The Open Returns to Troon
in a World No Longer
Following the Script
A Monday at Carnoustie wasn’t the first time I’d disappointed a caddie, but never before in this way.
My foursome at the venerable Open Championship venue had just teed off on the links’ 10th hole, a long par-4 running eastward, with our backs against a mid-July sun that had just begun turning downward on an afternoon sky dappled with white, grey, and blue. The scrappy Scottish town and the railroad tracks separating the town from the links ran alongside our left shoulders.
I don’t remember where I’d hit my ball. I don’t remember my score on that hole. But I do remember that the conversation turned to politics — the American presidential contest, to be specific. My standard modus operandi on a golf course is to avoid political discussions like the plague. In famously liberal Scotland, though, I cautiously engaged.
Searching for it, literally and figuratively, at Carnoustie in July 2016.
My caddie was a short, stocky fellow with a roughly hewn beard in his late 20s. Back in the U.S., he would have passed convincingly for an SAE at Mississippi State. But he was eager to talk about the Democratic primary, with an enthusiasm too brimful to be a setup.
That enthusiasm lasted until I told him that I’d voted for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.
He didn’t say so, but I could tell that he was disappointed. I explained that it was practical: she was more moderate than Sanders and would offer independent voters are more palatable option than the Republican nominee, Donald Trump. He responded that most of Sanders’ proposals were unremarkable, by his country’s standards: nationalized healthcare and higher education accessible to nearly everyone. But I reminded him that U.S. politics was, at least on a national level, a race to the middle: that hard lines entertain American hardliners, but that unaffiliated, pragmatic voters who cast the deciding votes shun extremism on either side.
Teeing off somewhere on the homeward nine at Carnoustie in 2016.
The moment passed. I took his silence for a begrudging acceptance. In hindsight, I wonder whether he knew something that I didn’t.
Four days later, on the country’s opposite shore, I walked in the gates early at Royal Troon for the second round of the Open Championship — famously won by Henrik Stenson after narrowly outplaying Phil Mickelson. I can remember sitting under a monotone sky in the rain at the second green, watching Jordan Spieth — by then still a presumed threat at every major, and just one year away from his own Open win. I can remember walking past Troon’s famous eighth hole and its tiny “Postage Stamp” green, and following Stenson up the 11th fairway while the rain quickened to its last, best effort.
“Well,” I thought, with water dripping off the brim of my cap, “you wanted the Open experience. This is it.”
And it was. It was everything it was supposed to be: predictable but wonderful, beautiful in its imperfection, different than a hundred years before and yet not, with a finish that even the loser’s supporters could admire.
The Open returns to Troon this week. For those returning from eight years prior, the old links will look familiar. The world does not.
That fall’s election ended not in a race to the middle, but in a lurch toward something awful and unsustainable. On a January afternoon just over four years later, on the steps and in the halls of our Capitol, the nation lurched even farther. Around the same time, Stenson and Mickelson — who’d written one of golf’s most wonderful chapters in 2016 — did their level best to tear the game down in a shameless, authoritarian-backed money grab. And now, fewer than four months before a presidential election that has dragged American democracy to a precipice, one candidate in that election brushed three inches away from assassination.
How, in God’s name, has it come to this? How has any of it come to this?
Your faithful blogger, with fewer wrinkles, from the 18th green’s grandstands at Royal Troon in 2016.
Professional golf is a sorry coequal to a democracy that has stood nearly a quarter of a millennium, but it is not a useless parallel: in an unimaginably short time, authoritarian forces and complicit yes-men have shorn into the game a schism that will never fully heal. For all the talk of mergers between LIV Golf and the PGA Tour, the truth is that there is no going back to what we had before. The world has changed, permanently, and not for better.
It is difficult not to feel the same way about our country.
In eight years — not even half a generation — America has gone from a president elected on notions of hope and change to a place where one presidential candidate openly refuses to accept election results and the other faces legitimate questions of cognitive decline. In 2016, Stenson and Mickelson were still worthy champions near the heights of their powers. Their moment fit the script. Eight years later, both for golf and for America, the script lies in shreds.
It is a sorry thing, unworthy of the millions of Americans who love golf or love our country. And yet, through no one’s fault but a handful of powerful narcissists, here we are.
What the hell do we do now?
It would be tempting not to believe in points of no return — to hope against hope that everything we care about can simply return to script. But things have changed. When an earthquake bends a river’s course, the river does not return to its old path simply by lamenting the quake. Boats on the water must accept the fact that the path has changed.
Friday morning at the 2016 Open Championship at Royal Troon, as seen from the second hole’s grandstands.
That does not mean, though, that the change itself must be accepted.
In both pro golf and American politics, whatever hope there is for a happy ending — or at least an ending not wrapped in tragedy — cannot lie in acquiescence. It makes no difference whether it’s a marriage between LIV and the Tour, or begrudgingly accepting a second Trump presidency. There is no such thing as peaceful coexistence with an authoritarian.
Coincidentally, golf is returning to the Open at a moment of some hope for the championship’s homeland. On July 4 (coincidentally), United Kingdom voters swept into power a newly center-left Labour Party on promises of addressing that country’s enormous challenges through pragmatism rather than blind ideology.
It sounds nice — not to mention elusive, for Americans whose politics are today driven more by vitriol than solutions.
I have to believe, though, that the opportunity that U.K voters seized will not be out of Americans’ reach forever. And I am certain that whatever chance we have must begin with resisting what feels inevitable — both for our game, and for our country.
The easy path through both the PGA Tour’s battle with LIV and democracy’s struggle against Trump would be to “just get it all over with.” All over, though, is exactly what it’d be.
All other paths are harder and longer. They are the only paths, though, that lead back to a future Open at Troon with any semblance of the world it invited eight years ago.
. . .
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