Learning To (Almost) Love The Links

“Have you seen the course?” said Mousey. “It’s a pile of c***.” It was 1989, the Open had just got underway at Royal Troon, and, in the clubhouse of my Nottinghamshire golf club, outraged heads were turning in my friend’s direction. I’d watched the Open before, the previous year, at Royal Lytham, but I was particularly looking forward to this one: my first Open as a “proper” golfer, to be observed, at length, with my new golf mates, in the middle of a long hot summer holiday that, with hindsight, seemed to last more like six months than six weeks. I’d heard great things about Royal Troon - particularly about its cheeky little 8th hole, the one named Postage Stamp ,where that odd, cheery-looking midget who kicked off the Masters had had a hole in one. I was also aware that, amongst my friends at Cripsley Edge Golf Club in Nottingham, Mousey hardly had a reputation as a bastion of golfing knowledge - once, after dislodging some dust from the tee mat on Cripsley’s par three third he had encouraged us to “look at the steam!” and, upon being quizzed upon the exact nature of links golf by the previous year’s club captain, he had answered with a hesitating, “Woodland... or fir?”. That said, his prognosis about Troon was cause for concern.

Making my way into the Men’s Bar, I made a quick analysis of the picture on the TV. What I saw was far from inspiring. Yellowed and parched, the terrain did not put me in mind of any course I had played before. I was more than a little confused. Surely the organisers of the greatest golf championship in the world would have wanted to choose a better course than this for their event? One with a few trees, for example, or one that didn’t so closely resemble the sun-dried wasteground beyond my school’s science block.

Looking back, I can see how the older, wiser members in the clubhouse might have tutted disapprovingly at the hotheaded innocents blocking the view of their screen. Like anchovies, the radio presenting style of Terry Wogan and the music of Leonard Cohen, links golf is an acquired taste that can only be truly appreciated with a certain amount of life experience. I thoroughly enjoyed the 1989 Open in the end, Mousey, several of our friends and I staying in the clubhouse bar late in the evening after a Nottinghamshire County Boys event, impotently willing Greg Norman not to mess-up in one of the most gripping play-offs in major championship history. Since then I have played many great seaside courses and come to appreciate that their intrinsic beauty is something that reveals itself slowly, in the form of subtle undulations, rather than in the form of breathtakingly verdant vistas. But the fact remains: I do not particularly care for links golf.

I realise that to make such a statement, as a low handicap golfer brought up in the British Isles, is considered blasphemy. To make it as someone who writes about golf for a living, it’s probably worse - the equivalent of a film critic saying that the movies of Ingmar Bergman are “boring”. But I have still yet to play a good round on a links golf course. Instead, I tend to cower beneath the shelter of pines, birch and oaks on fairways whose herbaceous borders are thick enough to dictate that the only people who can laugh at my shanks and duffs are my playing partners. Talk all you will about manufacturing punch shots and using “imagination”, but I like to see golf as a form of showing-off, and this means that I can muster little enthusiasm for attempting to replicate the swing of Christy O'Connor Jr. If I'm going to hit an eight iron, I want to hit it way up into the air, 165 yards, all carry. Then, when I shout “bite” at it, I want it to make its way back towards me like a well-trained border collie. What I do not want to do is scab it along the ground 134 yards, then watch it negotiate a bunch of random hillocks, before finishing somewhere vaguely near the pin, leaving me to be congratulated by my playing partners on “playing the percentage” - sort of in the way Bruce Forsythe might congratulate someone for winning a consolation toaster on The Generation Game.

Nonetheless, every now and then, I am forced to submit to peer pressure. “I fancy some proper old-fashioned bump and run golf,” a friend will say one day in the pub or clubhouse. “Yeah! Let’s get out in the wind and give ourselves a proper test,” another will add. I am thoroughly bewildered at what gives people these masochistic urges, when surely the psychological challenges of a typical average round of heathland or parkland golf provide all the “test” a sane person could ever need. Nonetheless, I will be forced to compromise. If I have my way, this will normally involve a visit to Aldeburgh or Thorpeness on the Suffolk coast.

I love Aldeburgh and Thorpeness because they demand the intricacies of links course management that even an ardent target golf enthusiast like me can appreciate, but without the usual accompanying sense of barren despair. Aldeburgh is the best-known and more regal of the two. It’s perhaps a measure of how much I love it that the last time I played it I lost thirteen balls, and received a bite the size of one of them on my arm, from an unidentified flying beast, and it was still the most enjoyable round I had all year.

When golfers in my native East Anglia talk about Aldeburgh, they tend to talk about it in the manner you would talk about a masked stranger who'd swept into town, killed all the baddies and wooed all the women, then swept out just as quickly. It always seems deserted when I go there - usually in early autumn - and doesn’t allow players to go out in anything more crowded than a twoball. Add to this the pleased-with-itself-looking clubhouse and the fact that the accompanying town is London-on-sea personified, and one can be forgiven for approaching it with trepidation, expecting to be told off for any number of minor rules infractions walking the wrong way, perhaps, or sporting an incorrectly-proportioned nose. In truth, it’s very welcoming, with one of the most relaxed clubhouse lounges on the east coast and a pro shop that always seems to be staffed by a friendly middle-aged lady or some labrador-like, spiky-haired teenagers with an aura of boy band about them. “This is millionaire's golf without the expenses,” said the sixty-something member who let me through on the back nine the last time I played. “And without the snootiness,” he might have added, since the incidents of green fees being let through by retired members are usually about as frequent as Brad Faxon three-putts.
The course itself is all gorse, niggling cross bunkers, perfectly-maintained tees and cryptic borrows. And when I say gorse, I mean gorse. Smack a shot into one of the eight or nine hundred mutant thorn blobs that flank the fairways here, and searching is not an option. For one thing, it would probably mean a trip to casualty, or at the very least, an uncomfortable evening with a pair of tweezers. For another, there's no actual way inside these things - or at least not without the help of a King-Size lopper from Homebase. Even if you did manage it, you’d probably only get bitten by an insect of similarly freakish proportions.

If golf didn't exist and you happened across the gorsey, crisp, sandy, hillocky land that lies a mile or so to the west of this seaside town - famous for its high quality fish and chips, arthouse cinema and classic music festival - you'd almost certainly have to invent it. I feel the much the same way about Thorpeness, which lies two or three miles to the north. If anything, though, it’s even better, owing to the greater diversity of its holes. My particular favourite is the par four fifteenth, which cuts back on itself almost at right angles, meaning that a full, straight drive must be aimed into what looks like a forest and what is actually an ocean of an only-slightly-smaller relation to that Aldeburgh gorse. This might be ok if you’re feeling on top of your game and you’ve totted up your yardages, but when you’ve already been stung by Aldeburgh earlier that day and you’re tired and down to a Dunlop 65 from 1973 that you didn’t even know you owned, it’s gruelling. Still, it’s a good kind of gruelling, I think - even if, at times like this, I find it easy to believe that giant golf ball in the near-distance at the Sizewell B power station can only be mocking my plight.

It has a smell to it, Thorpeness: sort of brackish, sort of hot, a bit like a burning version of a herb that hasn’t yet been invented. I don’t know where it comes from (my hopes don’t lean towards Sizewell) but it’s powerful enough that, every time I go there, I’m immediately transported back to my first ever game at the course, back in 1989, not long after that Troon Open. My parents had gone off to do some rambling (i.e. golf without the interesting bits) or something similarly tedious and holidaymaker-like, and left me in the company of the cheerful man who owned the guesthouse where we were staying. After some liqourice disagreed with him, necessitating a quick dash into some heather, he made his way back home, clutching his stomach, leaving me to play the last five or six holes alone. I’d played a couple of links courses the previous month, and I’d thought they were ok, but to argue the case for them over this would be like arguing the case for baldness over a full, beautifully-styled head of hair. Here was that sandy links turf, but here also was heather, an adjacent mere, a spectacular House In The Clouds to provide a line for the drive up the majestic eighteenth. I was smitten.You could even see the sea at one point, out by the eleventh tee. I’m sure I’m supposed to find some extra magic attraction in the more traditional links golf that’s played a thousand yards or so closer to the edge of the land, but, almost twenty years on, I’m still wondering what it is.