Pitchmarks #65 - 22nd September 2024 -Royal Worlington & Newmarket

“If I just had one golf club to call my own, and never have to play anywhere else, Worly might meet all of my needs better than any other"
David Normoyle

It is human nature to wish to classify things, in order to better understand them. We search for a category through which to define what we experience, and in doing so often look for the handful of qualities that best describe this or that, as if such soundbites could ever tell the whole story.

Of Royal Worlington & Newmarket, I knew only a handful of things. I knew that it wore several names, and that people whose opinion I cherish develop a misty-eyed distraction when sounds like “Mildenhall” or “Worly” swirl in the air. I knew it is widely held to be “the best nine hole course in the world”; a title that didn’t seem to change hands as often as the eighteen hole equivalent. And perhaps the snippet that had lingered longest were the last nine words in this passage from Tom Doak, a voice from this modern world that can stand beside those of a century ago:

“[Royal Worlington is] certainly one of the best in the world – with no weaknesses in regard to condition, length or poor holes.  You should see this course sometime in your life”

These handles we dish out are often tied up with quirk - I’d also heard the story about a 1930’s party at which the thirsty guests finished all the standard drinks, then began to fill glass pitchers with a lethal cocktail of whatever else they could find. Of course, John Morrison was involved, and this legend led to the small stitched logo that you occasionally spot on a passing sweater, often beneath a look of deep satisfaction - “the pink jug”.

All of this plays into expectation, but the beautiful thing about knowing so little about the nuts and bolts of a place is that I get to discover it afresh. The approach to Mildenhall is a chance to acclimatise, for it is a quiet, gentle part of the world. I wind through old villages and farming land, and as church bells ring and tractors plough, it feels like I am drifting back through the decades, headed for a simpler world.

I follow what signs there are, and then stumble upon a few red flags, and the scene is not grand or spectacular - as so many of the great courses are - but disarming. A sweet little clubhouse, with carefully painted timber signs, and a wide open parcel of sandy soil, with a few little folds in it. All I can hear is joyous birdsong, and the silk flapping above the final hole, and I bask in the inherent serenity of this place.

While lunch is prepared, I shuffle around the clubhouse walls, from one remarkable snippet of this club’s fine heritage to the next. The good and the great of golf - particularly of the amateur game - have passed this way, and all of this whets the appetite to get out there. There’s no great rush, for there is - as I gather is often the case at Mildenhall - hardly anyone around, but I have waited a very long time to delve beyond those headlines and immerse myself in this place, so we press on.

From the very first stroke, a clue emerges. The fairway is wide, and with the rough cut down, there’s space even beyond that generous carpet. But one has to choose a target to aim at, and on a patch of land like this, that is easier said than done. Already, some shadow of St Andrews…of needing to decipher the playing lines, to imagine a worthy approach. When we reach the green it is a mystery - every inch of it contoured, with little ridges and curves and hollows - and it sounds and rolls like the turf of my dreams.

We fail to hit the second green, though the card says it is a par three, and Jasper tells me he found it the first time, and will spend the rest of his days trying to repeat it. Four is not a bad score on this quietly treacherous short hole, and as our drives soar over the second green in search of the third fairway, I am already wearing a wry smile, for the course has me utterly hooked after barely twenty minutes.

The third narrows just where you want to hit the ball, so you hit something less, and risk those right hand ponds in order to have a better line in. The green is wide, but you have to carry it all the way for danger lies in front. Off the left is a bunker that serves both this and the seventh, and the whole front-right quadrant rejects balls into a little hollow, in which many sanded divots can be found, evidence of a fate that has been dished out for over a century. It is a hole that requires both accuracy and restraint, but I have neither this time, and so suffer like all the rest.

A gentle stroll through the trees to the right, and then the fairway that the fourth and sixth share appears as a vast ocean spread in front of us, with centreline bunkers like bobbing boats, giving at least a clue of the line. Rippling swales take us over and down to a green perched away from us, with danger both long and right - the two directions that the contours propel us. By now, I am starting to understand that the digit indicating par on the card means nothing out here, for there are a thousand different ways to play each hole.

The fifth is a shortish iron with today’s pin near the front, but what Herb Warren Wind called “a bowler-hat green” is long and thin, and on both sides lie dangerous fall-offs. Miss left and the pitch up a steep wall must surely hit the flag or fall gently off the other side, towards a fatal ditch. Right, short and long are also perilous options here, but I somehow make a two, and will probably never stop smiling.

Then we retrace our steps up and over the brow to the sixth fairway, and have to dodge that string of bunkers all over again. Along the right hand side runs the “belt of fir trees” that Darwin described, familiar from the Rountree painting of the great man and his caddie - “the result of a bad slice”. Naturally, I replicate the predicament, but I am glad to do so, not only as it reinforces this sense of walking in the footsteps of the greats, but also, an escape from this angle serves to emphasise the unusual, architectural influence of these Scots pines.

The fairway skirts this copse from behind the fifth all the way to this sixth green, but then the right side of the putting surface is tucked in behind the edge of the treeline; a kink in this hole that makes the angle of approach so important whilst also pushing the ambitious player further left, where bunkers lie in wait. It is brilliant design - so many options, but by any route a par four is a score to be celebrated and a five happily tolerated.

The seventh looks benign by comparison but doesn’t play as such - the shared bunker that was only a lurking shadow when approaching the third is a clear deterrent from this angle, and another green with fathomless internal complexity looms. On many courses, the short holes offer respite from the battle of the longer challenges, but at Mildenhall, a par three is well-won on any of them, and we manage to collect a pair here, and breathe some shared sigh of relief.

But this rollercoaster resumes with the long and intriguing eighth, skirting down the other flank of Darwin’s “belt”, with a second shot challenged by a formidable rampart of bunkers, dissecting the fairway. Beyond them, the ground falls away to another green perched precariously on the crest of a downslope, and I - the newcomer to these puzzles - learn the first of what will be many golfing lessons around this penultimate green. Looking back towards the furry backs of the bunkers, it is still not obvious, but Jasper - by now both familiar and intoxicated by Mildenhall’s intricacies - points out a delicate, diagonal spine that creates a powerful right to left momentum for a ball running into the approach.

The nearer the trees a ball lands, the more pronounced that effect becomes, and all of this subtlety, this ingenuity, is brought into effect by the firm, linksy turf. It seems suspicious that one’s irons should find such glorious resistance in the strike when so far from the sea, but the running game is alive and well here, and we reflect on how single-minded the early, intrepid golfing explorers were in pursuit of just this sort of golfing soil. Having found it - though the parcel of land itself had none of the advantages of rolling hills or seaside dunes - we assume they felt implored to use it, and it feels like the magnificence of this “sacred nine” - as Darwin famously called it - is all the more extraordinary on what must have been a pretty bland canvas to begin with.

Our silence at the ninth tee celebrates not only this quiet corner of the golfing world but also a sadness that this loop is nearly over. And yet, the job is not quite finished, for the shortest four on the card represents a dangerous finale. Out of bounds - a familiar threat here - guards the right hand side, and one must decide how much to cut off when playing to this angled fairway. From the left, the approach has more to fear from the greenside bunker between our final flag and the practice green, but the margins for error are tight, for the ground will gently persuade a leaking second into the twin trap on the lower side. Short is that road upon which we breathlessly entered this magical realm not two hours ago; long is another bunker and perhaps - on those days when more than a handful of people are here - the terrifying hush of other warriors licking their wounds on the patio.

Naturally, we decide to go again, and on second glance the course is as if switched from monochrome to technicolour for me. All the nuance of the first impression gets compounded, but as we work our way around, learning all the way, there’s a sense of not only getting to know these individual fiends, but of zooming out to marvel at how they knit together. The constituent parts are extraordinary in isolation - wicked, natural bunkering to protect deceitful borrows and shelves; width and angles forcing the player to choose their fate at every turn. But as a whole it is so much more than the sum of these wonderful parts.

Nine exceptional, stimulating holes flow so effortlessly into each other, and the rhythm of the course feels so instinctually right as to be supernatural. Two days later I stumble upon Patric Dickinson’s exquisite homage to these holes, and can do no more than simply paste his words here, for they tell us all we need to know - “Mildenhall’s nine diamonds need playing; need all the cutter's art to become brilliants - make no mistake, they have as many facets, highlights and angles as any diamond, and they are quite as hard”.

The late summer light starts to fail before our thirst for this place runs dry - if it ever will - and so, while driving home, I begin to try and make sense of this latest epiphany. The following morning, while standing in line at the supermarket, and then when doing just about everything else for the next two weeks, I find myself to some degree detached, like a part of my psyche is a drone hanging in the sky above the course, trying to comprehend it better.

Two swift loops of this divine masterpiece are enough to fundamentally change how I feel about the game, and it is so far the other side of the spectrum from the sort of golf that the masses crave as to have dribbled off the edge, like an errant ball (Jasper’s, this time) tumbling into that crevasse left of the fifth. In all its charm and restraint - on and off the course - Royal Worlington & Newmarket feels like some inland, reclusive cousin of Rye, and in this heart of mine no finer compliment exists. Darwin called New Zealand “sui generis”, though bandits steal his term for other gems, but these three places really are unlike any others and, more importantly, they don’t seem to feel the need to be.

For every hundred ambitious clubs, stretching great courses for yards they don’t need and stripes I don’t want, there is another quiet outlier whose acolytes understand that a simpler beauty rings out from the bells of such chapels; that “all the handbags and gladrags” of the modern game miss the point entirely.

At Mildenhall, the home of the infamous Pink Jug, these humble nine holes are like some celestial cocktail of all that is best about this crazy game. A concentrated blend of all that Golden Age architecture stood for, preserved by thoughtful custodians. Somehow, the whims of fashion have passed by this little patch, and we are blessed instead with a fleeting glimpse of how things could be, and probably should be.

Before we drag ourselves away from this astonishing afternoon, we ring an old door-bell by the hole in the bar wall, and order a refreshment, though it mustn’t be a pink jug today. And as we wait, I glance at the painting of yet another great who passed this way - Henry Longhurst. Beneath the oil, beneath that portly figure, a little plaque includes an excerpt from “My Life and Soft Times”, where he returns to Mildenhall after “the war at last was over and nothing would ever be the same”. Nothing, except this place, he soon realises, for it is “absolutely unchanged. We pressed the bell, up went the hatch, and there was Williams. One nearly burst into tears”, and so did we on reading this.

Degas once said that “art is not what you see, but what you make others see”, and so - changed by an unforgettable afternoon in Bury St Edmunds - I think it is only right and proper that the final word should come from my host that day, for he and Royal Worlington & Newmarket delivered this important message together:

“Golf sometimes seems to try too hard. So much can be had with so little if done with simple elegance and subtle nuance. If this type of golf were replicated, which seems entirely possible given the parcel of land it’s on, we would all be richer for it”
Jasper Miners, evalu18.com