Final Rounds by James Dodson

Author:James Dodson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2017-10-24T04:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

All the Lovely Wee Places

A winding road from Dumfries, Scotland, took us to Southerness, a marvelous short links course unknown to most Americans overlooking the Solway Firth, where we met up with a retired vet named Dr. Jupp and his wife Freddie for a late Saturday afternoon round. The Jupps were on a “weekend break,” as Freddie Jupp called it, staying at an inn nearby. Our first day in Scotland was rain-free, the sun gloriously warm on our shoulders.

“We’ve been to America quite a number of times,” Dr. Jupp pronounced loudly as we marched off the first tee together. He was a tall, thin man with a wisp of duck fluff waving from the crown of his bald head. “Got some foreign friends in St. Louis named Kellogg. She’s all right, husband’s a bit of a lush. Know ’em?”

He was frowning at me, though I quickly realized frowning was Dr. Jupp’s natural expression. His scowl fell somewhere between that of a disapproving owl and a constipated eagle. I admitted I didn’t know the Kelloggs of St. Louis; I said that the only Kelloggs I knew came from Battle Creek. I paid homage to them every time I ate my cornflakes, I said. Ta-dump. No one but my father seemed to catch my little funny.

“Where’s that?” wondered Freddie primly.

“Michigan,” I said, “land of wolverines, big two-hearted rivers, and Henry Ford. A budding northern golf mecca, too. You might want to check it out on your next trip.”

“Right,” snapped Dr. Jupp. “I’ve eaten lobsters from there.”

I decided not to tell him lobsters came from Maine, not Michigan. He didn’t seem like the sort who could handle being corrected by a foreigner, and I didn’t fancy having my appendix taken out with a mashie niblick. We watched Freddie tee up and crack her ball a hundred yards down the fairway with a big loping swing.

“Get your arse lower to the ground, Freddie!” Dr. Jupp shouted helpfully at his wife through a pair of bony cupped hands. “Arse to the ground, that’s the ticket!”

“Fizz off,” Freddie said.

I smiled at my father, wondering what it was about Brits and their arses. He seemed to be thinking the same thing. Was getting your arse to the ground anything like getting your bum into the shot?

Southerness is considered a “plain” course by some devotees of Scottish linkslands. For one thing, it’s one of the most contemporary seaside creations in Britain, having been built by MacKenzie Ross during the same postwar years he was restoring Turnberry’s links, seventy miles up the coast. There Ross used earth-moving machinery to marvelous effect, sculpting the dunes and hummocks that give the Turnberry player a powerful sense of the land’s whimsical elevations.

For one reason or another—but probably economic in nature—Ross left the lovely green earth at Southerness alone, routing his course over relatively flat pastures and hayfields. The whole enterprise cost less than two thousand pounds to create and was turfed, not seeded, the soil being almost identical, the story goes, to that found in the fens of England.

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