Golfers, I have to admit, can be great bores. Just listen to the pros discuss their performance after a round in a major championship or ask a golfing friend about his game and you can be stuck listening to tales of triumph and tribulation with as much chance of escape as the Wedding Guest from the Ancient Mariner. So it was with some misgivings that I began to read John Greig’s reflections about taking up golf again after a gap of many years and a debilitating illness. Would it be all I, I, I — I hit this magnificent drive here, I then sank a monstrous putt 20 feet from the pin and so on? But Grieg has three qualities in his favour. Firstly, he can write and has six books of poetry, two mountaineering books and five novels to his credit. Secondly, he is a Scot and understands the somewhat dour, pessimistic mentality that helped them create the game, and thirdly he was brought up on the Fife coast next to several famous traditional links where as he says golf is as natural as breathing, swearing and eating fatty foods. He did not have to take up golf. It was always there.
With these advantages, and the added bonus of a father who played golf and taught him the etiquette of the game as well as how to play, he became a local hero, winning the boys’ championship at Anstruther. But at 16 he discovered the guitar and the joys of folk music and the songs of Bob Dylan. Golf slowly became less important in his life and he gradually stopped playing. Writing and climbing now took over until even these activities were brought to an abrupt conclusion by a life-threatening cyst in his brain. He was saved by the timely intervention of a surgeon in Sheffield (where he lives for part of the year). Then one day back in Orkney, where he also lives, still in recovery mode, he decided to take down his clubs from the attic and start playing again. Despite his illness and many years away from the golf course he found he still remembered how to swing a club.
This starts a journey back to golf which is in part a personal memoir and partly an exploration of the roots of Scottish golf which can still be found in some out-of-the-way courses in the far west and north of Scotland and also on the links land of Fife and East Lothian. He begins in North Ronaldsay, the outermost of the Orkney isles, famous for its seaweed- eating sheep, which possesses one golf course consisting of a rough patch of ground with no tees, no definable greens, just holes in the ground with flag sticks — the kind of terrain which gave birth to golf in Scotland back in the 15th and 16th centuries. He then travels south to the industrial lowlands to join an old Marxist golfing friend to play Bathgate, West Lothian, a course which has the unique distinction of producing two Ryder Cup captains of the British team, Eric Brown and Bernard Gallacher. Then on to North Berwick, which he rightly recognises as one of the great links in Scottish golf. And then his journey zigzags from coast to coast, taking him to the extraordinary course of Shiskine on the Isle of Arran, to Machrihanish, to Ely in Fife and up to that gem of a course at Dornoch and finally to Dollar, where he had been briefly and very unhappily at school.
However, this is not another book about famous Scottish links courses. In some ways he lacks the descriptive powers of Bernard Darwin to bring these courses alive. And he leaves out many courses which should have been included in a book of this nature — Brora, for example. But he does have an ear for the way people talk and express themselves on and off the course and he does have an inner eye, one which allows him to inspect and analyse the thought processes which possess him when he plays golf well — and badly.
His journey then is also a journey of self-discovery and a return to the people who had meant much to him as a child and young adult growing up in Scotland — his mother suffering from a fading memory, a brother who still retains a perfect swing, old mountaineering colleagues as well as memories of his dead father. He also makes new friends and among the oddest of his encounters the prize must go to the group of golfing Buddhists from all parts of the world whom he joins at a house run by the Findhorn Foundation in north-east Scotland. They are taking part in an annual ‘Fairway to Heaven’ course. As they sit in a circle in silence holding hands, torn between curiosity, resistance and the giggles, he wonders what he is doing there. I would have fled, but being the tough Scot he is Andrew Greig decides to stick it out and learns one or two useful insights into the game of golf and the spirit in which it should be played.
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