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

Muirfield is everything Carnoustie isn't. Muirfield is elegance and class, charm and dignity, convenience and pleasure. There is not a true distance on it, nor a fixed par, nor a name for a hole, but it is a course with a championship quality in the purest sense. There is not a tree or a bush or a burn, but there are those 165 bunkers, and they are trouble enough. It is the only course in Scotland that takes advantage and disadvantage of the full cycle of the wind, for the outgoing nine goes clockwise and back to the clubhouse, and the back nine runs counterclockwise and returns. Par is probably 72, but it is easy to envision days when the winds would make it 76

Muirfield is on the Firth of Forth between Gullane and North Berwick, not painfully far from Edinburgh. It is on a fine shore surrounded by estates, and one gets the idea that this area is to Edinburgh what the Hamptons are to New York City. Muirfield's clubhouse is noted for its spaciousness in comparison with other Scottish clubhouses, and its kitchen is esteemed for its cuisine. This, after all, is where The Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers hangs out.

Directly next door to the huge stone clubhouse with its sprawling veranda and putting green is the Greywalls Hotel, where a member of The Honourable Company would stay. Greywalls fronts on the 9th green, and the Scots have long felt that part of the vast charm of Muirfield is that a fellow can stop after nine holes and grab a tap at Greywalls—the way Americans do at their courses.

The real charm of Muirfield is in its memorable fairness and its splendid pacing, both of which are much on the order of Merion, that gem of a battleground on Philadelphia's Main Line where every club comes out of the bag every round you play. Muirfield has short 5s and long 5s, short, bending 4s and long, narrow 4s, short, tricky 3s and long, reachable 3s. Its fairways are skinny but the lies are perfect, and there are shortcuts to be taken by the brave or long-hitting who wish to flirt with more bunkers than the eye can count.

Because of the eccentricities of the wind and the roll of the fairway, as well as, perhaps, the exaggerations of the caddies, one hears that Jack Nicklaus was able to drive the 407-yard 15th hole when he won the British Open there in 1966. But, they say, he had to lean on a three-wood coming back to reach the 198-yard 16th. It would be difficult to imagine a more implausible course on which Nicklaus could win a tournament, because the tightness would practically render his big drive useless. But as they say at Muirfield, "He one-ironed her."

The highest compliment anyone could pay Muirfield, I suppose, would be to say that it is a Hogan type of course. Distances are meaningless because of the wind, and Hogan always said they were meaningless, anyhow. Every shot has a look to it, he said, a certain feel. "I might hit a two-iron 150 yards," he often said.

I played Muirfield that way. My two-irons went 150 yards and frequently off the shank of the club to the right.

"This is the course," my caddie said, over and over. "This is the best of the lot."

"I'd like to see it sometime," I said.

There are a number of spectacular holes at Muirfield, but the 6th is perhaps the finest. It is a par-4—sometimes a par-5—of 475 yards or thereabouts, an uphill-downhill dogleg left that curls around a battered rock wall which separates the course from an archery field. The landing area for the tee shot is no more than 20 yards across and deep bunkers patrol it. With a career drive you can then get close to home with a career three-wood to a rolling green, again framed by bunkers.