Chapter 1 Scotland Golf began in the dark--in a hole actually. Some dissipated characters in medieval Scotland were out on the dunes one afternoon with their het kolvin sticks, slapping a ball around. One of them aimed at a rabbit burrow or a sand-filled crevice. When the ball toppled in, golf was born. Golf historians are equally in the dark. Looking for a link to the stick-and-ball games of continental Europe, they pore over Flemish woodcuttings and sketches by Rembrandt of men in wide-brimmed hats using a bladed stick to roll a ball the size of a melon across a courtyard. Researchers are similarly enchanted by the French game of jeu de mal, which employed a flexible wooden mallet and a wooden ball, and by the Belgian game of chole, in which teams of players hit wooden balls through a designated door or gate up to a mile away. (The Dutch word tuitje, for the small mound of earth upon which the ball was placed for the first stroke, is an obvious forerunner to the golfer''s "tee.

") Masters of the obvious have pointed out that a Low Countries variant of chole, called colf, was played in the shade of windmills as early as the thirteenth century. Here we have a case where the lexicographer trumps the historian. The Oxford English Dictionary defines golf as "a game of considerable antiquity . in which a small hard ball is struck with various clubs into a series of small cylindrical holes made at intervals usually of a hundred yards or more . with the fewest possible strokes." No one reading this definition can miss what separates golf from all the other games employing clubs or mallets and small hard balls. It''s that little dark place where the ball goes. Once we accept that golf is about holes in the ground, we can reflect on the fact that the holes are dispersed over a vast natural terrain.

For that we owe King David I of Scotland, a twelfth-century monarch whose idea of a good time was cathedral building. It was on David''s watch that the previously forgettable fishing village of St. Andrews, on the North Sea between the Eden estuary and the River Forth, became the ecclesiastical center of Scotland. As a sop to the local folk--a hodgepodge of Picts, Celts, and assorted Norsemen--David decreed that certain lands be set aside for the free use of ordinary people. These commons or greens included some worthless tracts of "linksland"--places where rivers meet the sea, producing a rugged dunescape of sand and wild grasses. Neither David nor the common folk foresaw a recreational use for these lands--or knew, for that matter, what "recreation" was. The linksland was simply a place where any Angus or Owen could set snares in the dunes, hoping to capture a rabbit for the dinner pot. Nevertheless, King David''s decree established a pattern of land use that allowed for the development of golf, first at St.

Andrews--where in 1552 Archbishop Hamilton affirmed the right of all to use the links for "golff, futball, schuteing [and] all other manner of pastime"--and later in the lowland shires along the Clyde and Forth estuaries. It would also give the Scots about 750 years to perfect the game before the rest of the world took notice. What the Scots came up with was a sport that requires minimal exertion and no physical risk but demands that the players police their own conduct to a degree unknown in most other games--or in life, for that matter--while enduring whatever discomforts nature dispenses in the form of wind, rain, heat, or cold. We need only glance at the first thirteen rules of golf, set down by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1774, to see how golf answers the Calvinist demand for sufferance in the face of sustained ill fortune. "If you should lose your ball by its being taken up or any other way," reads rule eight, "you are to go back to the spot where you struck last and drop another ball and allow your adversary a stroke for the misfortune." Rule eleven imagines an even more dire circumstance: "If you draw your club in order to strike and proceed so far with your stroke as to be bringing down your club, if then your club should break in any way, it is to be accounted a stroke." The game''s gloomy rules owe in part to Scotland''s national temper, which was formed through centuries of gory conflict with its neighbor to the south, England. James IV of Scotland, who died in 1513 at the battle of Flodden Field, was a casual golfer.

His granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots, celebrated the violent murder of her estranged husband, Lord Darnley, by playing golf at Seton with the Earl of Bothwell, the man suspected of arranging Darnley''s death-- and then, some years later, Mary herself lost her head at the order of her coousin Queen Elizabeth I of England. Thankfully, by the seventeenth century the crowns of England and Scotland were unified under the Stuarts, and gggggolf temporarily replaced war and the executioner''s axe as the arbiters of aristocratic disputes. The Duke of York settled a quarrel with two English noblemen in the 1680s by challenging them to a money match on the links at Leith, and like many a hustler after him, the duke showed up with a suspiciously talented partner: a shoemaker with a good swing and a sure putting stroke. The shoemaker, John Patterson, earned enough from the match to build a home in Edinburgh that stood for almost three hundred years. As durable as Patterson''s house is the concept that allowed a duke to partner with a shoemaker in the first place. The Scots developed the idea that golfers constitute a society separate from their stations in ordinary life. A king, although sovereign in the realm, could play golf with and respect a tradesman. The tradesman, in turn, could gather with gentlemen of like interest to form a golfing society or club.

The first of these societies, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, organized itself at Leith Links around 1744, and a similar group formed at St. Andrews a decade later. Neither club owned a golf course--the common land still belonged to all--but the clubs staged competitions and other group endeavors. The pattern was set in 1744 when the town council of Edinburgh offered a trophy in the form of a silver club; the winner of the annual competition at the Leith Links assumed the title of "Captain of Golf." St. Andrews adopted the Honourable Company''s rules and took the club competition a step further by awarding each year''s winner a silver golf ball, which was then attached to the silver club. With time, the silver balls hung in grapelike clus-ters, leading to a curious ceremony called "kissing the captain''s balls." The golfers who were the first to gain royal sanction came, however, from neither Edinburgh nor St.

Andrews; for reasons known only to King William IV, that honor went, in 1833, to the upstart Perth Golfing Society, established only since 1824. The Golf Club of St. Andrews promptly petitioned the king, pointing out that the Perth golfers were relative pups. William, it is assumed, rolled his eyes and sighed, but a year later he granted his St. Andrews subjects the right to call themselves the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews. Almost two centuries later, the men''s-only R&A stages the Open Championship and serves as the rules-making body for all golfers outside North America. Although it is accurate to call golf a Scottish invention, very few Scots actually played it.

Working people had no time for games, and golf balls were prohibitively expensive. Perhaps thirty golfers were playing regularly at St. Andrews at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and even smaller societies clung to life in Edinburgh, Perth, and Ayr, and in England at Blackheath. To grow, the game required a fundamental shift in economics. It needed a leisure class. The Industrial Revolution provided that class. Up to the 1800s, goods in Europe were manufactured at the cottage level, with entire families contributing to the production of flatware, china, and woolens. The mechanization and specialization of the nineteenth century changed that system, and tradesmen found themselves able to delegate some of their work.

As the textile bosses, crystal makers, and bankers took time off for recreation and networking, the ranks of golfers swelled. They, in turn, supported a growing number of golf professionals--club makers, ball makers, and greenskeepers who lived solely off the game. The most notable of these professionals was Allan Robertson of St. Andrews. Robertson, the son of a caddie, made "feathery" balls in his kitchen with the aid of a young apprentice named Tom Morris. Robertson was also the best golfer of his time. He was the first player to break 80 at St. Andrews, and he and Morris beat all comers in a series of high-stakes foursome matches.

"His style was neat and effective," the memoirist James Balfour wrote of Robertson. "His clubs were light and his stroke an easy, swift switch." The friendship between Robertson and Morris dissolved, however, when the older man caught his former apprentice playing with one of the new gutta-percha golf balls, introduced in 1848. (The rubbery "gutty" was more durable and much cheaper than the feathery, and Robertson feared that it would destroy his business.) Robertson died of jaundice in 1859, at age forty-four, having reluctantly switched to the gutty himself. Morris, meanwhile, moved to Prestwick, south of Glasgow, where he designed a new twelve-hole course and served as professional and greens-keeper. It was at Prestwick that the foundation of modern tournament golf was laid. On October 17, 1860, Morris and seven other professionals played three rounds, or thirty-six holes, for a "challenge belt" of red morocco leather and silver.

The winner was the whiskered Willie Park Sr. of Musselburgh, who edged Morris by two strokes. A year later, the Prestwick Golf Club responded to the complaints of excluded a.