A homesick sport returns to the source

There's more to golf than money, and Joel Beall's book takes us to its soul.

Robert MacIntyre

Golf is personal. It is the source of madness. It is that rare social network that involves real people, for hours at a time. It also is the only sport in which the fans are also players. The most tepid fastball, thrown by the least accomplished major league pitcher, would be impossible to hit for the common man. But it is quite possible to hole the same putt that Tiger Woods did, on the 18th hole at Torrey Pines 17 years ago. It might be for a double bogey that pushes you over 100 for the day, but it brings the same glow.

Because of that shared experience, we generally deified our favorite professionals. They walked alongside us. They called penalties on themselves, and still do, with no official or camera present. The best ones made a fortune, of course, and each logo on their bags and their shirts added more dollars, but that was never why they were playing. We measured them by major championships, not the money list. Above all they seemed like gentlemen, worthy dinner companions. There was the joke about the Lord, watching his Son walk across a pond to get to the green. “Who do you think you are?” he cried. “Jack Nicklaus?”

The pros left Quad Cities Sunday night, most of them headed to North Berwick to play the Scottish Open, some of them eligible to play the Open Championship at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland the week after that. These are commercial enterprises, no doubt about it. Last year the Open (formerly known as the British Open, and you won’t be canceled if you call it that) had a combined purse of $17 million. In truth it stands as the true World Championship of the game, because it’s homecoming week. Golf in Scotland and neighboring lands, as played by those who live there, is in the same place it always was. But with each year it becomes more distinctive and quaint. Everything else has moved.

Joel Beall, of Golf Digest, is a parishioner of those scruffy cathedrals. He has also become a perceptive, literate golf writer of the highest order. His book, “Playing Dirty,” deals with the extremes of the game. On one side, the arrival of LIV Golf hasn’t significantly reduced the PGA Tour but has undeniably changed its soul. On the other, the Scots refuse to let the game outgrow life. To them, they’re one and the same.

Imagine a place where you can carry your bag to the first tee, past an “honesty box” for your greens fee in case no one’s minding the store, and spend the next hours on a course that was designed by erosion and photosynthesis, not Fazio or Dye. The essential courses are the ones by the North Sea and the various Firths, the links courses that include St. Andrews, Carnoustie, Muirfield and Troons, and hundreds of others who are much shorter, much less busy, and maybe more enchanting. Most Scottish towns have a golf course, with a pub and maybe a restaurant, and a caddie who is more of a human Waze, taking you through the blind shots and the detours. As Beall points out, there are 587 courses in Scotland, where the population is 5.4 million, and only two of them are totally private. Those who live in St. Andrews can purchase a year’s worth of golf on seven courses, including the Old Course and the New Course (opened in 1895), for $400. Yes, for the year. And on Sunday they turn over the courses to the dog-walkers and the picknickers and those who just want a nice unspoiled walk. The Old Course ends right in the middle of town. It’s centrally located, on the map and in the heart.

In America, many of the best courses are unquestionably private. The average green fee for the top 10 public courses (as rated by Golf Digest) is $570. Donald Trump, noted guardian of the game, has said the ability to play golf should be “aspirational,” open to those who have conquered some financial summit. Before Covid-19, golf was receding in this country, primarily because it was too expensive and time-consuming. But golf was also the first activity that could survive the pandemic, as long as you avoided hand-to-hand contact, because it was outdoors. They haven’t figured out a way to put a dome on it and play it at night, but the odious TGL, a league spearheaded by Woods and Rory McIlroy and played on simulators, might get us there.

Beall holds LIV Golf in near-total contempt because it wouldn’t exist without money from Saudi Arabia, which is using it to “sportswash” its repressive identity. Most fans couldn’t tell MBS from SGA, but they haven’t warmed to the new league even though it lured Jon Rahm, Brooks Koepka, Phil Mickelson, Bryson DeChambeau and Dustin Johnson. There is no purpose to their schedule except for money, no cut, no pressure, hardly any TV time. In response, the PGA Tour has lavished more money on its top players, invented “signature” events that threatened to shut out the tour’s journeymen, and yet it continues to negotiate with the Saudis for a golf-for-peace plan, even though players like McIlroy had taken a hard line against LIV reparations.

When McIlroy was asked what the tour’s fringe players could do to join the party, he retorted, “Play better.” Some of them have. On Sunday, Brian Campbell won a playoff at the John Deere Classic, to go with another playoff win in Mexico three months ago. Campbell is the shortest hitter on the PGA Tour, lost his PGA Tour card after the 2017 season and didn’t get it back until this year. Then there’s J.J. Spaun, who nearly lost his card last year, rallied, lost to McIlroy in a playoff at The Players, and then rolled in a 64-foot putt to win the U.S. Open.

The PGA Tour has what the LIV does not. It has stories. It has Sundays in which the hole keeps shrinking and the fairway keeps narrowing, but someone always wins, and sometimes does it with a golf ball that changes his life like Powerball. Sunday morning’s straggler becomes Sunday night’s commodity.

But the human cost of the LIV incursion is considerable. Hudson Swafford was an established PGA Tour player who lived in Sea Island, S.C. and regularly practiced, dined and joked around with fellow pros Davis Love III, Zach Johnson, Brian Harman and Harris English. When he joined LIV, he found himself ghosted by all those close friends. “I don’t know what they’re thinking,” Swafford said. “I basically switched jobs. I took a different job at a start-up. I don’t get the personal vendettas that I’ve come across.”

Then there’s Talor Gooch, a defector who said that if the LIV golfers aren’t invited to major championships, the winner would bear an “asterisk.” That definitely could happen, since the LIV guys can’t amass World Ranking points anymore, but when McIlroy won the Masters, no one seemed interested in Gooch’s “take.”

Beall also points out that the greed has disabled the DP World Tour, formerly known as the European Tour, the springboard for Seve Ballesteros, Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer. Now the top 10 finishers on the Euro money list are given PGA Tour cards, each and every year.

One of those who took advantage was Robert MacIntyre, from the Scottish town of Oban. The lefthander won the Canadian Open last year, then cashed a 22-foot birdie to win the Scottish Open, a putt that launched a thousand toasts. Although MacIntyre had maintained a house in Orlando, the better to negotiate the PGA Tour, he had never really left Oban, and when Beall visited the hamlet he saw a poster of MacIntyre with the inscription, “Brilliant, Bob!” When the American players leave their homefolks behind to huddle in Florida, they no longer represent their first teacher, their first benefactor, anyone who was there for the launch.

“I’m not a golfer there,” MacIntyre said, speaking of Oban. “Eveyrwhere else, that’s what I am. In Oban I’m one of the boys. I’m Bob. What we do as golfers, we don’t get to share it very often. After the win we had a big celebration, and quickly I recognized I was only a small part of it. It was a win for home.”

Since then MacIntyre has finished second in the U.S. Open and will be a favorite of the thinking bettor when he gets to Royal Portrush. Before and after all that, visitors will be riding the backroads to play Crail, Nairn, Brora, North Berwick and all the rest. There are the familiar shrines, but there always seems to be a little-brother course nearby that’s just as good, like a diner where all the locals eat. You’ve perhaps heard of Machrihanish, but Beall takes you to Carradale, where Robert Strang is a one-man staff, and where you can play all day — and there are some long days – for 30 pounds. And when you go out of your way to find a place like that, the folks at the club appreciate it. No grunting 21-year-old at the check-in desk, allergic to eye contact.

Beall spent a summer amid the gorse and the fescue and dunes and the post-game pint. The goal was to replace thoughts of sportswashing with brain-cleansing. It’s a worthy book, and the only flimsy thing about it is the title. Centuries of golf, at ground level, will always be stronger than dirt.