Remember how Golf Digest had that thing "Worst Avid Golfer"? I'm the
slowest avid jogger. Your grandmother is faster than me. I don't care
how old she is.
At least at my pace you see more, and on my last night in Scotland I saw a lot. I left the Marine Hotel, beside the Royal Troon Golf, with no particular plan, except to jog to the Prestwick Golf Club and back. Prestwick is where the first British Open was played, 149 years ago. You could say the first Open, as there were no other opens then. Your Tom Morrises of St. Andrews, father and son, won almost every year in the early Opens, all held at Prestwick. It's a fantastic course, not just as a museum piece but as an everyday place to play, and it's on all the golfing tourist itineraries.
But the thing about Scottish golf are the courses off the tourist trail. You could write a book about the subject, and my friend Jim Finegan did, one I heartily recommend. But the best thing to do is make your own discoveries.
On Thursday night of Open week, a fellow typist, Alan Shipnuck, played
Royal Troon. It was expensive ($175) but excellent, and if you're going
to cover Opens you have to know the courses and bounces in the Open
rota. (I may need that sentence for my expense report, but you do the
damn thing on a computer and you get Twitter-like lengths to make your
case.) Every course I know in Scotland is, in some regard, public, even
ones with posh names like Royal Troon or the Honorable Company of
Edinburgh Golfers, aka Muirfield.
Most of the time these clubs are closed to "outside play," but they all have designated times when they permit it, and if you approach the club the right way, and you're willing to pay, you can get on. Maybe that's a better system than what most private American clubs do, which is say no to everybody, but have these enormous Monday outings where everybody takes a cart and leaves behind a trail of cigar butts and lost Pro V1s. Of course, the best course in Scotland, and the best course in the world, is an absolute muni: the Old Course at St. Andrews, where the Open will be played next year, 150 years after the first one.
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