Pitchmarks Archive ADVENTure #13 - "Peerless Prestwick"
Where the soul of golf is resting...
“It is only the mad masterpieces of the world that live in one’s memory”
Tom Simpson
Twenty-two days ago I swung left out of that car park and back on to the main road, and for a great proportion of those days and nights that have since passed, I have been absorbed - bewitched even - by the fathomless depths of Prestwick’s glory. What can I possibly say that is of value to anyone else? How can mere words sum up how I feel about the place, after only one morning on the links - one incredible, priceless morning?
It feels hopeless to try, just as the first lurch at my yellow ball in the Cardinal bunker felt hopeless, but in shifting the ball off the downslope, I at least made escape at the second attempt possible - only just - and so perhaps by pouring out this blend of confusion and adoration, I might clear the way for another chance to make sense of it all. For I feel I must not forget a single detail, for life after Prestwick doesn’t feel quite the same as that which went before. I am changed by the place, inspired. Grateful.
In the Smoke Room, the assembled are waiting “The Draw”, and I shake a few hands and learn a few names, all the while staring through vast windows at the perfect weather outside. The previous evening, at Western Gailes, my golf suffered greatly in the wind, but this morning is calm and sunny, and of course the locals insist this is always how it pans out at Prestwick.
The cards are drawn, and my host and I take one each, but ours are identical, for this is “a pockle” - a gentle fix. An eyebrow or two raise slightly at this, and then settle above broad smiles, for nothing is taken too seriously at Prestwick. And before long our group - all Kings, and I feel like one this morning - move towards the locker room.
I slip into the shop on the way past, and replenish my stock of balls, but the first tee is adjacent not only to the clubhouse windows - what stories they could tell - but to the railway station, and I fear for these precious new spheres, and wonder if I have picked up enough. Nothing like abject terror to begin a round…
We jostle for position around the tee, as some Jacks try to slip in front, but our rank is acknowledged and order restored. And Euan quietly suggests to me that I’ll “find a reassuring lack of organisation about everything except lunch”, and I am delighted, for this is what golf means to me. Fun, adventure, good humour.
And then it is my turn, and when I declare the identity of this new ball, Douglas explains that “though it may have a Prestwick logo on, it won’t necessarily know the way”, and he is right, for this is a course to frequent and learn, so I limit myself to an opening task of being left of the wall, and thus the railway, but right of the strange nipple that guards the left edge. And my new friend the yellow Callaway seems keen to start off on good terms, soaring high between these two parameters.
I misjudge my second. but somehow make four, raising another couple of eyebrows with a lengthy holed putt, but that is how it will go today - one of the rare rounds when good shots seem to just emerge, and I can’t help but think it is simply my enchantment with this place manifesting. Everything seems to enhance relaxation, though my mind is racing as I try and soak up all the details of this exhilarating ride.
Though we play “the new course”, which replaced the original twelve hole loop in 1882 (but not before fifteen of Prestwick’s twenty-four Opens had been held), many of the features that were discarded have been mown back out for a recent celebratory event on the original routing, and I marvel at the grand scale of both the “new” and “old” challenges.
Vast greens, often pitched away from the line of play; others approached from an angle different to that for which they were “designed”. Bunkers large and small, and hollows and ditches and burns. And here and there, huge dunes to navigate, daring one to choose a line, then hit and hope. But often there is so much more room than can be seen at first glance, and by the time we shake hands at the last, I somehow have the same yellow ball that I began with, three hours earlier.
Looking back, it is only snippets of detail I can recall, but the overwhelming sense of Prestwick was that I had somehow stepped into the heart of golf, finally seen this grand old game at its best. Human vs nature, and there are few such natural courses through which to travel. All around are vibrant, hardy plants - the marram grass on the hillocks, the lean fescue in the fairways. Gorse and heather for rough.
All around us are the sights and sounds of the seaside, in this bolthole for the Glasgow golfer. A kestrel hovering over a valley, an egret drifting across the dunes. And from the surf that separates us from Arran, the wibble and wail of the curlews, and - my favourite - the stuttering whistle of the oystercatcher. For most of the round it feels like a dream - each detail a little more vivid than usual - but in writing this I realise it is just the workings of my heart, filtering the most wonderful of golfing days through a lens of - well - love. I am set alight by Prestwick, as perhaps I always knew I would be.
Later I will send Stephen Proctor - a gifted writer who knows the charm and importance of this place as well as anyone - a photo or two, and his response hits the nail on the head, as usual. We both love Bernard Darwin, who said of these holes that they “possess an eternal thrill” so I am not surprised to hear him say “it is to me what Aberdovey was to Darwin”. I’d been thinking about first impressions all morning, in between staring at bunkers and laughing, and about how - almost a year to the day - I’d first crossed that railway line to glimpse that Welsh links which the great man declared his “soul loves best”.
A few things have struck me like this; love at first sight. My wife, of course. Those two children asleep upstairs. The odd bike, here and there; the view south from Pen-y-Fan. And north, east and west. But more often than not, it is golf that bestows this precious gift. Rye, New Zealand. Cleeve Hill, of course, and Sand Hills. More recently Crail, though I only stopped by for lunch. And the extraordinary Cypress Point, with its white flashed sand and the deafening wail of the elephant seals etched in my memory nearly two decades on.
But when Douglas seems to apologise that Prestwick doesn’t have quite the sea views of Western Gailes, I realise that while it is still a gorgeous, wild spot up here, in this instance it is the golf course that is captivating, and I can barely take my eyes off the holes long enough to notice much outside the links. After the quote that began this piece, Tom Simpson went on to identify a handful of what he regarded as “mad masterpieces” - “a few of the classics” - and sure enough “Sea Headrig” is among them, aka the thirteenth on the “new” course; formerly the fifth in the original dozen.
And “Sea Headrig” is perhaps a madder masterpiece seen through today’s lens than it would have been for Simpson and Darwin, or for Old Tom Morris, but golf needs more such drama, a little more intrigue in the formula. The drive is classic - one of a thousand stories of this place is of a local caddie advising a visitor to “avoid the bunker ye cannae see” - Willie Campbell’s Grave, as it has come to be known. And if you can avoid the same fate as Willie - his sandy apocalypse surely the precursor to the old Hamlet ad - the second is no less confusing, a long, precise approach required to a green that only Mother Nature could have built.
It is one of the greatest holes I will ever play, and I know where Simpson is coming from, but it feels wrong to even mention individual features of Prestwick, for I don’t want to feel that I am diminishing the other elements of this luscious beauty. Each part of the course I find beguiling - the fragments of ancient wall that mark the boundary of the original property; the carefully painted boxes that mark every tee.
And the hole names - among them “Alps” and “Himalayas”, and I feel like I have been in rarefied air walking off, as if those other courses were somehow base camps, and that in coming to play and perhaps begin to understand this thing called Prestwick, I am nearing the summit of golf’s mountain range. The sixth (and indeed the stretch from there through to the ninth) are known as “Elysian Fields” - in Greek mythology the “final resting place of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous” and this somehow feels apt given the nature of the golf that is played here. But before I am finished a couple more hole names tickle me. For all the way round, Douglas and Euan - the perfect hosts - have given me directions borne of many years of experience here.
“Don’t go there; you need to avoid that”, etc. The specificity of the instruction is comical given my inconsistent golf, and we laugh about that, but then the view from “Narrows” (the fifteenth) wipes the smile off my face, for never has a name seemed more apt from a tee box. I am told that Lee Trevino, never a man short of words, said of “Narrows” that if you hit a straight one, the left half of your ball would be on the left edge of the fairway, and the right half would nestle against the other side.
So I miss the fairway but only because I can barely stop laughing, and as the pain softens into the broadest smile, it occurs to me that I’ve not stopped smiling since I woke up. In the calmest day in living memory across these links, I’ve been enthralled by Prestwick like no other golf course in these thirty-seven odd years of playing; I can barely imagine what it is like in a stiff breeze, or with hickories and the old balls. It must certainly be “heroic”…
Standing on the eighteenth - “Clock” - my line is not the two lampposts through which I took aim on the previous hole, but this time the clock above the main clubhouse door. And I take my stance and lick my lips at this final, teasing challenge, and I hear one of these wonderful partners mutter that it is not simply the timepiece I should aim for, whose hands have been spinning around that face for generations, but “the 9”, and in that comical final instruction, Prestwick’s secret seems to emerge to me.
For every step of the way has been fun. Difficult in places, mysterious at times, but always exciting, appealing. Somewhere it is described as a “charismatic course”, and this rings true, and it absolutely makes sense that golf grew in the way it did in the period following this “new” course opening, for many of these old places were thrilling pitches on which to play; where golf sat in partnership with the landscape.
Over time, tastes changed, and many courses have been softened - often a sentimental note in Darwin’s writings, the loss of the more audacious holes - but Prestwick seems to have stuck to what worked so well in the first place, and is all the more wonderful - and precious - for this. Not here will you find a preoccupation with yardages - I think Douglas suggests at one point that if they really wanted to, they could stretch it out to 6,999 but not a yard more, which delights me, as if doing that would poke a finger at the pride of other clubs about their championship credentials, or the notion that you can measure the sublime in such tedious increments or thresholds.
But nothing at Prestwick is anything but a celebration of golf…even on this illustrious coastline, there is no real competition to this place. It has enough history and charm for the whole country, and were this the only links in golf’s spiritual home, Scotland would still be a rich destination for the golfing student. We hole out, and shake hands, and I really don’t know what to say about the morning I have had, for it is already one of a handful of days in this charmed life that I will never forget.
Words cannot convey how grateful I am to have played here, for I’ve been granted a ticket to the very heart of the game, and this jumbled collection of letters can only skim along the surface of what Prestwick feels like. And so we shower - the showers are great, of course - and take in a drink, and when a few places at the legendary long table are cleared, we move into lunch - oh, the lunch! And we talk about the game, and look at what hangs on the walls and sits in the cabinets of this old place - a good proportion of golf’s crown jewels - and the part of the day that is off the course is almost as wonderful as the bit on it.
But I have run out of words for the rest of it, for now, and you have probably run out of time, if you are still here. It near enough broke my heart to drive out of Prestwick’s car park and away from this ancient marvel, and though I am already pining to return, if I never pass that way again I will still feel lucky to have walked on that sacred turf, putted on (and off) those hallowed greens.
I feel a better person for having been, and am inspired every day since to stay as true to myself as Prestwick is to what makes it so special. And then I find that quote about charisma, from the club’s website: “With its unrivalled history, charismatic course and warm welcome, there are few places like it in the world of golf”. All of which is true, but for me the final phrase exhibits a modesty that shies away from the truth. I haven’t played all of the greats - yet - but I don’t think there is anywhere like Prestwick in the world of golf.
It became, at first glance, “the course my soul loves best”, and I think it might just be where the soul of golf is resting, hidden in plain sight. Prestwick, I love you…
Ah, so lovely to once again read this one. I’d all but forgotten what I wrote about Prestwick, but someone asked me only yesterday what “my favourite course is”, and though I am at a loss to identify only one, Prestwick was mentioned as being in that conversation for me, among the others mentioned above, and a few others now.
And that notion of it being “love at first sight” was indeed the case as I first peered across the links, trying not to be intimidated by the low wall and railway station in my peripheral vision on the first…but that intoxicating feeling was only enhanced as the round went on, the modern version of this ancient wonder weaving through dunes to within a whisker of Royal Troon and then back to the world’s greatest luncheon. What a day it was…I must get back!
Special memories.