Beyond the Fairway: Zen Lessons, Insights, and Inner Attitudes of Golf

Beyond The Fairway is a guide for getting to the heart of golf and self by measuring a not by the score, but by the overall experience.  Going against conventional approaches to golf, disproving that a straight fairway drive is golf's ultimate thrill, golfer and author Jeff Wallach steers his cart into the rough and even dangerous terrain where golf becomes an adventure into the unknown, into the greater mysteries of life, love, friendship, endurance, being a son, and being a man. Each chapter presents the unique physical and spiritual challenges of exotic and exclusive courses around the world from Scotland, Africa, and Thailand to Oregon, Alaska, and Nepal.  The book gives an insider's often humorous, sometimes irreverent perspective on the sacred sites and rites of golf, and pros from around the world provide practical tips and insights into the game.

CHAPTER ONE
Weil-Connected Golfing in Scotland
 
 
Before a person studies Zen, mountains are
mountains and waters are waters; after a first
glimpse into the truth of Zen, mountains are no
longer mountains and waters are not waters; after
enlightenment, mountains are once again
mountains, and waters once again waters.
—Zen saying
 
A new member of the golf club was anxious to
learn about the course and said: “I have only
recently become a member. Will you be gracious
enough to show me the way to the first tee?”
  The Head Pro said: “Do you hear the
murmuring of the stream?”
  The new member said: “Yes, I do.”
  The Head Pro said: “Here is the entrance.”
—Zen golf koan
 
PRESTWICK … ROYAL TROON … TURNBERRY … NORTH Berwick.
 
Carnoustie. Gullane. Royal Dornoch. Nairn.
 
The names of Scottish golf courses are like mantras to me now. They roll off my tongue with a cool liquidity, like clear water running over smooth stones. Sometimes I whisper these names aloud, and they transport me beyond the overstylized, ukramanicured, artificial fairways of American golf, connecting me to the pure spirit from which the game was first distilled.
 
Late one October, when northern climes were spinning toward winter but the afternoons were still golden with syrupy light, I spent eight sylvan days chasing an elusive golf dream across the dunes and fescue grasses, the heather and gorse of Scottish links courses, searching for connection, seeking out the lost and achingly beautiful heart of the game—in which I only half believed. For much of my life I’ve felt, intuitively, that golf could connect me to pure, clear streams of consciousness, but I’d never quite discovered how to enter the flow. One fall I set out for the headwaters of the game, to drink from that true source and discover what it could teach me.
 
My days went much like this: On a Friday morning, for example, I woke early in my suite at the Turnberry Hotel and looked out the window as light gathered over the Firth of Clyde and shadows retreated from the championship Ailsa course (which I’d played the previous day) stretching greenly beside the windy dunes below. The lighthouse perched on the cliffs beside the ninth hole shone like a white monolith in the rising sun, and beyond, the peaks of Arran sketched a blue line against the horizon.
 
Downstairs, in the dining room, I opened The International Herald Tribune across the starched table linen and ate a full Scottish breakfast accompanied by strong coffee thick with cream. Then I called for my car and, as frost melted off the surrounding countryside, drove north too fast along winding roads to the small town of Prestwick. The leaves on the trees were yellow and ragged against the bluing sky, and the fields were brown and gold, dusted with white. In the small towns through which I drove, children in blue uniforms walked to school along the narrow streets.
 
At the old stone clubhouse of the Prestwick Golf Club—home of the first Open Championship (which Americans call the British Open) in 1860—Secretary David Donaldson took me for more strong coffee in the private card room, where century-old portraits of captains and secretaries stared menacingly down from the walls and antique golf clubs and scorecards from famous matches were displayed in glass cases.
 
As we waited for the morning chill to burn off, Donaldson and I compared notes on various far-flung golfing destinations; he seemed to have played on every continent except Antarctica. An hour later, my host summoned two caddies and we headed out to play eighteen of the most diverse and unique golf holes gathered together on a single course anywhere—holes requiring long, blind shots over monstrous dunes and quarries of sand, laid out along ancient stone fences and speckled with bunkers so deep you’d need a Ph.D. in philosophy just to see bottom. And all of it threaded delicately by the murmuring, meandering waters of Pow Burn.
 
We played a friendly match as Donaldson told me stories and my caddy, Waldo, produced a few gems of commentary. After I hit a long drive off the fourth tee, he observed, “Some people don’t go that far on holiday.”
 
As Donaldson and I were struggling up the dune that gave the fifth hole, Himalaya, its name, I asked him who had designed this fabulous course.
 
“God,” he said without missing a beat, then added, “with a little help from Old Tom Morris.”
 
I won our match seven and six after carding three pars in a row to open the back nine, and my opponent observed with acerbic humor that I must be a very good eighteen handicap. When we’d completed the round, we changed into coats and ties back at the clubhouse and drank a cocktail in the Smoke Room; my pint of lager arrived in a silver cup from the 1929 club championship. Then we lunched at a long table laid with fine silver in the formal dining room. Following a plate of venison accompanied by a sturdy claret, which we enjoyed in the excellent company of several other club members, and having worked up a warm and comforting buzz, I changed back into my favorite wool sweater and went out for another eighteen holes on my own in the bracing wind, with the smoky scent of burning peat perfuming the air.
 
I concluded the round with a gaming birdie attempt—and a solid par—as the light flattened and a soothing lavender color spread across the sky. Following a hot pub dinner in town, I ended the day in a steaming bath in my suite back at the Turnberry Hotel, while below my window a ghostly figure in Scottish plaid played the bagpipes along the walkway and the last light disappeared over the distant firth.
 
 
In spite of the almost religious cachet that Scotland holds for so many golfers, I’d tried not to expect anything too dramatic from my trip. Having grown up playing so much American golf, I always wanted to believe that a deeper game lay beyond the manicured fairways I was accustomed to. But I was afraid to trust this notion: I hate to be disappointed.
 
Eight days and 234 holes of golf on eleven different Scottish courses torpedoed my fears and taught me more about the game than I could have learned playing in America for another century. For starters, I realized that accessing golf’s subtle inner core may require playing in swirling, howling salt air, lugging your own clubs up and down dunes for thirty-six holes, swinging helplessly at balls wedged in heather, tearing your clothes on gorse, freezing in cold ocean winds and occasional hail and sleet, and then giving yourself over to the reviving powers of a single-malt Highland whisky in the dark-paneled clubhouse bar overlooking a links where they’ve played golf for nearly five hundred years.
 
In America, we have so bastardized and diluted the game, manicured and modernized it, tidied it up and high-teched it, transformed it into an expensive, elitist hobby, and robbed it of so much of its purity and true character, it’s a wonder we can draw any emotion from golf at all. Yet, at some level, we must still sense its inherent potential: Why else would so many of us become addicted?
 
By traveling to Scotland, I also learned that at its very heart, golf is a game of connections—to the land, to history, to community, and ultimately to ourselves. The game has a power to unite players in a kind of overarching Oneness, but to feel these connections, we must return to golf’s roots and see where it was first played, and how, and maybe even why. In America we’ve severed the game’s most powerful connections, so we must return home, to Scotland, to discover them again.