Mapping Golf’s DNA

The British Open returns to the hallowed fairways of Carnoustie this month for the first time since 1999, when the course was dubbed “Carnasty.” That was the year, you may recall, when superintendent John Philp and his overseers from the Royal & Ancient decided it would be fun to grow the rough knee-high and narrow the fairways down to almost single-file width. When the weather turned foul that week, as it almost always does on the Barry Sands along the Firth of Tay where it opens to the North Sea, the scores were higher than a caddie left alone in the single-malt tasting room and the pros spent most of their time whining about the course.

That was also the year when the dashing Frenchman Jean van de Velde played outstanding golf and came to the last tee on Sunday with a three-stroke lead on the field. All he needed on that final hole was a double-bogey 6 to win. He instead sank a gutsy 10-footer for a 7 after a wild drive, an approach shot off the grandstands that ricocheted into the deep rough, a hack into the Barry Burn in front of the green, and a contemplated barefoot attempt to knock it out of the water before he finally was able to hole out. (He then lost the playoff to Paul Lawrie.)

But van de Velde is just one name that always will be famously associated with the Carnoustie links. The original 10 holes were laid out early in the 19th century by Allan Robertson, the great keeper of the links at the Old Course, which lies perhaps 20 miles to the south. Robertson’s successor, Old Tom Morris (Young Tom’s father), expanded the links to 18 holes some years later, and, later still, James Braid added bunkering and made further adjustments.

What resulted is a course that most experts consider the most challenging in the Open rota. It’s deceptively difficult. The land is basically flat and featureless, but that means it is open to the usually spirited gusts that move in from the sea. The bunkers scattered everywhere are always in play: One must fly over them from the tee and avoid them around the greens, and almost all of them are built to collect and swallow anything but the most precisely directed shot.

And then there’s the burn. This apt Scottishism for “creek” well describes what can happen to a player who goes into it. Carnoustie is the only British Open course that has such a significant water hazard, and it shows up throughout the course. Never more so than on the last two holes, as the Barry Burn, now safely encased in its stony walls, snakes across both fairways and in front of both greens, demanding the golfer’s attention. Bernard Darwin, the great English golf writer of the early 20th century, made up a word to describe this burn: circumbendibus.

Another golfer always to be associated with Carnoustie is Ben Hogan, who came over to play in the Open Championship in 1953 for the only time in his career. The Wee Ice Mon, as the Scots fondly termed him, took the course apart, coolly and calmly. On the long par-5 sixth, a brutish hole with out-of-bounds tight down the left, a thicket of trouble to the right, and a huge swallowing bunker in the middle of the fairway just where one’s drive lands, Hogan decided the only way to play the hole was to aim at the sliver of fairway between the OB and that big bunker. In the last two rounds (played on Saturday in those more God-fearing days), he put his drive squarely in the middle of that 5-yard-wide piece of fairway, so that legend has it he had to hit out of his own divot the second time around.

Hogan won easily, and Glasgow Herald golf writer S.L. McKinlay remembered that all the golfers on 16 and 17 stopped to watch Hogan play the last hole, applauding when he reached home in two. That sixth hole is now named “Hogan’s Alley,” which makes it the third or fourth place on the planet with that name.

But there are other names associated with Carnoustie that are perhaps not quite so well-known to today’s golf fan, but probably should be. Indeed, American golfers should designate a midsummer day as “Carnoustie Day” to commemorate all the sons of that dark, wet town who did so much to bring the royal and ancient game to our shores.

Carnoustie is not the prettiest village in Scotland, by a long shot. Dull, gray, often damp and cold, bisected by a commuter railroad and huddled against the harsh winds, it does not speak of enterprise or opportunity. And it has always, apparently, been so, because beginning in the late 1890s and continuing for the next 20 or 30 years, an estimated 150 sons of Carnoustie emigrated to the U.S. to take up positions as golf professionals in the new clubs that were springing up like daisies across America’s fruited plains.

In those days, a golf professional not only gave lessons, but also was expected to help keep the greens (that is, work as superintendent), as well as make and sell golf clubs. And, of course, professionals played in matches and tournaments when they could. Because they hailed from the Home of Golf, Scotsmen were sought-after for these new positions, and Carnoustie contributed some of the best.

In the first wave of golfing immigrants from Carnoustie were the Smith brothers: Alexander, Willie, and MacDonald. Alexander, the eldest, came over first, in 1898, taking a job as assistant professional at the Washington Park club in Chicago. Willie and Mac followed soon after. For the next decade, the Smith brothers were contenders at the U.S. Open, which had begun in 1895. Willie won the title in 1899, and Alex in 1906 and 1910, in the latter tournament beating brother Mac and John McDermott in a playoff. Mac never won a major but did win 24 times in other professional events.

This tournament success and fame helped the Smith brothers gain new jobs as club pros and helped inspire other Carnoustie men to make the long voyage across the Atlantic. Willie Smith, probably the most accomplished player in the family, eventually moved down to Mexico City to take a club job, got caught up in the Revolution of 1916, and died of injuries suffered when Zapata burned the golf club to the ground.

In 1908, another young Scotsman from Carnoustie got word that his older brother, then the head pro at Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club, was leaving for a job at a club on Long Island. Jimmy Maiden had made arrangements, however, for his brother Stewart to take over the Atlanta job.

Stewart Maiden arrived to find the club had several young prodigies: Percy Adair, Alexa Stirling, and a consumptive young lad they called Little Bob Jones. He began to tutor these youngsters in the finer points of the game.

“Stewart was just like Jimmy, only Scotcher,” Jones would recall years later. “He said very little, and I couldn’t understand a single word of what he said.”

Although he was laconic to the extreme, Maiden believed in a few very simple principles and passed them on to his students. “Hit it hard, and it will land somewhere” was one of his instructional insights. It must have worked, because all three kids, and especially Jones, went on to great heights in the game.

When Jones was a teenager, he played in the Dixie Invitational in Alabama. There, another Scotsman was watching the tournament as Jones hit his approach to a green. “I di’ not know wee Kiltie Maiden was playin’,” he said, using Stewart Maiden’s nickname. “I’d ken tha’ Carnoustie swing anywhere.” A man standing next to the Scotsman spoke up. “That’s not Maiden,” the man said. “That’s my son, Bob Jones.”

The Carnoustie influence extended beyond teaching. When the Professional Golf Association of America was founded in 1916, there were some 82 golf professionals in the original charter. Almost half of them were Carnoustie men. Other sons of the town went to Canada, New Zealand, and Australia and were equally influential in spreading the gospel of golf. Indeed, the 10th hole on the town’s Championship course is named “South America” in a rather mournful remembrance of all the Carnoustie men who left.

When you think about it, with the Smith brothers, the Maiden brothers, and all the 100-plus other Carnoustie men who taught American golfers how to handle a club, it’s not a gross exaggeration to say that America’s golf DNA comes from that small gray “toon” on the Barry Sands.

A.G. Pollard Jr.’s golfing DNA, based on his results, quite clearly does not come from Scotland or any other remotely civilized nation.