Prestwick, Scotland, and Being Dead Otherwise

“Death is death,” matter of factly says my friend, the anthropologist Anne Allison, when I share worries about aging, cancer, and the end of life’s crazy journey.

Her new book Being Dead Otherwise guides us through a Japan of corpse clean-up businesses, Buddhist prayer robots, and automated mausoleums. An aging, atomized country is inventing new modes of funerary care for what Allison call “the lonely dead” who may not have loved ones to see to their afterlife.

I was feeling morbid on a trip to Scotland a couple of weeks ago. Besides just getting older, as we living beings do, I’ve lost some strength after my cancer surgery, radiation, and testosterone-lowering injections. It has felt good lately to be doing undercover fieldwork in an Amazon warehouse for a new project on the e-commerce giant. Wrangling boxes onto trucks I’ve at least put back a little muscle, not to mention getting to feel like a working stiff except for all the trips to the bathroom to change my diaper.

You’ll find some golfers among Amazon’s hundreds of thousands of workers, or “Associates” as the company euphemizes us. My friend Barb, the champion pallet builder of Lane C, has a regular game with friends. She makes Black on Black gal pal trips where her group plays Black-owned golf courses around the country.

I had gone to Scotland for a conference about labor rights – and to get in some Scottish links golf. 

Traveling alone I’m sometimes prone to melancholy. The Glasgow gloom didn’t cheer my mood as I headed off to play the Western Gailes Club, only mildly guilty for shirking my conference duties.

My grumpiness didn’t last long. Being able to train everywhere is one of Europe’s delights, unlike our insane American car culture. A subway and then a commuter rail took me down to the Western Gailes Club along the Firth of Clyde with Ireland just a two hour a ferry away.

I loved everything about the round. The staff was welcoming as so often at Scottish courses. Their lovely, sometimes incomprehensible accents rank among the pleasures of playing golf in the sport’s home.

Freddy, the starter, was apologetic about having me play by myself. He compensated with a viewing of his starter shack collection of bag medallions from courses worldwide before fist bumping me away off the first tee.

I hit weakly at first, and about to give in once more to my self-pitying inner narrative about lost distance, lost manhood, and life’s decline. But the play of sun and cloud together with the sea breeze made it impossible not to take pleasure in the moment.

                                                                                                          Western Gailes 2023

Like the best links courses, Western Gailes lies easy along the sea. Remember those parachutes games from summer camp? How gently the sheer fabric would settle on the ground when the circle of kids lowered it? It’s as if the Western Gailes design floated down from the sky just like that.

You rarely feel that way about golf courses in the U.S.. Despite the Coore-Crenshaw naturalistic trendiness, the earth-mover still reigns supreme. My favorite old American course, Pine Needles, a classic Donald Ross, is the rare one with that same effortless way of being on the land.

I was reminded of the links influence on Mike Strantz, the maestro architect of Tobacco Road not far from my own hometown of Durham, North Carolina. “Every hole should be signature hole,” Strantz supposedly said. Among many memorable ones at Tobacco Road, his par-5 12th has fascinated, mystified and frustrated many a golfer.  The green sits in what’s effectively a hole between high, shaggy mounds, making for an uncomfortable blind shot.

Playing the par-5 6th at Western Gailes also means hitting blind to a green in a hole.  Strantz was a brilliantly creative artist of an architect, taken from us, at 50, far too young from mouth cancer. Yet he also borrowed heavily from the old seaside Irish and Scottish courses, in the case of Tobacco Road for a course constructed in an abandoned quarry in the middle of North Carolina.

 

                                                               The sixth hole at Western Gailes and the 12th at Tobacco Road

Is any sport more mind game than golf? The game is 99% mental – and the other 1% is mental too, somebody once said.

I was so happy at Western Gailes that I started to hit the ball with more authority, all the morbid melancholy swept away by the bright sea breeze. Over a Guiness in the clubhouse, I struck up a conversation with a fellow American, Randy “Tank” Tantlinger, and his friend Jeff, a retired firefighter. A former boxer, Tank looks the part with a delightful outsized personality to match.  He hosts a Pittsburgh Steelers radio talk show, and is a golf impresario with an entertaining youtube series called "Golfin' Around" and the CEO of a company called Victory Sports and Entertainment.

The Scots adored Tank, a one man traveling revue with a joke and big tip for everyone.  We had dinner and few drinks together at the nearby Dundonald Links, a lovely newer track with its own golf cabins. The kind Paul, a staffer there, drove me back to the train station afterwards – at no charge, in characteristic Scottish hospitality. 

Before heading home, I made a trip down to Prestwick, the birthplace of the Open Championship with a 19th century Old Tom Morris pedigree. It’s snow globe of a classic Scottish course, sealed in by the Prestwick airport, train tracks, a dune walking trail and its parking lot and club house. 

You see why Prestwick is no longer in the Open rotation despite its pedigree. There's no room for the crowds or the necessary lengthening for big-hitting 21st century pros. 

I was little put-off by the Downtown Abbey snobbism of the club. When I planted my tee on the first tee, the starter interrupted me. 

“I’m sorry, Sir,” he said, “But those are the Members Tees.” 

If Prestwick wants to charge visitors $300 a round (plus the unspeakably overpriced Peter Millar souvenir gear in the pro shop), it might consider losing the Upstairs Downstairss pretensions. 

The first hole is crazy interesting, short and bordered by stone wall like a miniature road hole.

Flustered at being relegated to the Regular tees, I yanked a terrible drive into the left gorse like a sorry novice. 

                                                                                           The first hole at Prestwick, 2023

It was still a treat to play Prestwick, and the staff generally friendly as elsewhere. Strangely for an old course, it has almost a miniature golf feel – short, blind shots, crazy undulations. I wouldn’t rave over it as some golf cognoscenti do, but it was lovely to be there no matter for the bad golf I played.

I’ve long thought golf has dimensions of a liminal space between life and death. Didn’t Bing Crosby die coming off the green at a course in Spain?  And aren't golf courses filled with us older people?  It's about time for me to transition from the stiff shafts of my stronger youth to the regular ones of a golfer weaker by the year.  Eventually, you can’t play at all anymore, just tune in to tournaments on tv. 

My grandmother liked nothing better than to watch Tiger Woods as she lay curled on her bed with dreadful osteoporosis.

I’m not quite there yet.  I’m heading next week to California – there to play one of my favorite courses anyway, the Weed Golf Course, that poor man’s Pebble Beach below Mt. Shasta. 

Fairways and greens.