What with it being 1864, I probably should have known the bar staff wouldn’t accept debit cards. I’d arrived at Westward Ho! with my regular golf partners, Simon and Scott, in what, for us, constituted “good time”, leaving a full seven minutes before our teeing off slot. We’d brought our hickory-shafted clubs, our swing-restricting jackets and ties to England’s oldest links, and while our DIY plus fours were really more like plus ones, we looked almost the part. We’d just forgotten one thing: to eat. At any point in the last 18 hours. Which ultimately left us with a decision: put our combined pocket change towards a shared Snickers, or race to Westward Ho! Co-Op and get some pasties and crisps. Thinking carefully about what the defending Open champion, Willie Park Senior, would do in the same situation, we chose the Co-Op.
I’d originally pitched this excursion to my friends as a round of authentic late 18th century golf: playing with the same restrictions as the earliest pros. Could Simon use his imitation olde blade putter? No way. Could Scott bring his Mizuno golf glove, to protect his soft, north London-dwelling hands from calluses? Could he hell. Sadly, though, my best intentions were getting diluted. It was only when we arrived at Westward Ho!, aka Royal North Devon – a golf course so ancient, it looks like it was designed by sheep, and so timelessly dramatic it’s been permitted the unique distinction of a permanent exclamation mark – that we realise that Timewarp Golf, the company from which we’ve hired our hickory-shafted clubs, did not also provide old-fashioned gutta-percha (natural latex) balls. Also, when I’d dreamed about our first tee entrance, flapping carrier bags and Kettle Chip fumes had not formed a part of the fantasy.
I’m like a lot of golfers when it comes to the ongoing debate about the way the technology of the past decade has transformed the game. I talk the big talk, bemoaning overly forgiving clubs and the way great courses have been taken out of play by long-hitting. But secretly I really like the vast distance I can now hit a drive, and would probably not swap for the world the illusion it gives me of my own machismo. That said, I have been playing golf long enough to remember when woods were made out of wood, and a shot I hit out of the heel of them went where the golfing gods intended it to go: into a gorse bush.
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| Hickory-shafted golf clubs |
In a hard-to-shake a habit from junior golf days, Simon, Scott and I tend to assign ourselves pro identities when we play. Normally, I think hard before deciding on mine, gauging my mood and desired swing. But today I opt to be four-time Open champion Old Tom Morris on the basis that a) he was called Tom, and b) I like his beard. “I’ll be John Logie Baird!” says Simon. We try our best to make this a normal round of golf, but, in truth, if we went out and did battle using only our drivers and some tennis balls, it would seem more familiar.
One of the reasons I still know it is golf is because of the fierce – even fiercer than normal – ups and downs involved. “I think I’m suffering from bipolar swing disorder,” says Simon. When I do strike a drive well, I find myself rhapsodising about the contact: how it has a purity that you could never get from modern, metal-headed clubs. Up by the 10th green, I gush about the way the restrictions of the club actually complement the bumpy links landscape, and make you interact with it more. Two minutes later, after a boned wedge, the romance is killed, and I’m picking fault with everything, irritated that I’ve left a bottle of water and two Titleist Pro-V balls on the last tee. On one hand, you marvel that early golfing superstars such Tom Morris, Harry Vardon and J.T. Taylor fashioned the scores that they did with such inferior equipment. On the other hand, you can’t help but ask: were yesteryear’s golfers really such idiots that not one of them thought to design a golf bag with some pockets?
There are times when, for me, the need to hit a ball is as all-consuming as the need to itch some chicken pox, and rarely has the itch been as strong as at the end of my round at Royal North Devon. But it’s the itch to hit a golf ball with a modern club, full of strange metals and suspicious chemicals, with a head the size of my own face, and hear the “wwwcrhhsh” noise it makes. Sacrilege? Maybe – but it’s worth considering, when making the arguments that golf has evolved too far, that we might actually just be making up for lost time. Is it not a bit retarded, after all, that it took golfers until almost a third of the way through the 20th century to realise that it might make more athletic sense if they didn’t play in a buttoned-up jacket?
There is nothing I find today that tells me that this is the golf that we were “meant to play” any more than 2009 golf. And while standing on a strip of headland dressed like a buffoon makes you feel in touch with the past, it also makes you feel like you’re standing on a strip of headland dressed like a buffoon.
Still, as strips of headland on which to dress like a buffoon go, Westward Ho! is extremely pleasant. All the way round, fellow golfers and ramblers smile, wave and offer support to us, only some of it mocking. “Didn’t you know they were banned in the 19th century?” a spaniel walker shouts to me as I check my phone on the eighth fairway. “Are they from Golf Punk magazine?” I hear a member of a late-middle-aged fourball say, pointing in our direction. We came. We hacked. We experienced authentic olden golfing pain. But, okay, on reflection, perhaps we didn’t get the look quite right.
Tom Cox is the author of the golf memoirs ‘Nice Jumper’ and ‘Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia’
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