Of buffers, bunkers... and a truly beguiling slice of life

MY first swipe did nothing to endear the game to me. The ball remained on the tee, untroubled by the breath of wind generated by the five iron passing in its general vicinity.

Same with the second shot. I searched the skies for the soar of the little white globe only to realise it was still on its peg, waiting patiently to be sent somewhere.

Shot three sclaffed about 25 yards along the ground but I was on the fairway, closer to the flag than before and already feeling a tingle of anticipation about shot four. Would I get it airborne? Might I hole it for my par? No, another fresh air shot.

This was when I was nine, playing my first round on a municipal golf course and making the complete beginner’s error of failing to keep my eye on the ball as I swung at it. More than four decades and countless lessons on, that shot is still in my repertoire. I have a terrible slice too – except when I hook it – and it has taken years of perspective to forgive the steep-faced bunkers at St Andrews for all the promising rounds they have ruined.

And yet golf, however well or badly I have played it, has been a perennial source of pleasure. As first football, then rugby, tennis and squash faded from my life, so golf came into sharp focus, offering constancy in the years ahead.

Health

‘Relax, I’m here for the long haul,’ the sport seems to tell its practitioners. ‘Shorten your swing and you’ll be fine.’

I suspect Andrew McKinlay, chief executive of governing body Scottish Golf, sees the game’s restorative powers in much the same way.

This week, as the Open Championship swung into action at Royal Portrush, he called for golf to be prescribed on the NHS to help combat mental health problems, particularly depression.

‘We all know we have huge problems with health in this country and I think golf could be a huge force for good in that,’ he says. He is unquestionably right. If you do not feel a surge of delight at cracking off a tee shot straight down the middle of the fairway then you may wish to check your pulse – or your ID to see if you are Colin Montgomerie.

And yet the uptake of this beguiling sport, native to our land, is in decline. There are now fewer than 190,000 registered golfers in Scotland – a drop of almost 29 per cent since 2005 and, within a decade, the number of golf club members under 17 is expected to dip to only 3 per cent.

Young people raised on video games and smartphones just don’t swing with the dress codes and antiquated traditions of golf clubs with their stuffy committees, blazer badges and dusty old trophy winners’ boards. And, frankly, I don’t blame them.

Either these often rather pleased with themselves institutions must modernise or accept that their memberships will become yet more aged and out of touch.

But I see little reason why the future of golf in Scotland should depend on local clubs embarking on belated journeys into the present day.

Whether the club medal matches appeal to them or not, youngsters across Scotland should see golf courses in their locality as no less accessible to them than the hallowed fairways at St Andrews were to me as a teenager.

There was certainly no rule at the Home of Golf stating that local juniors on the New Course, the Jubilee or the Eden must have an official handicap or belong to some affiliate club. They wouldn’t have dared.

The golf links – even the sacred turf of the Old Course – belonged to the people of St Andrews. We callow duffers had every right to play on it and nothing as archaic and irrelevant to our lives as a golf club was going to stop us.

Joyous

Imagine the shock on learning that golf did not operate like this everywhere, that youngsters had come to view the sport through the prism of the forbidding framework around it rather than as the joyous, lifelong pursuit of competence that it had become for me.

Undoubtedly I was lucky in that the second half of my childhood was spent in St Andrews, walking in the footsteps of champions such as Jack Nicklaus and Severiano Ballesteros and treating as my back yard golf courses which tourists would cross oceans and build entire holidays around playing even once.

I do not suggest quite the same feelgood factor attaches, say, to the municipal course in Glasgow’s Knightswood. And yet, as McIlroy, Woods and co burn up Royal Portrush, I heartily commend the game to anyone of any age anywhere near a municipal course.

Far from being a good walk spoiled, as the old barb has it, golf is in fact the good walk that takes your mind off your troubles, consigns the mobile phone to a pocket of your golf bag for three hours and engages the brain in healthy, outdoorsy problem solving.

I hope to play much more golf as I grow older – in St Andrews if I am lucky or anywhere if I am not – and enjoy the fact that, 40, 50 even 60 years on I may be as liable to hit a belter straight down the middle as to swipe at fresh air. That’s what the game’s about for me. Club ties have nothing to do with it.