A Personalized History Of Scottish Golf Or You'll Not Do That Here, Laddie

From the viewpoint of providing difficulty for the top professional golfers, Carnoustie is surely the toughest course in Scotland. It is long and windy and wet. It is also smoky, dreary and somber. It is a course with more of a sameness to it throughout than any other. Every hole begins to look like the one you've just played—unreachable. Even the names of the holes are unimaginative. The 2nd: Gulley. The 4th: Hillocks. The 6th: Long. The 11th: Dyke. The 18th: Home.

Carnoustie began to develop a distinction around the 5th hole, I thought. But maybe I felt this because my caddie had me primed. Here was the hole where The Wee Icemon, Ben Hogan, had chipped in for a birdie-3 in 1953 during the last round. It was where he had made the chip from the sand at the edge of the lower left bunker that launched him toward the British Open title the one and only time he ever played in the tournament.

"He stood right here," said Phillip, the caddie. "Aye, it was only a short flick of the wrist."

The 6th, too, had character, most of it provided by an imposing cable fence down the left side of the fairway. Periodically there would be a sign in red letters hanging on the fence that said: "Do Not Touch Anything. It May Explode and Kill You." On the other side of the fence was a firing range used by the Ministry of Defense. The hole is 565 yards long and the Scots named it Hogan's Alley in '53, for Ben birdied it the last two rounds.

Phillip stopped at a point far beyond my tee shot down the fairway. "Here," he said, digging his shoe into the turf. "And here." He moved it a couple of inches. "Then here." He moved it another inch. "And over here." He moved his shoe about a foot.

"That's where the Icemon drove it," he said.

From here until near the finish Carnoustie became something of a blur. The wind wouldn't give my four-wood a rest and the steady drizzle turned my under-and over-cashmeres into about 700 pounds of inconvenient weight. The most fascinating landmark near the course, after the firing range, was a factory calling itself Anderson Cranes & Stone-Cutting Machinery.

"Phillip," I said. "Did anyone ever suggest to you that Carnoustie is not Antibes?"

Somewhere near the end, I vaguely recall, there is a Barry Burn that you have to cross about 30 times on the last three holes, which happen to be first a 243-yard 3-par into the gale that Jack Nicklaus finally reached with a driver in 1968, then a 438-yard par-4 that you are forced to lay up on off the tee and finally a 453-yard par-4 that I judged to be a driver, spoon and full eight-iron. With dry grips, maybe less.

As it turned out, I finished with a flourish. Good driver, good spoon, good eight-iron, four feet from the cup. Of course in my haste to have Phillip show me the spot where Hogan used to go to wring out his sweaters, I blew the putt. And with a number of people staring at me through the clubhouse window, too.