If you had one last round to play – Royal Dornoch
Yesterday at 10:00 AM
If you had one last round to play… now there’s a question.
At the risk of being too gloomy this will come to all of us.
If you're 'lucky' enough to know that this is it then you can put a bit of planning in. If you're not then 18 holes of mediocre golf will be the least of your worries.
If we're going to do this then it needs to be good and a something out of the norm. We don't want to be getting on a plane anywhere and we don't want to be playing anywhere with artificial lakes, buggies or 'USGA greens' or other things that don't matter.
We want to be heading to the coast, where the ground is going to get the ball rolling, straight or sideways into a bunker, and where we can occasionally land the ball 20 yards short and enjoy the next 10 seconds as things get even better.
We want the option to get the driver out on the 1st tee and be able to hit it anywhere and we want the wow factor, two holes later, of enjoying a 50-yard walk that opens out onto one of the greatest views on the planet – endless, chiselled out holes of spectacular links golf.
We want the chance to hit different clubs in the bag, we want to get stuck in a bunker and we want to ignore the starter's only instruction to play one of its par 3s as a par 4 – and then to pay the price by chipping back and forth across the green.
Tom Watson, an honorary member along with Ben Crenshaw, described Royal Dornoch as the 'most fun I've ever had on a golf course'. When he first visited in 1981 he was only meant to play one round but stayed on for another 36 holes.
Dornoch is pretty much everything that I want from a golf course. I don't need a signature hole to be reminded of the place, I just want a run of holes that both flow and vary in equal matter, where there are no obvious slumps and where I can sit on a bench half a dozen times and think to myself that there’s nothing like it.
I don't need to be told what the greens are 'Stimping' at to justify that they're pure and quick and, if I have come on a golfing pilgrimage to the seaside, then I'd like to see the sea as often as possible.
I'd like there to be at least a few holes where I know that I'm incapable of playing them properly, e.g. 14 and 17, but that I can still comfortably make a bogey. I want to be able to putt it from everywhere and I occasionally want to see the odd putt miss the break and end up in more sand.
I want a reminder that I can’t really play golf but also that I’m decent enough. But, more than any of this, I want to be able to come off the course having loved every last drop of it.
Ideally the gorse and sun will be out, it wouldn’t be a big deal if they’re weren’t, as you could probably play here in 50mph winds and biblical rain (which I once did) and still lap it all up.
As to who would be part of all this then there's no right or wrong answer.
The obvious one would be to plump for a family member – first on my list would always be my late dad who I last played with in 2004.
But we've seen more than enough of each other's golf, him down the right and me up the left, so in truth I'd probably be keen to swerve him along with all the other golfing weirdos that I've spent most of life with.
There's nothing left to the imagination with any of us and no 18 holes, even in this beautiful corner of the Scottish Highlands, is going to change anything.
It would have to be some sort of hero status and, almost certainly, a collection of characters from the 80s, a decade which I've really struggled to move on from.
Think along the lines of Ken Brown or Sandy Lyle, maybe Paul Way could be tempted to make the schlep from Kent to the Highlands?
Top of the tree would be Seve and Olly (they’d have to be on different teams), and the chance that, with my final throw of the dice, one of them would finally teach me the sensation of what a satisfying chip would sound and feel like.
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