The expression “links” derives from an Old English word meaning “hill” or “ridge” — it came to describe the ranging dunelands with which the British Isles are uniquely blessed. Unusable for farmers, links land was left to the herdsmen and hunters, and to the first golfers in Scotland who found a landscape ideally suited to their game. Livestock nibbled the valley grasses down to playable height, rabbit’s warrens were patted down and puttable, and where the sheep laid into hillsides and wore the grass down to its sandy bottom, golf’s first bunkers were born.

Image The author on the course at Kingsbarns in Fife, Scotland. Credit... Recounter Photography

Before the helping herds came glaciers and ice ages and millenniums of receding waters and shifting tides that left behind these former seabeds turned preposterous dunescapes that no course designer could have imagined or sculpted. Millions of years of geographical phenomena went into shaping a true links course; nature forged the pathway that inspired and sustained the game. It’s hard to say the same about Wrigley Field or the Staples Center, so forgive golfers when they behave as if their game is divinely inspired. Because it was.

It took years for me to understand that this is what I was feeling on a links — the providence of it all — and to accept that golf in any other setting was an imitation (often wonderfully so) of the game’s true state. Links golf plays differently — the ocean breezes require one to engage the landscape rather than avoid it. It’s bowling versus darts.

Links golf forces you to ponder the myriad ways a golf ball might arrive at point B from point A, while our softened version often suggests one or two straightforward strategies. It feels and sounds differently, too — the crunch of hearty beach grasses underfoot, the thud of a ball hopping across hard-packed sand. It’s the sandy base that makes all the difference — it drains like a colander, playing fast and firm even in the frequent downpours. It is a place where a game meets the natural world in a way to stir the spirit, to make a participant feel like a small piece of a vast plan. Mountain climbing probably achieves the same end, but tee times in Ireland and Britain are an easier summit.

It’s also relentlessly difficult. Links rough is wiry and hungry, and with little to stop your Titleist from finding it, golf balls go missing like there’s a hole in your bag. The bunkers are shoulder-height, the gorse thorns will bleed you before giving back your ball, and even the most seasoned links player will struggle to gauge how the wind is going to affect a putt.

That is why links golf, and the Open Championship where it is annually celebrated, is golf’s greatest setting — because golf is a game for chasers. There is no perfect score, no blemish-free round, no reason to not go back out tomorrow. Links golf cannot be solved, and its whims shift with the winds. It offers a hundred answers to one simple question: Can you bury this little ball six inches beneath the earth?

Dad and I both survived Carnoustie that afternoon; we even carded a bogie and a par on 18, scores that would have had Van de Velde kissing the Claret Jug. But my pilgrimage to Carnoustie was only a stop on this links journey. I am in Donegal, Ireland, as I write this, a week deep into another links binge, and this morning I took five swings to dislodge my ball from the vegetation beside a fairway. I was Jean van de Velde. And I may be tomorrow when I head back out into the dunes again. Or maybe tomorrow will be the round when all the shots follow my intentions, and golf is finally solved. For this chaser, that would be a bigger nightmare than anything that ever happened on the 18th at Carnoustie.

Tom Coyne (@coynewriter), an associate professor of English at St. Joseph’s University, is the author of, most recently, “A Course Called Scotland: Searching the Home of Golf for the Secret to Its Game.”

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