PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — Owing to a personality defect that shows up in my golf and extends far beyond it, I would rather, when on the East Coast of Scotland, play the wee little Elie course than most anywhere else (though I do love it all). At Merion, over the river and through the ‘burbs from my home in the city limits of Philadelphia, I prefer the West course to the celebrated East, the one made famous by the firm of Jones, Hogan & Rose. This is just my second trip here, six years after my first, for the Open Shane Lowry won. I stumbled on the so-called other course here twice on Tuesday, once from the beach, then at the end of the day, as if days end here.
The course where they are playing the 153rd Open Championship this week, the Dunluce course of the Royal Portrush Golf Club, is as grand as it gets, dunesy, windy, loaded with swales. But nestled between this “championship course” and the Atlantic Ocean in all her majesty, is another course, the Valley course, designed by Harry Colt, 6,300 yards, all stretched out, 18 holes dropped into a vast swatch of linksland that will leave your heart racing, as the first blush of love does.
The Valley course is closed this week, though flagsticks — just the sticks, not the flags — are still in place on many of the greens. Many of the bunkers have rakes in them. The fellas playing in the Open are on the Valley course now and again without knowing it. The driving range and the short-game area were made for the week from repurposed Valley course acreage. That still leaves a vast stretch of Valley course for your walking and hiking pleasure. The dunes are massive. You can scale them.
Good courses are like good Italian restaurants, where you know you’re in the right place when you walk through the door and breathe the garlic, the red wine, the freshly baked bread. So it is with this Valley course: the brackish air, the pale-green fairways, the corridors of tee-to-green promise.
I don’t know what the par is here, and I don’t care. I just want to play the course, and I can see on the Royal Portrush website that anybody can. Anybody can! The big course, the same. That’s the spirit.
Really, that is the spirit. That’s the spirit that makes this game so great. All the royal this and royal that; the coat-and-tie for luncheon rules and the gentleman’s bar and all the rest, it’s just window dressing.
The thing about golf, here in the kingdom, is the golf. The courses, the players upon them; the wind, the turf, the pace, the seaside air. You can measure wind speed on your cheeks and its direction on your ears. (When you feel the wind balanced on your left and right ears, your nose is pointed into the wind.) Anyway, it matters less than you might think.
