located on Liverpool Bay, although you might think of it as the Irish Sea. The track is a mile from the train station in Hoylake – many fans get there via Merseyrail – and about 15 miles from Penny Lane in Liverpool.
Lifelong Texan Jordan Spieth, winner of the 2017 British Open, prepared for Royal Liverpool by taking part in last week’s Scottish Open, playing on the links court at the Renaissance Club. Spieth slipped out one afternoon and played North Berwick, an old and beloved band. The 13th green is guarded by a stone wall because – well, why not? The wall came first and the track dates back to 1832.
“In the British Isles,” said American golf course architect Rees Jones recently, “they like quirky.”
Promoting a job through the architect, a powerful marketing tool in American golf, is not such a thing in Britain. Years ago, Jones first visited Western Gailes, a rough course on Scotland’s rugged west coast. The club’s stiff club secretary – that is, the gatekeeper – told Jones he could play the course if he could name the architect.
Jones offered a range of names.
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
“Then who designed it?” asked Jones.
“God!” the secretary bellowed.
Spieth’s plan was to play just a few holes at North Berwick but found himself unable to stop. He played the whole course. As he sat on it, he spoke of the joys of left golf.
“There’s nothing like left golf,” he said. “The turf plays completely differently. The shots go shorter or further than shots go anywhere else, depending on the wind. It is exciting. It’s fun. You use your imagination. There is never a driving-range shot when you play left-hand golf.”
In the background, someone in Spieth’s group offered “Good shot” to another player. But you have to be careful with that sentence when you play on the left.
No one could know that better than Tom Watson, the winner of five British Opens in the 1970s and 1980s.
“In 1975 I went to Carnoustie to play in my first Open,” Watson said in a recent telephone interview. Carnoustie, on the east coast of Scotland, is known for being difficult, gloomy and troublesome. Watson arrived at the track on the Sunday before the start of the tournament, but the overlords rejected him. He was too early. Fortunately, there are 240 traditional links courses across Britain.
“So Hubert Green and John Mahaffey and I went down the road to Monifieth,” Watson said. “I hit my first shot right in the middle. Everyone says, “Good shot.” We walk down the fairway. I can’t find my ball. It’s gone. I think: ‘I don’t know anything about this left golf.’”
Watson won the 1975 British Open at Carnoustie. And he might have won at Turnberry in 2009, but his second shot, with an 8 iron, on the 72nd hole landed short of the green, bounced badly and ended up in fluffy grass. He needs one simple closing par to win. Instead, his bogey meant a playoff, and Watson, 59 and spent, was doomed. Stewart Cink won.
Watson entered the press tent and said, “This is not a funeral.” A links golfer learns over time to accept the good and bad bounces in every golf life.’
After Tom Doak graduated from Cornell in 1982 with dreams of becoming a golf course architect, he became a summer caddie at the Old Course in St. Andrews. Doak, now a leading architect (and the designer of the Renaissance course), has studied links golf ever since. In a recent interview, he noted that older golfers often do well at the British Open. Greg Norman was 53 when he tied for third place in 2008. Darren Clarke was 42 when he won in 2011 and Phil Mickelson was 43 when he won in 2013.
Left-hand golf, Doak said, isn’t about crushing the driver with youthful abandon. When Tiger Woods won at Royal Liverpool in 2006, he hit the driver just once in four days. Greens on British Open courses tend to be flat and slow, especially when compared to the greens at Augusta National, for example. There is less stress in putting and playing in the game that favors young eyes and young nerves. What ties golf rewards together the most is the ability to read the wind, the bounce, and how to fly your ball with an iron.
“In left-hand golf, you have to bend the ball in both directions depending on what the wind is doing and where the pin is,” Doak said. “You have to figure out what the ball is going to do after it lands.”
That requires trickery and skill and earned golf wisdom – all useful whether you’re playing in a British Open or a casual match with a friend in the long twilight of the British summer. Open fans sometimes end their golf day with a supper nine (or more) at a nearby coastal links. Greater Liverpool has a lot of them. Every British Open venue does.
If you play night golf on those courses, you may also see golf officials, equipment representatives, sports writers, and caddies, including Jim Mackay. Mackay, who is known as Bones and who is caddies for Justin Thomas, was Mickelson’s caddie when Mickelson won at Muirfield ten years ago.
Mackay, like millions of other golf geeks around the world, can’t get enough of the game. That is, the actual game, not the politics, not the business opportunities. As a golfer and caddy, Mackay knows that success in links golf requires a certain kind of golf magic, the ability to make the golf ball do what you want it to do.
Playing links golf, he said recently, “is like standing 50 yards in front of a hotel and having to decide which window on which floor to let your ball go through.”
The caddy as a poet. A golfer with options.
Links golf, John Updike once wrote, stands for “freedom, of a wild and windy sort.” On some level, the winner at Royal Liverpool will understand that. So will the winners of all those supper contests. Yes, the Open champion gets $3 million this year. But he also gets custody of the winner’s trophy, the burgundy jug, on which his name is engraved forever.
Do you know how much Woods made by winning against Hoylake in the summer of 2006? Unlikely.
But many of us remember Woods sitting in his caddy’s arms, sobbing. We remember Woods rocking the pitcher in victory. We remember the clouds of brown dirt announcing his shots, his ball up, his club head spinning.
“Hit him, wind,” Woods would occasionally say to his ball in the air, as if the wind could hear him, and maybe it could.
