Miracle at St. Andrews Read online

  “No…to play. Based on my fourteenth-place finish, I was the next alternate and it opened up this afternoon. And I need a caddy. Do you know the course?”

  “I’ve been coming here for twenty-five years. I know it like the back of my hand.”

  Would that be your left or right? I think. But I hold my tongue and arrange to meet him at dawn.

  “Before you head off to sleep,” says Seamus, “do one thing for me. Sit on the stool like this facing the room and watch the TV behind the bar by looking back at it over your shoulder, first over your left for about thirty seconds and then your right. Back and forth ten times each. Best thing you can do for your ROM—range of motion.”

  46

  MY FIRST REACTION TO the course is “Where is it?” From the tee box, I face a gray expanse as featureless as a Walmart parking lot. There don’t seem to be any holes. Last night in the van, I perused the layout and gave myself a crash course on its eccentricities—the seven double greens with white flags for the outward holes and red for the inward, the 120 bunkers, all of which have names and some of which are located in the middle of fairways. In person, the holes have much less definition than on the card. With no trees, it’s impossible to make out the fairways, and with no fairways, there’s no clear idea of where to aim.

  On the range, I introduced Seamus to Sarah and Noah and Louie. Then I gave Seamus the distances I hit my clubs and he laid out our game plan. “I’m going to give you a club and a target and unless I specify differently, you’re going to put your smoothest eighty-five-percent swing on it. Then we’re going to go find it and do it again. Other than that, you’re just along to absorb the atmosphere and take in the sights.”

  The tee shot on No. 1 is almost absurdly easy. It’s a short hole, 376 yards, and you have two fairways to hit into—1 and 18—and between them they are 130 yards wide. Seamus pulls my hybrid 3 and points left at a lone gorse in the center of a featureless field. Last night, as I crammed for this test, I searched out the worst of the trouble, the places you least want to visit. Except for the armada of bunkers, it’s all to the right. The stern warning I gave myself that first morning in England as we pulled out of the parking lot in our rental—RIGHT equals DEATH—is as applicable to the Old Course as the M6. Swerve right, you’re roadkill. Keep it left, you’re pretty much in every hole. This is no course for old men…who are fighting a slice…but for a middle-aged fellow like myself, whose go-to shot is a low hard hook, it’s quite hospitable.

  Speaking of right, I glance in that direction. Sarah, who looks damn good for 7 a.m., smiles and waves, and Noah, who shows no indication of ever getting out from under This Is Spinal Tap, raises his pinkie and pointer finger in the international sign of rock ’n’ roll solidarity. At least he doesn’t curl his lip and flip me the bird.

  Sarah and Noah are easy to spot. I’m going off in the third pairing of the day with Kazuhiko Hosokawa and Tsuyoshi Yoneyama, and Sarah and Noah are the only Caucasian faces in a small sea of ardent Japanese fans. Many of the women carry open umbrellas against the invisible Scottish sun.

  My hybrid flies about 215 yards and rolls another 50, leaving me 123 to the pin. The only thing challenging about the shot, along with the circumstances, is the Swilcan Burn, a piddling irrigation ditch of a stream that runs directly in front of the green on its way to the sea. It’s maybe six feet wide and a foot deep but catches so many balls they leave a metal scooper beside it to pluck them out. My wedge barely clears the burn, but the greens are so hard and fast the ball still rolls twenty feet past the hole. I find the contours of the greens as nebulous as the fairways and am entirely in Seamus’s hands. “Twenty feet that plays like twelve,” he says, “two balls to the right.” His read is spot-on and so is my putt and when it finds the hole my constituency erupts.

  “How does it feel?” asks Seamus as we step over to the No. 2.

  “How does what feel?”

  “To be the leader of the Open Championship? And please don’t say it’s humbling.”

  47

  IT MUST FEEL GOOD, because I birdie the second and third as well, two more indistinguishable par 4s, and as I step onto the fourth tee, my mind is focused. My only concern is that the raw data of my birdie, birdie, birdie start has been collected and transmitted to the keepers of the large electronic scoreboards scattered over the course, and that no one else has matched my start.

  That’s not exactly true. I hope for one other thing as well, which is that out of the thousands of golf fans already milling about the grounds, one of them will have a sufficiently developed sense of the absurd to snap a picture of a leaderboard, and later reach out so that he or she can get me the photo. Back in Winnetka, I’ll frame and display it as irrefutable proof that one cool gray morning in the mists of time, a McKinley, Travis to be more precise, gazed out from fairway to firth, master of all he surveyed. I’m not planning on anything gaudy or ostentatious, just a simple black frame with a matte white background and maybe some recessed spotlighting, and I wouldn’t put it up in more than three or four rooms. Also, I would have a lot more parties.

  Once in wish list mode, it’s hard to snap out of it, because as soon as I conceive my hope for an enterprising imaginative photographer, I layer on another wish, my third, which is that the players just below me on the leaderboard will not be as anonymous or Asian as Hosokawa and Yoneyama, but iconic names known throughout the Western world like Faldo and Watson and Woods, to give my moment some context.

  Perhaps you’ve already concluded that these kinds of thoughts, and I use the word charitably, are the least appropriate for someone contending with 156 of the best golfers in the world, and almost as many hungry bunkers, with annoyingly picturesque names like Pulpit and Principal’s Nose. If so, you’d be wrong. Rather than the standard pitfall, which is to get ahead of yourself and start fantasizing about your new status and life if by some miracle you are able to keep this up and hoist the Claret Jug, I’m staying well behind myself and focusing entirely on what I’ve already done, how it might be recorded for posterity and expressed as interior decorating. And it turns out to be quite helpful. Although I don’t record any more birdies, I don’t post a single bogey, either, and at the end of the day my 69 is good enough for a share of the lead along with half a dozen other golfers, all of whom I’m happy to be associated with, including Ernie Els and Pádraig Harrington. And later that afternoon before Sarah, Noah, and Louie join me for a walk around the gray old town, a friendly stranger snaps a few pictures of the leaderboard with the four of us and Seamus standing in front of it and promises to send me the pictures.

  So I’m good to go.

  48

  FRIDAY AFTERNOON, SEAMUS ASKS me to meet him at the Martyrs’ Monument, a tall, austere piece of commemorative granite that sits on a bluff and looks over the back of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club and the epic sweep of the beach. Seamus is waiting on a nearby bench with my clubs and a small stack of British tabloids, all of whose headlines refer to me—EX-BROADCASTER LEADS OPEN…AMERICAN SENIOR CLAIMS PIECE OF LEAD…MCKINLEY WHO?

  “I’d like to perform a cleansing ritual,” he says, and pats the empty spot beside him.

  “Knock yourself out.”

  “Please close your eyes,” he says, “and inhale deeply. Hold it for a beat. Now release the breath through your nose. Feel the sun on your face and the breeze off the sea. Smell the brine. Be the brine.”

  I’m okay with “be the ball,” but be the brine?

  “Listen to the birds…and the waves. I know this all seems unreal, Travis—coming in late last night and leading the Open Championship. And you’re right, it isn’t real. It’s completely unreal. But the thing to keep in mind is that so is everything else. This bench. This obelisk. It’s all an illusion. In a couple hundred years, maybe less, this entire course will be under water and all that will be left are the birds and waves and sun and maybe the tip of that obelisk, and no one will care who led the Open Championship after the first round or second or even whos
e names are engraved on the Claret Jug. So none of this really matters. Do you understand that?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Do you believe it?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. Let’s just bag this experiment and go golfing.”

  On Friday, the group of Hosokawa, Yoneyama, and McKinley goes off at 4:52 p.m. and I get a second look at the Old Course. Although both are hundreds of years old, overlook the North Sea, and are built on the edge of charming Scottish towns, the Old Course and Royal Dornoch could not be more different. Dornoch feels like a discovery, that you’re planting a flag on new golfing land. At St. Andrews, pronounced “Sinandrooze,” there’s no mistaking you’ve stepped onto the most golfed track on earth. It’s the muni of all munis. People have been playing it for six hundred years and it looks it. Even on a sunny day you feel like you’re seeing it in black-and-white, and, like all the most revered munis, it feels chilly to outsiders. It reminds me of a legendary inner-city playground where the greatest athletes have done battle for generations and there are no nets on the rims. And yet somehow it’s not played out. Not even close.

  For the second day in a row, Seamus guides me through the peril like a Seeing Eye dog. Most critical is avoiding the deep bunkers strewn over the turf like land mines, and somehow we do. And my ground hook continues to serve me well. It swerves away from the trouble on the right and rolls forever on these firm fairways, so my disadvantage off the tee, compared to the youngs, is minimized and on most holes, I’m hitting the same irons and wedges into the greens as players twenty years my junior. And despite my deficiencies as a putter, I’m as comfortable on these greens as at Dornoch and North Berwick. On a U.S. Open layout, I’d be lucky to break 80, but here, at least so far, I’m competitive.

  I don’t get off to the same hellacious start as Thursday, but I keep my nose and card clean and, based on three birdies in a five-hole stretch in the middle of the round, put up another 69 and cling to a piece of the lead along with Thomas Bjørn, Colin Montgomerie, and a golfer you may be familiar with named Tiger Woods.

  Just off 18, Sarah, Noah, and Louie give us a royal reception. “Amazing,” says Sarah, hugging us both. “You two are kicking ass and taking names.”

  “Not only that,” says Noah, “you’re going to be huge in Japan.”

  I’m just thrilled to have made another cut, and after Seamus retires for the evening I explain to Sarah that even if I finish last, which I still consider likely, I’m guaranteed £10,999, which according to the calculator on my phone is worth $16,697.11. “Half the field just got sent home and eighty hotel rooms opened up. So let’s ixnay the van and check into another luxury suite. I miss those four-hundred-thread-count sheets and down comforters. Life is short, and according to Seamus, none of it is real anyway. It’s all just an illusion.”

  “What are you talking about?” says Sarah. “And there’s no way we’re moving now and messing with your karma. Are you crazy?”

  And so we faithfully adhere to our little routine. After everyone but Louie takes advantage of my player’s credential to shower—Noah and I at the R&A and Sarah at the nearby Forgan House—we enjoy fish and chips at our regular, then stroll the town in the lingering light. St. Andrews, the town, is as warm and welcoming as the course is not, and townspeople smile and doff their hats as we wend our way from the antique-looking picture house on Market Street past the genuinely ancient cathedral and on down to the small harbor, where we have already found a little place that puts together a pretty fair ice cream cone. Just like home, we join the queue, pay up, and ferry our perishables to an empty table.

  Postdessert, we resume our walk, circling back along the esplanade that runs behind the cathedral. When Louie barks, we notice that half a dozen Fleet Street photographers are shadowing us from across the street.

  “I don’t mind the pictures,” I say, “but if they see the van we’ll never hear the end of it.”

  “What are we going to do?” says Sarah. “You need some sleep.”

  “I have an idea…it’s going to be a bit of an adventure.”

  “Cool,” says Noah.

  Next to the St. Andrews School of Economics is a bed-and-breakfast, and we turn off the sidewalk and walk to the door. “It’s got to be unlocked,” I say, “because they never know when their last guest will arrive or return for the evening. We’ll go in the front and step out the back.”

  “Travis, at what point did you become an operative for the CIA? We could all get arrested. That would make a lovely headline—‘Leader of Open Championship Deported for Breaking and Entering.’”

  “Unlikely.”

  The photo corps have crossed the street and are setting up tripods by the gate. “The time has come to act,” I say. “Freedom and whiskey gang the gither! Take off your dram.”

  “What?”

  “Robert Burns,” says Noah.

  I grab the handle and the front door opens with a creak worthy of The Addams Family and Sarah and Noah succumb to giggling. Fortunately, no one hears them and we tiptoe through a pitch-black living room into the kitchen and out a side door. Minutes later, we slip unseen through a tall hedge and into the parking lot where our trusty white van awaits in the moonlight.

  “Worked like a charm,” says Noah.

  “I’m on a roll, what can I say? And Noah, you should never try this on your own unless you’re being hounded by paparazzi in a quaint Scottish town. Are we clear on that?”

  “Dad, I don’t think you’re going to do much more rolling.”

  Slapped on every window of the van are aggressively adhesive NO TRESPASSING stickers, and bolted to the back wheel is a yellow rectangular encumbrance that resembles a medieval instrument of torture. “Just as I feared,” I say, “the dreaded Sinandrooze boot.”

  49

  DESPITE THE PAPERWORK AND impediment and our slippery legal footing, I sleep soundly on the lead for the second day in a row and so does the rest of the carhold, including Louie, who barely acknowledges the fact that his best friend is the thirty-six-hole leader of the Open Championship. Throughout the night, a brisk breeze ventilates our little dorm and rocks it like a cradle, but by 6 a.m., when the first light is visible through the thickets, the lullaby has turned into a tempest. From inside I can hear the wind trying to claw the stickers off the windows, and it’s so fierce I’m almost grateful for the extra ballast on our back tire.

  When I tug Louie out of bed for his morning constitutional the wind plasters his coat to his body like a bad toupee. The two of us lean into it and head up to the course to get an idea of what I will be facing. Without trees, the visible evidence is limited to the flapping flag on No. 18 and the heaving gorse along the right side of the fairway, but there is no doubt it’s blowing a gale. Although I haven’t read the play, or at least the CliffsNotes, since high school, the turbulent scene makes me think of old King Lear and how thoroughly he screwed up his life. I fear that when I go onstage, I’ll screw up as tragically and be one more old man stumbling blindly across a windswept heath.

  A few hours later, Seamus and I rendezvous at our favorite obelisk.

  “You’re not going to attempt another cleansing ritual, are you?”

  “Strictly for amateurs. I got something much better in mind.”

  He shoulders my bag and we head down the hill. He sidesteps the range and keeps going until we reach the entrance to Jubilee, a newer course that runs adjacent to the Old Course, and continues past the closed pro shop. “I’m taking you someplace special. A place only locals know.”

  We take the path that runs beside the first two fairways and just before the third, tack left into a large open area where there are three heaping piles of sand and gravel and dozens of trucks and pieces of earth-moving machinery, in various states of repair. Beyond it to the right is a practice area with a green and a bunker and enough space to hit full wedges. The cul-de-sac is shielded from view and the elements by a large dune, and although we can hear the wind whipping across the wave
s, I feel utterly cut off from the fray.

  A hundred yards from the green, Seamus lowers my bag and empties a plastic tube of balls at my feet and for the next ninety minutes, it’s just the two of us, out of sight and out of the wind, hitting and shagging balls.

  “I want you to find a spot as tranquil as this inside yourself,” says Seamus. “Before every shot and every putt I want you to get really quiet. Whatever you’re feeling, I need you to lower the volume, take a breath, and lower it some more. It’s going to get hairy as hell out there, and I want your mind and body to be a source of comfort, not something you fight. It should be a refuge, a sanctuary, like this spot here, where no one can mess with us. It might be a little Zen for your taste, but try to buy into it. It will help.”

  For Saturday, groups are trimmed from three to two, and I go out second-to-last with Danish pro Thomas Bjørn. Although little known in America, he has a dozen wins in Europe and played in a Ryder Cup. He’s big and strong and known for his dark gloomy demeanor—Hamlet to my Lear.

  When I step on the first tee, an enormous gallery is standing six and seven deep from the steps of the R&A to the corner of Market Street. Only a handful are Asian. Mostly they are locals, attracted by my Scottish name and heritage and the unlikelihood of a fifty-four-year-old not good enough to keep his card on the Senior Tour bidding to win the oldest and grandest major of them all. In barely decipherable brogues, they urge me to dig deep and represent. “Let’s go, laddie!” “Come on, McKinley!” “Don’t lose your nerve, boyo!” “One more time for us old bastards!”

  There must be three thousand people packed behind the tee, and I have just enough time to locate my bunkmates. Overhead the sky glowers like Armageddon and the strength of the cold wind is terrifying. The wind and cold remind me of the dread I felt every morning as an eight-year-old at YMCA camp before being forced into the freezing lake whose Native American name I have thankfully forgotten. But when a gust blows a tweed cap off the scalp of a tournament volunteer and sends it bounding down the fairway like a jackrabbit, I experience a sudden adjustment in attitude and point of view. You might even call it an epiphany.