The Seventh at St. Andrews

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Editor's Note:

Excerpted The Seventh at St. Andrews: How Scotsman David McLay Kidd and His Ragtag Band Designed and Built the First New Course on Golf's Holy Soil in Nearly 100 Years. By Scott Gummer, now available from Gotham Books.

Golf course construction typically begins at the lowest elevation because the low spot on the site is often the wettest, so the drains are dug from the low ground to the high ground, same as in any garden. Working up the slope allows construction to continue through the temperate seasons and move to higher, drier land when the weather turns inclement. Conventional wisdom would thus have called for breaking ground down by the brae tops then progressing upwards and inland towards the Crail Road, except Kidd believes the weakest golf holes on any course are usually the first ones built, largely because individuals in any endeavor improve as they gain confidence. The holes along the braes promised to occupy the white-hot media spotlight. That was no place for trial or, God forbid, error. "The weather in springtime is shite, and if it is shite up high it is going to be doubly shite down low," Kidd said to the crew in explaining his decision to start up in the southeast corner on holes 12, 13, and 14. In truth, Kidd worried mightily about a new team that had not yet gelled and a plan that did not yet exist beyond the two-dimensional boundaries on which his routing plan was printed.

Designing in two dimensions eliminates the critical element of depth. The edges of a piece of paper or a computer screen become creative boundaries that, when reached, force the designer to stop and start anew. Working on paper or computers is like painting, whereas working in dirt is akin to sculpting. Over a strategy session that took place one Friday night in the pub at The Dunvegan, Kidd, his senior designer Paul Kimber and lead shaper Mick McShane agreed that the first hole to be sculpted would be the 13th hole, a par-3 projected to play around 200 yards. Under normal circumstances the three would have trod out armed with cans of paint, a flagstick, a few golf clubs and balls, found a natural spot for a green, spray-painted an outline for the green and perhaps the form of a potential bunker, stuck the flag in the ground where a hole might go, marched back a couple hundred paces, kicked clear a patch of dirt, dropped a few balls, and had a whack to see what could be. Under these circumstances there was no natural spot for a green, no place Kidd could stand and squint and see in his mind's eye a suitable place to putt. There was nothing to frame his reference.

Kidd asked McShane to cut a valley and fill some mounds, nothing too polished. That adjective sits atop Kidd's list of despised words. He cringes at the cookie-cutter courses on which so many PGA Tour events are played, with their immaculately manicured fairways, gently rolling mounds, neatly edged bunkers, flat tees, symmetrical greens. They are pretty. They are perfect. They are polished. They are fake. Designers who build pristine courses are, to Kidd's mind, the furthest thing from artists and more like Botox-happy plastic surgeons. Nature is not manicured or neat or symmetrical, and the pursuit of perfection comes at the expense and demise of distinctive features, inherent character, and true beauty.

Kidd knows that no matter what he does at the seventh course there will be those who will grouse. Not only is he fine with it, he relishes it and uses it as a battle cry. "People are going to throw stones," he tells his troops, "so what say we give them something to throw stones at!" He demands that the course ooze flavor, anything so long as it is not vanilla. "Häagen-Dazs makes the world's best vanilla," he is fond of saying, "but it is still just vanilla." Kidd favors Strawberry Cheesecake ice cream served up just like his golf courses: hard, lumpy, and full of surprises.