Golf, my secret history. Includes terrible events in Troon bunkers involving bicycles

As usual, you can read the piece below or listen to it read by me, interspersed with tunes that may or may not have some sort of connection with the subject in hand…the full playlist can be found at the end.

I was aged seven when golf entered my life. Since then, like God, motorcycles and guitars, it has lurked in the background, occasionally a source of joy and pride, sometimes shame, frustration, fear, moral failure and a few tiny victories. Mostly involving well-struck seven irons on the Knab pitch-and-putt course in Lerwick.

In 1962 we moved from the south side of Glasgow to Troon in Ayrshire, from a cramped huddle of rooms above my dad’s dental surgery to a big, rattly 1950s house in Ottoline Drive, Troon. Metal framed single-glazed windows, coal fire, a tiny bathroom, but a huge garden that adjoined the main Lochgreen and Fullerton stretches of the three municipal golf courses. Royal Troon, then known as Troon Old, was down past the woods which would soon be razed for more and posher housing.

From the start of primary school, a bus ride away, golf came knocking like a mashie on the shin. And sometimes, a mashie niblick, a three iron or a driver would be used to batter your legs, arms or head. Barassie Street was tough primary with some apparently psychotic teachers, several of them war survivors bearing the requisite scars. Either that or they’d been injured in a lightning strike on Darley, that mean, vicious and sullen sister to Lochgreen, over by Marr College, with its green copper dome and psychedelic purple uniforms. Going to that school in the late 60s and early 70s was like being in a Paisley Park video.

 Lightning strikes and heart attacks seemed to claim golfers every week. Electricity sizzled from the sky down sand wedges, shriveling limbs and presumably supplying some victims with Spider-Man-style superpowers, though that was rare. Cholesterol hadn’t been invented, let alone stents and statins, so corpulent men in Pringle or Lyle and Scott were keeling over on fairways all the time, or so it seemed from the adult conversations I eavesdropped on. 

I think it was neighbours and fellow pupils Gordon Saunders from Wilson Avenue and Kenny Milligan from the Muirhead council estate (in Troon,  who first inveigled me onto Fullerton, the “ladies and children’s” course, then only a few pennies to play. I shared their thin clutches of cut-down clubs, then acquired, from a junk shop back up in Pollokshaws called Dirty Dicks, a rough assortment of wee hickory sticks of my own. 

Somebody showed me the link grip I use to this day and I was off into the Big Green. Burnished brown in peak summer, icy grey in winter. We played all the time. The gate from our garden helped. We played very badly, of course. For me it wasn’t about winning or competing. It was about hitting, about those moments of transcendent peace and joy when everything connected and the ball soared perfectly, then fell, a few feet away from the pin on that infamously easy par three Fullerton sixth. Birdie! Or maybe just four over par.

If we didn’t play we were hiding in gorse pushes beyond blind tees, waiting for unsighted balls we could steal. We would shout at money-shot putters and then run, ride our bikes along the dog walkers’ paths and sometimes, in the deserted twilight, carry out stunt rider leaps off bunkers. Later, with a decrepit Vespa, I would do the same thing as a callow teenager and nearly kill myself, not to mention the pensioner practising his pitching.

Secondary school, saw daily Darley daunners to and from regular mindless beltings, but summer games periods could be used for golf, meaning an entire afternoon lolling about the course. Dad had tried the sport, bought some decent steel shafted clubs, and I appropriated them. You could get a three-course junior municipal season in the early 70s for a fiver. That provided unlimited play on Lochgreen, one of the best public courses in the country.

And then to university; Glasgow and beyond. Girls, God, guitars, cars and motorcycles took over. For years. Family. The turmoil of attempted domesticity.

Golf occasionally nudged me back onto various courses for gut-wrenchingly poor performances against friends who were beginning to take it quite seriously, fitting the long tramps around Knightswood or Dalmuir into their adult lives. But the call of the Big Green was strong, and its literature, a surprisingly huge range, from Updike to Bamberger, Wodehouse to to Betjeman and Sam Beckett (played off seven) to Hunter S Thompson,  eventually saw the emergence of a book and radio series called Hell’s Golfer.

It was about a man who had lost his family,his faith, his identity and his whole purpose in life, and attempted to rediscover and reconnect by strapping a set of clubs to an old motorcycle and playing the inaccessible edges of Scottish golf, the little community courses from island to island, south to north, coast to coast. It led to further radio work and eventually a career. I owe golf. Big time.

Will I mention that disastrous Hell’s Golfer  promotional tour of  South African championship courses, where I was expected to be guest of honour at three pro-ams?  Not just at the moment…and I’ve just remembered the programme I recorded for Japanese TV, a guide to the Old Course in St Andrews in which I was dressed as Old Tom Morris, its designer. You can still buy the DVD, allegedly. Worse, there’s a reputable golf coach and owner of something called Morton Golf in the USA. His name’s Tom too.

Here in Shetland, I’ve played the occasional round, acquired clubs, pitched, putted and never taken it seriously. Until lockdown, when I began practising in the garden, took out a membership on the little Asta nine-hole, and have yet to  play there. Now I find myself spending a lot of time in Troon, wandering the ground I grew up on, that Lochgreen and Fullerton patch, amazed at the cost of a round (though the annual South Ayrshire season ticket remains very good value, equivalent to a day or so at the venerable and eye-wateringly dear Prestwick)

I actually began this piece intending to review the new book by Jim Hartsell, a proper golfer from Alabama, which is called When Revelation Comes. I’ll save that up for another day I think, because it deserves much more than a couple of paragraphs at the end of this assortment of memories. Suffice to say that When Revelation Comes is an intensely moving, raw, disturbing exploration of the worst kind of loss. But also a joyful exultation in and celebration of Scotland, golf and the redemptive powers of Arran and the Mull of Kintyre. Jim will be in Scotland next month and there will be a launch event and signing at Dunaverty, down near Southend.

Meanwhile, I now have a set of golf clubs safely installed in a cupboard in Troon. All I have to do is take them to that first tee at Fullerton, place a ball on a tee, and be seven years old again. Maybe I’ll drive a few more yards than sixty years ago. But then again, maybe not.

Listen to the audioletter here, including the following tracks:

John Hiatt — Master of Disaster

John cooper Clark — Drive, She Said

Stone Roses — Fool’s Gold

LCD System — Losing My Edge

MGMT — Time to Pretend

The Strokes — Someday

The Fall — Hit the North

Beta Band — Dry the Rain

Elbow — One Day Like This

Warren Zevon — Bad Karma