This Scottish stunner was my favorite course I played this year

I would like to live out more days like the one this summer when I played the Ailsa Course at Trump Turnberry for the first time. When I think about it now, inspired by the sunset photos on my phone, I am reminded of the innocence (and ignorance) I felt, mostly because I had no idea a Covid diagnosis was coming. 

When you traipse around Scotland with a sniffle, everyone tells you to take a hay fever tablet. Agh is johst the pohlen is goht ya. But in my case, no tablet was going to save me. A real fever was on its way soon enough. I had just a few more hours of normalcy to spare. 

Which is why they were so well spent on one of the greatest golf courses in the world. The Ailsa is best known as the place where Stewart Cink made (but really spoiled) golf history, beating 59-year-old Tom Watson in a playoff for the 2009 Open Championship. It was impossible to not think about that while on site, especially because many of the competitors in the Open at Troon were ripping down the Ayrshire coast for a knock around Turnberry. 

Scottie Scheffler, Adam Scott and Sam Burns had all gotten out over the weekend. Luke Donald had snuck out just a couple groups ahead of ours. I wondered if (and even hoped that) the routing would let us cross paths with the European Ryder Cup captain. Keegan Bradley had just been announced as the U.S. captain, and I knew Luke had some thoughts. 

But that’s when Turnberry took over, and I soon forgot that Donald was ahead of us. The massive dunes, gorse and heather will do that to you, working as boundary bumpers for your golf ball but also centering your attention. You scale on top of them to hit tee balls and play to greens cut into them. There’s a lot to love about these high-dune courses — Cruden Bay is another — as the path home is always abundantly clear. If you play waywardly — unlike at your tree-lined parkland American course — here you will always see your ball down. You may not find it in the fescue, but at least you know where to look (and where to take a drop). 

There are many hallmarks of Turnberry worth clamoring about. The course really starts sprinting on the par-3 4th, your first along the coast of the Irish Sea, when you start to appreciate the distant Isle of Arran. It hits hardest on the 8th, 9th and 10th — a par-4, par-3, par-5 stretch that takes you as close to the sea as possible. By the 9th is the iconic lighthouse and a shoreline where we found locals enjoying the setting sun. 

Partly due to the prohibitive greens fee, you’re not going to find many people gaming it every night at Turnberry. The price is incredibly steep — approaching four digits — but for us there was a silver lining. A foursome of pals ahead of us were itching for a game, so they invited us up to play inward with them, from the 12th hole on, in a sixsome. 

As a rule-follower and former golf-club worker myself, the proposal made me uncomfortable. But there wasn’t a soul behind us and not a push cart in the group. A maintenance staffer drove by and told us the place was ours. It was bags on our backs as we battled the clouds that began to mask the light.

This kind of scene stands out to a lot of us American golf writers because it feels so different than what we’re used to at home, and also because it seems to happen in Scotland on repeat. The windy afternoon settling into a calm breeze as you play your 18th tee shot at 9:49 p.m. The sky over there seems permanently ready to turn pink.

A similar vibe settled in 24 hours later as a colleague and I ran around Prestwick. You have no choice at that point but to forget about your score and snap mental images of the surrounds because it feels like a painting has been created around you, and it’ll be quite a while before you come back. And that’s OK. After closing our round with four pars, a birdie and my double bogey, a sneezing fit overcame me on the walk to our rental car. Covid had officially arrived, but I wasn’t about to let it ruin the mood.