TRAVEL: A trip through Scotland's Best - Turnberry Ailsa, Pg. 8 |
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Him by the hand dear Nature took . . .
Leaving Prestwick, now in Roy’s van with shirt and tie still on, I thought I had learned something about the game of golf that I never knew before. For me, it was a revelation about the game’s roots, about how different golf used to be and how golfers played the game strictly for fun. I can’t stress that word enough: Prestwick is just so damn FUN. But we were moving, back down the coast to Turnberry. As much as I wanted to stay in Prestwick and talk history with Ken Goodwin, to go ogle a replica Champions Belt like the one that Young Tom Morris was allowed to keep after winning the Open three times in a row, eat fish-and-chips and then head back out there again – we had to go. Our time on Turnberry was quickly arriving, and my excitement was only growing.
Of all the things that made me want to head to Turnberry, No. 1 was the 2009 Open Championship. I don’t think that shows my youth, but rather my propensity for the history of the game. It was then when Tom Watson was so close to writing the most improbable major championship story since Francis Ouimet in the 1913 U.S. Open. Watson was 59 years old and he had a one-shot lead standing on the 72nd tee. If he made par, he was going to tie Harry Vardon with six career Open Championships. He was already miles above any American-born links player in history, and this would have been a way to show that youthfulness and brute strength don’t always equal the lowest scores; sometimes cunning and experience do win out. But Watson hit an 8-iron from the middle of the fairway just a little too good, and it flew over the green. From the fringe he then ran a putt past (later admitting he should have chipped) and missed an eight-foot comebacker for par, his bogey five forcing a playoff with the younger, more rested, and, at this point, more emotionally balanced Stewart Cink. Now the Stewart Cink Suite is just down the hall a bit from Watson’s, but Watson can always walk downstairs in the barroom named “Duel in the Sun,” after his epic battle out there with Jack Nicklaus in the 1977 Open. With pictures of a shaggy haired Watson adorning the walls, the place commemorates this St. Louis-born adopted son of Scotland and his second Open victory. When Nicklaus hit a shot from under a gorse bush to the front of the 18th green, Watson knew he had his hands full. One shot up, Watson stuffed a 7-iron to two feet. So when Nicklaus made the 40-footer that tied the two great champions, the crowd erupted and Watson’s putt got a lot longer. But he calmly drained it, and with overflowing praise, there is now a room with a large, red-felted snooker table that overlooks the course in reverence.
I doubt Cink will ever get something like that, but nonetheless I wanted to see the exact spots when an almost-60-year-old came that close to beating a man in his prime. So after a quick coffee and some pastries in a bastardized version of British afternoon tea (in that room in the back of the hotel lobby, overlooking the course and sea, remember?) we headed down the grand steps and to the golf course clubhouse to check in. At that point it was almost 2:30 in the afternoon, and we had experienced a week of shockingly terrific weather. Every day was mid-50s to low-60s, with the sun blaring and hardly a dark cloud in the sky. Walking over to the putting green, the skies started to look a little hazy, and although the sun was out, we should’ve know it’s impossible to play five rounds of golf in Scotland and not see some weather. It was only a matter of time. The first three holes at the Turnberry Ailsa Course are rather forgettable. A lot of people liken Turnberry to Pebble Beach, because the setting is so spectacular that it creates some truly magnificent golf holes, while the inland holes leave you a little flat. I think that’s a fair comparison, but here you are never out of sight of the Ailsa Craig, and very rarely out of sight of the famed Lighthouse that is a beacon at the tip of the coast.
The first three holes are all medium-length par-4s, running back and forth, eventually leading you to the fourth tee, from where you are now next to the Irish Sea. A 168-yard par-3 up a hill, the fourth is a nice hole, not too tough, in a great setting. It begins what I think is possibly the best eight-hole stretch in golf. Most critics like to say Turnberry’s best stretch starts at No. 6 and lasts for only six holes, but I enjoy No. 4 and the following 479-yard par-4 fifth enough to make it an eight-hole stretch. The fifth tees off down into a ravine and then plays up to a green that is still below the crest of the hill that separates the course and the water. It’s a protected little place, but makes for a nice green location. The sixth is a bear of a par-3, playing 231 yards from the back tees, all up hill, and is surrounded by bunkers. This is where the Cink-Watson four-hole playoff started, and Watson hit hybrid into the front-right bunker while Cink hit a long iron into the middle of the green. It was the beginning of the end for Watson.
From that green, you walk up a small slope to the seventh tee box, which now is on the edge of the cliff, overlooking the small beach and the sea. It is the first of many splendid views, and the hole itself is a dandy, playing either as a 538-yard par-5 or a 469-yard par-4. The tee shot is downhill to a fairway that has a big mound in it, directly at the place where it turns left to go up the hill to the green. It’s a tough tee shot with bunkers on either side of the fairway, and even a tougher approach, with two small, penal bunkers to the right.
The eighth hole is of similar design, a 454-yard par-4 that tees off on the edge of the cliff, goes downhill to the fairway and then back uphill to the green. This green is near the point of the property, though, so from there you begin to glimpse the sea not just to your left, but also over the green and little to your right as the course turns direction with the coastline. Walking off the back of the green, you head to the ninth tee, which is without question one of the great places in all of golf. The back tee sits on a small little perch in the cliffs, like this man-made piece of flat grass that juts up out of the jagged rocks. From there you have to hit a drive over the rocks and water to reach the fairway on the 452-yard par-4. Appropriately, it was here, the place where man meets nature in such a frenzied confluence, that the weather descended. A couple holes back it began to get dark, and as we kept trudging to this point, where we are farthest from the clubhouse and most exposed, the sky dropped a couple rain pellets here and there. But standing on this tee box, we met the defender of Scottish golf, the wind, with much anger. Whipping itself into hearty gusts, the wind was directly into our face and was blowing golf bags over. One of the men we were playing with, Chris, who is a member at the semi-private Turnberry, had his bag begin to roll away on its pushcart. It was a scene, and I teed my ball low and took an easy swing, just as Jack had always said was the way to play this shot.
It was a good strike, but a little left and started heading for the Lighthouse, which at this point is no more than 300 yards away, out on the cliffs to the left of the fairway. With the fairway itself being a slight hogs back, and falling off at the sides into the rough, I was just hoping I wouldn’t get a bad kick and have my ball bounce into the stoned off area that is out-of-bounds and used to be the garden for the Lighthouse. It turned out to be okay, and I whacked it somewhere up there to make a bogey. The tee on the tenth hole is similar to the previous one, as it too is a small piece of turf standing alone amongst the rocks. It is just on the far side of the Lighthouse, and the drive must carry over rocks and water again in order to reach the fairway of this 457-yard par-4. It was here in 2009 when Tiger Woods blocked one a mile right in the first round – his ball ending up on a rough hill where a monument to the two World Wars stands – and he ended up missing the cut. The second shot is over a round bunker with a grass island in the middle of it, well short of the green.
The eleventh hole is the one that wraps up this splendid stretch, a 175-yard par-3 that plays with the water all along your left side. It doesn’t really come into play, and you hit your mid-iron up a slight hill to a green with a deep, tough bunker short and another one along the right side. From there, heading in, the course goes back to being good rather than great. No. 12 is a straightaway par-4, named after the aforementioned monument that is well out of play, up a small hill to the right. It’s an appropriate place for the monument, as to the left of the fairway is a somewhat intact airplane runway, which is left over from when the golf course was used as an air base during both of the World Wars. The runway goes from this point to the clubhouse, and is in sight but never in play. Nos. 13 and 14 are both good par-4s, with 14 really exemplifying the great green complexes. Heading up a slight hill, 449 yards, the approach to 14 has to be exact, or it will roll over the green and into a collection area before the 15th tee. As we waited for the 15th green to clear, we watched a couple different approaches land 20-30 yards short of the green – and still run through the back. The ground was that firm, and the greens are that turtle-backed and undulating in places, that the rather benign hole designs more than hold up. This particular green is like many others at Turnberry, where your iron game has to be utterly precise and your judgment has to be sound in order to leave yourself with a legitimate birdie opportunity. Otherwise, you will be faced with a difficult up-and-down – just ask Tom Watson.
No. 15 is a long par-3 over some broken ground, and then No. 16 brings you to a place on the golf course that seems foreign. Redesigned before the 2009 Open, this green complex was moved farther from the tee and to the right, going from a straight 410-yard hole to a 455-yard dogleg right. The new green site also brings into play the “little burn” that runs through the property, here fronting the green and running up along its right side. The banks down to the “wee burn,” as the hole is named, are shaved tight. The green is almost reminiscent of No. 13 at Augusta National, but the shot in is not quite as demanding, nor are the slopes in the green as rewarding if you hit a good one. If you closed your eyes and opened them to see this green, it could be anywhere in the world – and although it’s a great complex that I enjoyed immensely, that’s not necessarily a compliment. No. 17 is then a long par-5 with a dip in the fairway from about 130 to 80 yards from the green, on the right of which are two pot bunkers in a semi-Spectacles fashion. Then the closing hole has a championship tee box that makes it a dogleg left, but for the rest of us humans, it plays from an elevated tee down to a fairway with three bunkers on the left and gorse bushes all down the right. From one of those bunkers is where Lee Westwood hit a spectacular 8-iron on the green in the 2009 Open, but because he thought he needed birdie, he ran his first putt way past the hole then couldn’t get the comebacker, missing the Cink-Watson playoff by one shot. After hitting my drive over near the gorse bushes – from where Nicklaus hit it to the front of the green (how, I have no idea) – I laid up and put a wedge to 15 feet, just left of the front-right hole. It was a straight-in putt. “To win the Open,” said my caddie and one of the assistant pros, Ross Leeds. I left it short and tapped in for five. “Unlucky,” Ross said, as he did most of the day in customary Scottish fashion. Turns out, he couldn’t have been further from the truth.
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