THE GAME THE Morrises played was already ancient. It was in the kingdom of Fife on Scotland’s east coast, the place where medieval shepherds used their crooks to knock stones at rabbit holes. They were at it within a century or two of King Macbeth’s death in 1057. In time, the shepherds’ sons and their sons’ sons whittled balls of wood to whack around the links, coastal wastelands where no trees or crops grew. They dug holes in flat places and planted sticks in the holes – targets for a game they called ‘gowf’ or ‘golfe’. Over the centuries the game would be called many other things, some printable, including ‘this human frustration’, ‘a good walk spoiled’ and ‘a weird combination of snooker and karate’.
Other countries had similar sports. One was chole, a Flemish pastime in which a team of players got three swings to advance a ball towards a goal that might be half a mile away. Then the opponents played defence, hitting the ball towards the nearest bog. The Dutch played a golflike game on ice, and it is fashionable in some circles to say that golf began in Holland. But if you ask a Scotsman if he owes his national game to some Amsterdammers on ice skates, he may shoot back, ‘That’s not golf.’ In fact, the Scots’ claim to the sport is simple and correct: they invented the game with the hole in the ground.
But they borrowed its name. ‘Golf’ is probably a corruption of kolf, a Dutch word for club. And as the game spread it corrupted its players – or so thought Scotland’s King James II, who banned it. The king was sick of seeing his soldiers wasting time on the links, neglecting their archery practice. No wee wooden ball would pierce armour and kill the damned English. In 1457, in the first recorded reference to the game, King James II decreed that ‘the golfe be utterly cryit doune and not usit’. Golfers ignored him.
His grandson, James IV, kept up the family tradition by calling the game ‘ridiculous … requiring neither strength nor skill’. Then he tried playing it. During a lull between wars with England, the young monarch emerged from Holyrood Palace with a brand-new driver in his hand. He greeted several lords and ladies gathered to mark the occasion, stepped up to the ball and – whiff! He missed. He tried again, whiffed again, threw down his club and stalked back to the palace. That might have been the end of royal golf, but to his credit James IV practised in secret until he could lace his drives more than fifty yards. He became the first royal golf nut and the first royal golf gambler. In 1504, after the king lost a two-guinea bet to the Earl of Bothwell, the debt was added to the nation’s tax bill.
A love of golf often passes from father to son. In the middle of the sixteenth century it went from father to son to daughter. Mary Stuart, better known as Mary Queen of Scots, was the only child of King James V, the golfing son of James IV. Mary ascended to the throne after her father died in 1542. She was six days old. When the news reached London, the gluttonous wife-killer Henry VIII, a tennis player, saw a chance to expand his empire. In a series of invasions called the ‘rough wooing’, he tried to force a royal marriage between his son, Prince Edward, and Scotland’s child queen. Mary was shipped to safety in France, where she grew into a striking beauty, six feet tall. Upon returning to Scotland the seventeen-year-old queen took up the national game and gave it a new word: she called the boy who lugged her clubs a cadet, which the Scots heard as ‘caddie’. Mary went on to be a golfing widow, hitting the links the same week her husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered. That faux pas gave her cousin, England’s Queen Elizabeth, an excuse to charge her with crimes against God, nature and good government. Mary Queen of Scots went on to lose a few more golf balls in Scotland and later, in England, her head.
By then a dozen generations of golfers had walked the four-mile loop of the links at St Andrews, over Swilcan Burn to the mouth of the River Eden and then back towards town, aiming for rooftops and the crumbling twelfth-century cathedral where ghosts were said to guard the remains of St Andrew, supposedly brought here by a monk in the year 345: three of the Apostle’s finger bones, an arm bone, a tooth and a kneecap. No man designed the golf course west of the town. The course was an accident. The fairways were narrow paths through thickets of scrub: thorny whin bushes, which the rest of the world called gorse, as well as heather, nettles, brambles, ground elder, dogtail, cocksfoot and chickweed. The putting-greens were clearings where players’ boots and the nibblings of rabbits and sheep kept the grass down. During storms the sheep huddled behind hillocks, where they scuffed and nibbled the grass and clover to the roots, leaving bare spots that eroded into sand bunkers. Other bunkers were carved by golfers slashing the turf in hollows where bad shots collected.
Golfers and sheep vied for space on the links with fishermen drying their nets, women beating rugs or bleaching clothes, dogs chasing rabbits, cows and goats grazing, larks darting in and out of the whins, children playing hide and seek, and even the occasional citizen soldier doing his duty by old James II, practising his archery. Still, it was a golf town. In the seventeenth-century sermons of Robert Blair, minister of the town church, Reverend Blair likened the bond between God and the Church of Scotland to that of shaft and clubhead. Remote, wind-blistered St Andrews may have been shrinking as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee grew, but the town’s sway in golf never shrank. Courses in Perth, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Montrose and Musselburgh ranged from five to twenty-five holes, but after St Andrews rejiggered its twenty-two-hole course to make it tougher, the ‘St Andrews standard’ of eighteen became everyone’s standard. Scottish sportsmen played the game by thirteen rules adopted in 1754 by the Society of St Andrews Golfers. Some of those rules sound reasonable enough today (‘If a ball is stop’d by any person, horse, dog or any thing else, the ball so stop’d must be played where it lyes’), while others sound puzzling (‘Your tee must be upon the ground’). One timeless feature of the game was already clear to a St Andrews writer: ‘How in the evening each dilates on his own wonderful strokes, and the singular chances that befell him – all under the pleasurable delusion that every listener is as interested in his game as he himself is.’
The men who made the rules and played most of the golf were gentlemen: well-to-do landowners who didn’t need to work. The game was technically open to all and the St Andrews links, like most links, occupied public land. But few working men could afford to play in an age when whole families, including both parents as well as children as young as five or six, toiled six days a week to earn what a gentleman spent to buy a single golf ball.
Golf evolved as a rich man’s game partly because the feathery balls of the 1700s and early 1800s, leather pouches packed tight with goose feathers, were expensive. Men who could afford them saw golf as a healthy outdoor pastime like fox hunting. They met in town halls and taverns to drink, joke, argue and arrange challenge matches, and as the game grew they formed local clubs and played for trophies. In 1744, after tabling discussions of taxes, prostitution and the latest cholera outbreak, Edinburgh’s town council approved the purchase of a silver cup, to be played for each year by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. That move seemed to establish the gentlemen of the capital, who played in satin breeches and silk-lined jackets, as the game’s ruling body. But the golfers of Fife would have something to say about that.
The ‘twenty-two noblemen and gentlemen’ of the Society of St Andrews Golfers played in red hunting jackets, a look borrowed from the Fife Fox and Hounds Club. Some wore hiking boots that had tacks driven through the soles – the first golf spikes. After forming the Society of St Andrews Golfers in 1754 they commissioned a trophy of their own, a silver golf club. They also played for gold and silver medals, and these medal competitions led to a new way of keeping score. Since a round robin of one-on-one matches could take forever, the society came up with a different format: ‘[W]hoever puts in the ball at the fewest strokes … shall be declared and sustained victor.’ The new style was called medal play. In time it would eclipse the old way of playing. Medal play is what Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and almost everyone else in modern golf play ninety percent of the time. Often called stroke play, it is the modern way to play golf: whoever takes the fewest strokes wins.
