The original golf course at Trump Turnberry, on Scotland’s southwest coast, has some years on it: 125 to be exact. But that’s nothing compared to the age of one of the course’s famous neighbors: the uninhabited volcanic plug that stands sentinel in the Firth of Clyde about 10 miles off Turnberry’s shoreline.
The origins of that wind-battered granite dome, which rises more than 11 stories out of the sea and is visible from nearly every hole on Turnberry’s Ailsa course, have been traced back 600 million years, to those lonely days when the continents were barren and the only signs of life came in the form of bacteria and eukaryotes.
Anyone who’s played at Turnberry — or, for that matter, Royal Troon or Prestwick, about 25 miles up the coast — will be familiar with the island for the magnificent backdrop it provides. Same goes for golf-watchers who’ve tuned into any of the four Open Championships that have been conducted on the Ailsa course since 1977, most recently in 2009 when Tom Watson nearly claimed the Claret Jug at 59 years young.
The Ailsa Craig featured prominently in all of those broadcasts, just as Torrey Pines’ hang-gliders or Pebble Beach’s harbor seals do when the PGA Tour visits those storied venues. The rock is a staple of the Turnberry experience: an eroded magmatic pluton that not only inspires awe but also just so happens to play an essential role every four years in the Winter Olympic Games.
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Ricky English isn’t much of a golfer. “I’ve tried it before, it’s quite hard,” he told me earlier this week in a Scottish accent thicker than a pint of Belhaven Black. “It’s one of those games where one hole you can play like Seve Ballesteros, and then the next hole it’s in the woods and you’ve lost your ball.”
Besides, English spends most of his days thinking about another sport: curling. If you’re even just a casual Olympics viewer — perhaps you’ve been following the action in Milan over the past week — you’re surely familiar with the pursuit, which has been awarding Olympic medals since the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan. Curling, in the most basic terms, involves a “thrower” pushing a roughly 40-pound stone down a 150-foot-long sheet of ice, with the aim of stopping the stone as close as possible to the center of a target (aka “the house”) on the far end of the ice. Aiding in the process are two of the thrower’s teammates who flank the stone as it slides down the ice, using “brooms”, as needed, to reduce the ice’s friction.
English knows a thing or two about those stones because he oversees the process of making them, as the operations manager of Kays Scotland, which since 2006 has been the exclusive manufacturer of curling stones for the Olympics. “We’re kind of servicing the whole sport,” English said of his small but mighty factory about a 45-minute drive north of Turnberry. “There’s only about 50 workers in here. We’re really busy.”
It likely will come as no surprise from where Kays harvests its materials for the stones: yes, Ailsa Craig her good self.
The island’s Blue Hone granite is used on the stone’s running edge while its Common Green granite, which is resistant to heat transfer and splintering, composes the body of the stone. It’s a formula Kays has spent the last 175 or so years perfecting, with granite that can be found nowhere else on earth. The factory, which is open four days a week, manufacturers about 12 stones a day or 48 per week with a sticker price of approximately $1,000/per (shipping not included). That might sound steep, but when you consider most stones last about 30 years, the cost also might sound like a bargain.
“We have to keep our own quality standards up for every stone,” English said. “Whether we make a stone for the Olympics or we make a stone for a [curling] club in Alabama, it’s the same quality control, the exact same way of making it goes into it. There’s no difference.”
Kays ships stones all over the world, from the U.S. to China, Japan and South Korea to Mongolia and New Zealand, even to . . . Antarctica. “They’re using it as a kind of luxury experience type thing,” English said. “It’s like minus-36 degrees, so I wasn’t sure with the temperature and the conditions how the stones would be, but they seemed to be fine.”
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While the Ailsa Craig’s granite is uniquely suited for curling stones, it also has found its way into Turnberry’s golf shop in the form of ball markers and other granite-based memorabilia. Kays also commissioned a St. Andrews clubmaker to build four hickory golf clubs into which Kays incorporated Common Green granite into the bases. They sold quickly. “So, yes,” English said of his team’s handiwork, “there’s wee ties to golf.”
English said he also sees some crossover between the skills required in both curling and golf, and, indeed, it’s not hard to see the parallels between sliding a stone down a slab of ice and rolling a ball across a slick green. “There are a few curlers that we know of that are actually really good golfers,” he said. “They’ve got the type of skills from curling, with the touch and feel, and they kind of took that into golf.”
But English has little time to work on his own swing or stroke. He has emails to answer and orders to fill, especially in this busy window during which his stones are enjoying their every-four-years moment in the international spotlight. To capitalize on the publicity, Kays’ online shop has been selling Olympics-themed giftware (coasters, drink cubes) made from Ailsa Craig granite. The majority of orders thus far have come from the U.S., and English suspects that’s at least partly due to a certain rap legend on NBC’s coverage team in Milan.
