Two
hundred yards or so behind the 18th green of the Old Course, on a broad street
called the Scores, sits a sturdy stone townhouse with a brass plaque at its
entrance. Inscribed on the plaque are the words “The Old Course Experience.”
“Could
this possibly be what it suggests?” I wondered on the day I first strolled past
it. Behind this unassuming gray facade, could there possibly be a Disney-caliber
exhibit, equipped with surround sound and virtual reality, the purpose of which
is to show exactly what it feels like to be 200 acres of windblown,
divot-riddled dirt?
Brimming
with ignorance, I pressed the doorbell. Surely, I thought, that buzzer would
trip off something special—perhaps a choir of falsetto-voiced, computer-animated
greenkeepers chortling a chorus of “It’s a Sod, Sod World.”
What
a letdown. The establishment turned out to be nothing more than a golf tour
operator that guarantees its customers an Old Course tee time on the day they
select. No strobe lights, no streaming video, no pixilated pyrotechnics, just a
little eight-page brochure.
Ah,
but one of those pages caught my eye, the one that trumpeted “The St. Andrews
Father-Son Tournament.” As it happened, my younger son and favorite golf
partner, Scott, was about to head over, and the dates of his visit coincided
exactly with the week of the tournament.
The
timing was perfect, and so was the venue. It was here in St. Andrews, after all,
that father-son golf made its big-time debut, with Old and Young Tom Morris
combining for a total of eight Open Championship wins. Following them were the
Parks (Willie Sr. and Jr., good for six Opens ’twixt them) not to mention the
Dunns, McEwans and Forgans, who knew not only how to wield clubs, but how to
craft them as well. A century later, St. Andrews is still brimming with dads and
lads who play together regularly (not to mention a few father-son-grandson
three-balls).
Indeed,
sometimes the whole town seems to be divided into two distinct generations. When
the university is in session, nearly half the residents are under 25 while the
other half—the year-round population—appears to be alarmingly over 60.
Hereabouts, you’re either long in the tooth or in the bloom of
youth.
And
so it’s totally appropriate that once each spring several dozen additional
fathers and sons descend on St. Andrews for the mother of all tournaments. Nine
different countries were represented in the field that Scott
and I joined, and we spent our four days playing side by side with duos from
Germany, England, Scotland and the U.S. The winners were a pair from
Taiwan.
In
some cases the fathers had brought college-age sons as I had, and there were
even a few high-schoolers in the field, but most of the teams were comprised of
young-adult sons and their senior-citizen dads, on a last fling together à la
James Dodson’s
“Final
Rounds” (which, incidentally, is about to be made into a movie, to be filmed
here next spring, with James Garner scheduled to play the father).
