In 1457, in the first recorded reference to the game, King James II decreed that ‘the golfe be utterly cryit doune and not usit’. Golfers ignored him.
His grandson, James IV, kept up the family tradition by calling the game ‘ridiculous … requiring neither strength nor skill’. Then he tried playing it. During a lull between wars with England, the young monarch emerged from Holyrood Palace with a brand-new driver in his hand. He greeted several lords and ladies gathered to mark the occasion, stepped up to the ball and – whiff! He missed. He tried again, whiffed again, threw down his club and stalked back to the palace. That might have been the end of royal golf, but to his credit James IV practised in secret until he could lace his drives more than fifty yards. He became the first royal golf nut and the first royal golf gambler. In 1504, after the king lost a two-guinea bet to the Earl of Bothwell, the debt was added to the nation’s tax bill.
A love of golf often passes from father to son. In the middle of the sixteenth century it went from father to son to daughter. Mary Stuart, better known as Mary Queen of Scots, was the only child of King James V, the golfing son of James IV. Mary ascended to the throne after her father died in 1542. She was six days old. When the news reached London, the gluttonous wife-killer Henry VIII, a tennis player, saw a chance to expand his empire. In a series of invasions called the ‘rough wooing’, he tried to force a royal marriage between his son, Prince Edward, and Scotland’s child queen. Mary was shipped to safety in France, where she grew into a striking beauty, six feet tall. Upon returning to Scotland the seventeen-year-old queen took up the national game and gave it a new word: she called the boy who lugged her clubs a cadet, which the Scots heard as ‘caddie’. Mary went on to be a golfing widow, hitting the links the same week her husband, Lord Darnley, was murdered. That faux pas gave her cousin, England’s Queen Elizabeth, an excuse to charge her with crimes against God, nature and good government. Mary Queen of Scots went on to lose a few more golf balls in Scotland and later, in England, her head.
By then a dozen generations of golfers had walked the four-mile loop of the links at St Andrews, over Swilcan Burn to the mouth of the River Eden and then back towards town, aiming for rooftops and the crumbling twelfth-century cathedral where ghosts were said to guard the remains of St Andrew, supposedly brought here by a monk in the year 345: three of the Apostle’s finger bones, an arm bone, a tooth and a kneecap. No man designed the golf course west of the town. The course was an accident. The fairways were narrow paths through thickets of scrub: thorny whin bushes, which the rest of the world called gorse, as well as heather, nettles, brambles, ground elder, dogtail, cocksfoot and chickweed. The putting-greens were clearings where players’ boots and the nibblings of rabbits and sheep kept the grass down. During storms the sheep huddled behind hillocks, where they scuffed and nibbled the grass and clover to the roots, leaving bare spots that eroded into sand bunkers. Other bunkers were carved by golfers slashing the turf in hollows where bad shots collected.
Golfers and sheep vied for space on the links with fishermen drying their nets, women beating rugs or bleaching clothes, dogs chasing rabbits, cows and goats grazing, larks darting in and out of the whins, children playing hide and seek, and even the occasional citizen soldier doing his duty by old James II, practising his archery. Still, it was a golf town. In the seventeenth-century sermons of Robert Blair, minister of the town church, Reverend Blair likened the bond between God and the Church of Scotland to that of shaft and clubhead. Remote, wind-blistered St Andrews may have been shrinking as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Dundee grew, but the town’s sway in golf never shrank. Courses in Perth, Edinburgh, Kirkcaldy, Montrose and Musselburgh ranged from five to twenty-five holes, but after St Andrews rejiggered its twenty-two-hole course to make it tougher, the ‘St Andrews standard’ of eighteen became everyone’s standard. Scottish sportsmen played the game by thirteen rules adopted in 1754 by the Society of St Andrews Golfers. Some of those rules sound reasonable enough today (‘If a ball is stop’d by any person, horse, dog or any thing else, the ball so stop’d must be played where it lyes’), while others sound puzzling (‘Your tee must be upon the ground’). One timeless feature of the game was already clear to a St Andrews writer: ‘How in the evening each dilates on his own wonderful strokes, and the singular chances that befell him – all under the pleasurable delusion that every listener is as interested in his game as he himself is.’
The men who made the rules and played most of the golf were gentlemen: well-to-do landowners who didn’t need to work. The game was technically open to all and the St Andrews links, like most links, occupied public land. But few working men could afford to play in an age when whole families, including both parents as well as children as young as five or six, toiled six days a week to earn what a gentleman spent to buy a single golf ball.
Golf evolved as a rich man’s game partly because the feathery balls of the 1700s and early 1800s, leather pouches packed tight with goose feathers, were expensive. Men who could afford them saw golf as a healthy outdoor pastime like fox hunting. They met in town halls and taverns to drink, joke, argue and arrange challenge matches, and as the game grew they formed local clubs and played for trophies. In 1744, after tabling discussions of taxes, prostitution and the latest cholera outbreak, Edinburgh’s town council approved the purchase of a silver cup, to be played for each year by the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers. That move seemed to establish the gentlemen of the capital, who played in satin breeches and silk-lined jackets, as the game’s ruling body. But the golfers of Fife would have something to say about that.
The ‘twenty-two noblemen and gentlemen’ of the Society of St Andrews Golfers played in red hunting jackets, a look borrowed from the Fife Fox and Hounds Club. Some wore hiking boots that had tacks driven through the soles – the first golf spikes. After forming the Society of St Andrews Golfers in 1754 they commissioned a trophy of their own, a silver golf club. They also played for gold and silver medals, and these medal competitions led to a new way of keeping score. Since a round robin of one-on-one matches could take forever, the society came up with a different format: ‘[W]hoever puts in the ball at the fewest strokes … shall be declared and sustained victor.’ The new style was called medal play. In time it would eclipse the old way of playing. Medal play is what Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson and almost everyone else in modern golf play ninety percent of the time. Often called stroke play, it is the modern way to play golf: whoever takes the fewest strokes wins. But for more than a century, it was a sideshow. Golf was a match-play game between players who challenged each other to man-to-man contests (singles) or two-man battles (foursomes). In match play, you can take ten swings in a bunker or even pick up your ball and surrender; you lose only that one hole. Whoever wins the most holes wins the match.
‘Challenge matches are the life of golf,’ Andra Kirkaldy of St Andrews would write, looking back on the game as it was played in his youth. ‘Man against man, pocket against pocket, in deadly earnest is the thing.’
Stroke play might win you the honour of a club medal once or twice a year, but the rest of the calendar was for match play. That meant bets and more bets. Many wagers were for a few shillings, but there were plenty of five- and ten-pound matches. Some gentlemen thought nothing of playing for fifty pounds – more than enough to buy a fine pony like the one Sir John Low rode around the links, dismounting when it was his turn to hit. Fifty pounds was more than most men earned in a year. In Scotland in 1820 the average annual income was less than fifteen pounds, a sum Sir John might bet on one putt.
Some matches were for territorial pride as well as cash. In 1681 a pair of English noblemen told the Duke of York that golf began in England. Any Scot who claimed otherwise, they said, was a liar! The duke, a Scotsman who would be king of both countries, agreed to a challenge match to settle the matter. For his partner he chose John Patersone, a cobbler who was said to be the best golfer in Edinburgh. The shoemaker arrived with his clubs tucked under his arm, trembling to be in such exalted company. After the other men hit their tee shots, he steeled himself, swung from the heels and belted a drive that dropped their jaws. With Patersone leading the way, the Scots routed the English pair. The duke was so pleased he split his winnings with Patersone, who used the money to build a house on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, a fine stone house with the old golf motto etched above the front door: Far and Sure.
By the 1800s, with seven golf societies scattered through Scotland and England, the game was respectable enough to seek royal patronage.