The Scottish way of golf - Scottish seem to enjoy golf more than Americans - Brief Article

Golf Digest, July, 1999 by Nick Seitz

Your well-traveled correspondent was searching for a ball deep in the wilds of Carnoustie a few years ago when a wizened local dog walker, attired in several shades of gray and tan before they became stylish, stopped to help. "Made it into a dogleg, did you?" he said wryly.

The Scots are the victims of more stereotyping than cowboys and Indians. As we know, they spend thriftily, if at all, insulate themselves against the frequently dank weather with their famous whisky (hold the ice and water, please) and exhibit personalities dismissed by the rest of the world as dour.

Like most stereotypes, this one contains a ration or two of truth but otherwise doesn't hold a lot of ice and water, at least the part about being dour. Laconic certainly, dour not often.

The ball was found, the old villager and his dog resumed their stroll through the public parkland-back into an earlier century or an antique print-and I was left remembering Ben Hogan, reflecting on his 1953 British Open victory, saying he'd never seen so many dogs as at Carnoustie and almost hit one teeing off once. Hogan loved the public-ness of the course, and talked too about "baby buggies" being pushed the full 18 holes.

Pinehurst is a public course in a rarefied, upscale sense. A walk-on round of golf without a hotel reservation at the full-amenities resort will lighten your wallet by $275, a price that probably will go up after the U.S. Open. At Carnoustie the locals pay a pittance, and you get the impression they all play golf, pulling their trolleys or hand carts from their little stone houses to the course. In the summer, when it stays light until late evening, they typically play after dinner and a day's work, perhaps at the MacKay (pronounced mah-KAI) jam factory that is the town's main industry.

They don't play very well, most of them, but they seem to enjoy the game more than we do, viewing it as recreation rather than a determined exercise in business entertainment or legalized gambling. No less an observer than Donald Ross, who had apprenticed at Carnoustie as a young golf professional, was struck on a return visit to his homeland in his later years by the differences between average golfers in America and Scotland.

He wrote, "It seemed extremely queer that the standard of play appeared vastly inferior to the standard in America. British golfers seemed to care much less whether they win. Possibly this is because they have been less under the strain of professional and business life. I wondered increasingly whether it would be possible to find so many players anywhere in the United States who would so promptly be rated as duffers. Nevertheless, these duffers were enjoying the game on some of the hardest links in the world, and woe to the one who would suggest to them that they might find more pleasure on an easier and inferior course."

To their everlasting credit, the Scots usually play 18 holes on foot in little more than half the time we require in motorized conveyances, and scoff at Americans who agonize over club selection or the line of a putt. Even little old grandmothers don't hold up play in the country that invented the game.

If the good burghers of Carnoustie have something to teach us about simple pleasures, the people who run the British Open share, to a point, their lack of obsession with numbers and par. Rarely does the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, which conducts the event, contrive to turn a hole that is normally a par 5 into a par 4, as does the U.S. Golf Association with some regularity and mixed results. "We are more concerned with how good the hole is than the score," says Sir Michael Bonallack, the leader of the R&A, without a trace of hauteur.

Maybe it's the maturity born of being the oldest championship in the world. With "globalization" a buzzword for the next millennium, and the game awash with new World Golf Cham- pionships, the British Open still feels like the true heavyweight championship of the world. Some three dozen flags representing competing nationalities will fly colorfully atop the coliseum- like grandstands around the 18th green at Carnoustie.

The locals will be looking on proudly while reacting laconically. Made it into a dogleg indeed.