My moment of immortality

Jim Crumley, The Courier, 15 February 2000

The Old Course at St Andrews gave me my solitary claim to golfing immortality. I have played it but once, the best part of 20 years ago, and broke 90 - just - and avoided the Road Hole bunkers. We parted company in good fettle.

I had treated her well, replaced all my divots, repaired my pitch marks, thrown no clubs, indulged in all the appropriate adoration of her unique lineage and status, and in return she gave me my moment of immortality.

It happened on the first tee. My partner had driven well enough and as the relief coursed through him into an appreciative grin I muttered a brief “good shot” and reached down to plant my tee. As I did so the daftest notion entered my head. I remembered Sherpa Tenzing.

Many years after he climbed Everest, he spoke revealingly of the anguish he felt as he climbed what for him and all Sherpas is a sacred mountain. He had asked forgiveness of the mountain for every wound his ice axes and crampons cut into her side. My tee peg was an ice axe, the Old Course a golfing Everest. I pushed the tee into the most famous grass in Scotland and said sorry.

As I straightened to address the ball, a minibus full of American tourists disgorged at my back, and a giant in a Stetson and powder blue suit began filming me with a cine camera.

I tried to envisage the diagrams from the appropriate pages of “Golf My Way” by Jack Nicklaus, my only sporting hero who did not play football in a dark blue shirt. I swung, the camera whirred softly and the voice behind the camera boomed:

“Shot, sir! I thank you.”

He has, I trust, from that day to this, bored half of California rigid with his film of my die-straight 250-yard drive. He has nothing of the sclaffed second into the burn, the too-strong wedge through the green, the chip back and the two putts for a seven. But he has the drive, my perfect entrance to golfs sublime theatre.

Non-golfing readers have probably skipped to the crossword by now, but it is not a round of golf you undertake on the Old Course. Rather it is an introduction to the concept of nature sculpted by history to emerge as high art. No cathedral builder ever did it better.

There is also the attendant role of destiny in all this. Destiny knew what it was doing when, out of all the hundreds of miles of East Coast links where the relationship between mankind and golf might be consummated, it hovered over St Andrews and pronounced the fateful “Here!” I sense the guidance of a star in the east.

Golf and location and the particular profile of the town and the chemistry that interacts among them have created something peerless here. Somewhere along the years, the thing has drifted beyond the confines of sport to become culture. It is not Pringle sweaters and Adidas shoes you wear here when you stand on the first tee, it is a cloak woven by an older order. It may swither about a corner of the Fife coast but the sense of its weave is here and there in every continent on earth. All this should be guarded fiercely and tended lovingly.

Injuries inflicted on any part of the chemistry cannot achieve anything other than its dilution, a weakening and an impairment of the mix. And you would think, would you not, if you were a thinking kind of creature, that however you contemplate the future of St Andrews you would make the safeguarding of such pricelessness something of a priority.

So why, you might wonder, is that clifftop headland up there, (that clifftop which in its own way is a critical part of the chemistry as a crucial component in the town’s landscape setting) having its characteristic elements carted off by the truckload so that someone with no interest in St Andrews’ wellbeing can make a lot of money by building a third-rate golf course?

Now I know the developers and the Kingask golf course architects will protest at having their creation called third class, but if this course down here on the water, the same Old Course which granted my immortality, is the only first-rate golf course in the world (and it is - ask Jack, Seve, Nick, Colin), and if Augusta, Carnoustie, Troon, Wentworth in early autumn and a couple of others might occupy the next rank, Kingask will be lucky to get anywhere near third rate, and the fact that it is within besmirching distance of the Old Course will not count in its favour, however it decides to style its postal address.

The mystery of it all is what troubles me. There is first the less than exemplary way in which the planning process reached its conclusions. There is now the less than exemplary way in which the construction process is going about its business so that the local MP is heaping embarrassing questions on the desk of the chief executive of Fife Council. And more mysterious than all that, there is the baffling contempt demonstrated by the council for both a strong section of public opinion and for the jewel in its crown that is the relationship between golf and St Andrews and the world.

The fact that St Andrews is a desirable place to live and work is precisely the reason why planning principles should resist those developer-overtures whose works will make it all less desirable. There is no doubt in my mind that a golf course, a hotel, and all the other associated unneccessaries on the Kingask headland will achieve precisely that.

So what is to be done?

The six local residents who are challenging the planning consent in the Court of Session (five of them women - what does that tell you?) are fighting a last rear-guard action which they should never have had to fight. If you are a member of Fife Council and you have no grasp of the sensitivity which is at work on the fringes of St Andrews of all places (the shoreline fringes as well as the chifftop ones), then perhaps you are in the wrong job.

Perhaps you should be asking yourself now, now as the trucks trundle the capillary backroads of Kingask, whether the chemistry of what already exists is not worth rather more to St Andrews and Fife and the world than one more third-rate-if-it’s-lucky golf course.

If I was one of the six in the Court of Session I would ask the judge to join them on the first tee at the Old Course. Just say the word, ladies, and I’ll step forward with the cine camera and the Stetson. Immortality is a mighty persuasive argument.