I’ve been a fan of Tom Coyne’s golf writing since I came across his A Course Called Ireland at a used book sale and subsequently journeyed through his peripatetic sojourn at a quick pace. Recently, his work for the Golfer’s Journal has been rather rich, and I’d like to devote two posts to what I think he has done this past year between the covers of that admirable quarterly. In short, I think he’s done two things: 1. Tried to purify our language, 2. Attempted to reframe our vision of the game. I’m not saying Coyne would endorse either summation, it’s just what I think I see going on.
As for no. 1, purifying our language, Coyne takes issue with a too loose use of the word “links.” In the Golfer’s Journal No. 2, Coyne’s essay titled, “Sacred Sand,” invites the reader to reconsider how we use this word, one that is often employed as a commonplace, referring to almost any and all golf courses. By doing so that which makes a true links course just that is obscured, and distinctions are lost. The loss of distinctions renders us less able to speak fluently about the multiform species of courses a golfer might meet and inhabit through a lifetime.
Coyne’s essay is both serious and playful, certainly not stuffy schoolmarm-ish vocabulary knit-picking. For Coyne, this makes for a true links course:
- It’s set upon ocean-side duneland: “Take a healthy slab of dark turf for your divot and you are not playing a links, where your divot should explode in the breeze as proper sandy poof. Gorse, humps and treeless vistas are all secondary indicators; the defining characteristic of a links is as simple as sand.”
- The formation of the course, its “kinks and ripples,” “are the stuff of primordial providence.” Coyne here gets poetically Platonic: playing a links, golfers play “their way across a landscape not built, but discovered.”
- For Coyne himself, there are also the factors of place and time to consider: “for me, a genuine links lives in the British Isles and predates the use of diesel in course design.”
The distinction now preserved, the distinctiveness of a links course can be more acutely appreciated and felt. Now the richness of the links emerges all the more clearly. And there is much to remark upon here, from geology to history to the playing experience, to the pints and soup and “droll caddies braving monsoons in brown sweaters.” The “irascible weather,” the seaside breeze, and the providential conspiring between man and nature. I can’t capture Coyne’s romp through the particular glories of a links course, nor will I try. I suggest you check out the essay for yourself: You can buy the issue here, it’s well worth it.
I’ll follow up with part two later this week.
Image Credit: By Tim Murphy, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13165674
Fairway Philosophy 