Beach golf
Some of the most fun I've had with a golf club in my hand has been with my family, wearing wellington boots, waterproofs and jeans and with nobody worrying about slow play or whose honour it is on the tee or walking across somebody else's line. I laughed more during an evening of playing beach golf than I ever have after paying a green fee.
Killantringan beach on the Mull of Galloway is an often-deserted stretch of Scottish coastline that can only be safely reached at low tide. It is a place of beauty, and one evening, as the sun went down, the tide times allowed us to venture onto the sand with a few irons and putters and a carrier bag full of old balls. We dug a hole, placed a piece of driftwood in it and drew a circle in the sand to mark the green. With a deep rock pool at one side and half submerged rocks scattered about the sand behind the green, we had created a tricky hole - one that need precise accuracy in distance and direction. We decided on a suitably flat spot about 150 yards away to be the designated tee box and shared a few moments gazing at our first ever attempt at golf course design. It looked good and it was pretty straightforward really; we had done as all good course architects would - used the natural features we had been presented with to fashion a surface for playing the ancient game. We each selected a ball, a tee and a club and the tournament began.
When the sea sweeps out at Killantringan it leaves a smooth swathe of sand, like a cake iced by a master baker. It looks like a golf ball would roll forever, but looks are deceiving - it's still sand - and when the ball landed it went nowhere, so it took us all at least two shots to get to the green. And in beach golf you can forget the slopes and borrows on the green; you must prod the ball hard, straight at the hole. Brute force brings success. There was much cajoling and teasing as we all, eventually, holed out. Buoyed by our successful design of one hole, we constructed another and the frivolities continued.
After we'd had enough, we teed up our balls and lashed them out towards the setting sun on the horizon as a kind of thank you offering to the sea. It wasn't meant to be a profound moment, but it was all the same. There was something spiritual about watching those small white pills sailing through the evening air and dropping into their watery grave. Don Naifeh would understand. Michael Konik, Don's friend, writes about the Scottish golfing trip he and Don share in his book In Search of Burningbush. For Don, it is a pilgrimage, and he adopts a ritual of writing the names of family and friends who can't be with him on golf balls and firing them out to sea as a way to connect with them while they are apart. And that is what it felt like as we concluded our evening of beach golf; it was a ritual - something of solemnity, albeit one with abundant laughter - to mark the end of a special experience. Of all the thousands of golf holes I will ever play in my lifetime, the two on Killantringan beach will be the hardest to forget, mainly because of who I played them with and because we did it for the sheer pleasure of having a ridiculous idea and giving it a go.
