Richard Lees posted on April 20, 2009 12:23
MORE GOLF COURSE PENTIMENTO
With our upcoming 17th Anniversary Event at the end of May near the Shivas home office at Bayonet to feature talks on the art of golf course architecture by Forrest Richardson and Bo Links, yet another article on what we’ve referred to as “Golf Course Pentimento” -- named after a term used in art restoration when earlier “drafts” of a canvas are discovered beneath the picture that currently lives on the surface -- has appeared -- this time in the April 20th edition of The New Yorker.
In a wonderful article by David Owen entitled “The Ghost Course,” the rediscovery of an original Old Tom Morris links course called Askernish, constructed in 1891 by Morris on the Outer Hebrides island of South Uist off the west coast of Scotland, is detailed.
As often seems to be the case in these stories, much had to be overcome in order to restore the original course, including resistance from the current local population known as “crofters” -- a type of tenant farmer dating back to Medieval land rights arrangements.
But the struggle was worth it, revealing, in the author’s words, something close to “the holy grail” -- “a course…in some ways more compelling than The Old Course (at St. Andrews)” because “Askernish had never been stretched to accommodate high-tech clubs and balls, and its original quirks had not been worn smooth over the years by motorized maintenance equipment… The last time the old holes were played, the greens were probably cut with scythes.”
Describing the moment in 2005 when golf course consultant Gordon Irvine climbed to the top of a grassy dune and looked toward the Atlantic to find “a stretch of undulating links-land… the experience was like lifting the corner of a yard-sale velvet painting and discovering a Rembrandt.”
I won’t ruin the reading experience by detailing much more of the article here, but suffice it to say that the read is a special one in which the author notes at one point, for example, when describing one particular challenging shot that Tom Morris engineered more than a century ago, that “part of golf’s addictiveness, for those who are hooked, arises from the thrill of effecting action at a distance -- a form of satisfaction also known to anti-aircraft gunners…”
I look forward to hopefully playing Askernish one day.
And to connecting one more time to that vision of Tom Morris -- “the original golf course architect.”
This, too, is, I think, something that “those who are hooked” -- especially those of The Shivas Irons Society who appreciate “the gemme as it was meant to be played,” connect to with “a thrill of effecting action at a distance” -- in this case maybe the “action” and the “distance” being that our eyes might be seeing the same thing that Tom Morris’s eyes saw when his ball lifted into the air near that sea shore and time stopped -- even for a century and 18 years -- before that ball fell back to the same good earth once again.
Thanks to David Owen for a great article.