Golf is Hell

Mention Carnoustie to golfers and they will often resort to war metaphors to describe the brutality of the Scottish seaside course. When the British Open was last contested at Carnoustie in 1999, the world’s top players muttered and clutched their heads like traumatized veterans. In a book about 21st century warfare published in 2002, Scottish author Gordon Lang coined the term Carnoustie Effect to describe the “psychic shock experienced on collision with reality by those whose expectations are founded on false assumptions.”

Carnoustie, where the British Open returns on July 19, lies less than 500 yds. (503 m) from an army firing range and some 15 mi. (24 km) from an air force base. Machine-gun fire echoes around the property. Fighter jets roar overhead. On one of the facility’s three courses, each hole is named after a historic battle, and on the 157-year-old Championship Course — the longest and most difficult Open venue in Britain — a water-filled ditch zigzags through the course like a World War I trench, and cavernous sand traps dot the landscape like bomb craters.

Many professional golfers have criticized Carnoustie for its severity — “Carnasty” is a preferred sobriquet — but their debt to the course is immense. The modern golf swing that has brought them unparalleled control of the ball (and untold riches) was invented here and came about as a direct response to the course’s difficulty. It’s basic science: a sport, like an organism, can evolve only when it has challenges to overcome.

Until around 1900, golf was inhibited by Man’s fundamental distrust of flight. Golfers believed that the walking game must also be terrestrial, and the best shots were hit low to the ground. This was particularly true in wind-battered Carnoustie, where nothing in the air is safe. In this part of Scotland, where golf has been played since the 1500s, even breeze-hardened seagulls are swept across fairways like errantly sliced golf balls. But the course, with par fours frequently stretching in excess of 450 yds. (411 m), proved too long for the standard earthbound strategy. That was the Carnoustie challenge: how to develop a shot that wouldn’t be at the mercy of the gales but could pierce right through them.

The solution was what would later be termed the Carnoustie Swing, now widely recognized as the embryo of modern technique. The mechanism of today’s golf swing, employed by Tiger Woods and most of his contemporaries, goes against a fundamental understanding in all sports, stretching back to Greek ideals, that the body must act in unison. In the modern swing, the shoulders turn around a stable base like a coiled spring, building tension and potential energy, which unleashes a powerful, unerring ball flight. For years, golfers had turned their upper and lower bodies together, twisting back and then unwinding like a screw. It was a messy affair, which generated minimal power.

A generation of Carnoustie golfers in the late 19th century happened upon the innovation by chance, then painstakingly improved it. It was a triumph of inductive reasoning over deductive, of scientific method over pure logic. Like the Enlightenment itself, this powerful new knowledge was destined to spread. Between 1898 and 1930, about 300 professional golfers left Carnoustie to teach the distinctive swing at clubs in North America — quite a feat for a town that then had a population of only 5,000.

The most famous émigré was Stewart Maiden, who left Carnoustie in 1907 for East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta, where he was studied and imitated by a young Bobby Jones. Maiden’s swing, passed on to Jones, had significantly more rotation than today’s players exhibit — generations of golfers have further refined the Carnoustie technique — but its fundamental utilization of upper-body rotation instead of a full-body twist remains unchanged. Jones, the only golfer ever to win four major championships in the same year, would later write: “Stewart had the finest and soundest style I have ever seen. Naturally I did not know this at the time, but I grew up swinging like him. I imitated his style, like a monkey I suppose.”

In the modern era, who wins at Carnoustie is decided not by the innovation of the modern swing but by its sturdy application. When Ben Hogan won in 1953, Scots dubbed him the Wee Ice Man for his small stature and unflappable play. Tom Watson remained calm in 1975 despite failing to make a par on the 16th hole in all four rounds. And the defining image of the Open in 1999 will always be Jean Van De Velde ankle-deep in the water guarding the 18th green, squandering a three-shot lead on the final day by failing to play the hole conservatively. “I just didn’t feel comfortable hitting a wedge,” he later explained. “Maybe it would have been against the spirit of a Frenchman.”

Keen to avoid the criticism it faced from players in 1999, the R & A, which oversees British Open venues, has widened the fairways this year. Carnoustie’s general manager Graeme Duncan says a cold, wet spring has thinned out the rough. The winning score could be 20 or so shots lower than eight years ago, he reckons. But Carnoustie’s head greens keeper, John Philp, whose fingers are stained black by the course’s soil, says such a tally would be an insult to the links’ distinguished history: “Golf was never meant to be a fair game, or an easy one. We’ve got the reputation as being a beastly test, but that’s what golf is — it’s a beastly test.”