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A Zen Approach To
Playing Golf In
Scotland

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James C. Plowden-Wardlaw

James Campbell Plowden-Wardlaw hit his first golf ball into the gorse bushes at Old Prestwick -- the cradle of championship golf and site of the first British Open -- at the age of nine, during a family visit to a great aunt in Ayr, Scotland. He returned home to America impressed by the game, but waited more than fifty years to play again in Scotland...(More...)

Alex B. Pagel

Alex B. Pagel dubbed his first shot at the Maidstone Club course on Long Island in the 1940s under the Scottish eye of the club professional Jack Ross. This legendary man endeavored to teach him how to hit a ball, never a total success, and how to enjoy the game, by contrast a long and continuing success story. Old Jack also frequently implied that the true object of the game was to play in Scotland on a links course in the wind...(More...)

 
 
 

 

The 19th Hole: An Epilogue and a Zen Golf Koan (Riddle):

Buddha would be bored, and we, writing on Zen Golf, would be remiss if we did not leave you with a Koan, a Zen riddle if you will. A Koan to take you beyond the elimination of club, ball, swing, and memories of the course you have played and can now replay in your mind.

See in your mind a sea-sided landscape rich in dune and gorse. Uncover the fairways upon which the sheep are tranquilly grazing, discover the greens where cows now munch, create a Zen course in the topography of your mind. It is the planned future course that is to be the stuff of present memories.

And it is a course offering such golfing delights that you are seduced into playing, into strategizing and contemplating the plan of play. And once this plan is mulled over and is finally made, then the strokes needed are conceived and mentally practiced and adjusted and re-adjusted so that they are imbedded even in your muscle memory although they have not yet occurred.

Play this course in such an exact and real way that you will recall it down to the smell of the heather nipped by salt spray down to the shape of fairways and the colors of the various kinds of heather, gorse, wildflowers and even the bent of the grass fronting the cup. Plan then the speed and angle of your upcoming putt. Plan it so that you will happily remember the roll of the as yet unmade putt over slopes and undulations as it closes in on the hole and then the “thunk” of your ball dropping in the cup! A great and glorious round of planned joys so impressed on the memory of the future that it supersedes and blots out the memories of endless past prosaic pedestrian rounds.

 

  

 
Vista of 18th & 1st Fairways - Brora

 
Clubhouse, 18th Hole & 1st Tee – Royal Dornoch

This is the future memory infused with hope and possibility vanquishing the duller reality of the actual present. Your mind has birthed the entire vision of the future itself and stored that vision in your memory. You have indeed created a Zen Golf game from an enlightened perception of nothingness - you have solved the Koan - you have WON!

Welcome home.

 

 
     

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