DESPITE THE PAPERWORK AND impediment and our slippery legal footing, I sleep soundly on the lead for the second day in a row and so does the rest of the carhold, including Louie, who barely acknowledges the fact that his best friend is the thirty-six-hole leader of the Open Championship. Throughout the night, a brisk breeze ventilates our little dorm and rocks it like a cradle, but by 6 a.m., when the first light is visible through the thickets, the lullaby has turned into a tempest. From inside I can hear the wind trying to claw the stickers off the windows, and it’s so fierce I’m almost grateful for the extra ballast on our back tire.
When I tug Louie out of bed for his morning constitutional the wind plasters his coat to his body like a bad toupee. The two of us lean into it and head up to the course to get an idea of what I will be facing. Without trees, the visible evidence is limited to the flapping flag on No. 18 and the heaving gorse along the right side of the fairway, but there is no doubt it’s blowing a gale. Although I haven’t read the play, or at least the CliffsNotes, since high school, the turbulent scene makes me think of old King Lear and how thoroughly he screwed up his life. I fear that when I go onstage, I’ll screw up as tragically and be one more old man stumbling blindly across a windswept heath.
A few hours later, Seamus and I rendezvous at our favorite obelisk.
“You’re not going to attempt another cleansing ritual, are you?”
“Strictly for amateurs. I got something much better in mind.”
He shoulders my bag and we head down the hill. He sidesteps the range and keeps going until we reach the entrance to Jubilee, a newer course that runs adjacent to the Old Course, and continues past the closed pro shop. “I’m taking you someplace special. A place only locals know.”
We take the path that runs beside the first two fairways and just before the third, tack left into a large open area where there are three heaping piles of sand and gravel and dozens of trucks and pieces of earth-moving machinery, in various states of repair. Beyond it to the right is a practice area with a green and a bunker and enough space to hit full wedges. The cul-de-sac is shielded from view and the elements by a large dune, and although we can hear the wind whipping across the waves, I feel utterly cut off from the fray.
A hundred yards from the green, Seamus lowers my bag and empties a plastic tube of balls at my feet and for the next ninety minutes, it’s just the two of us, out of sight and out of the wind, hitting and shagging balls.
“I want you to find a spot as tranquil as this inside yourself,” says Seamus. “Before every shot and every putt I want you to get really quiet. Whatever you’re feeling, I need you to lower the volume, take a breath, and lower it some more. It’s going to get hairy as hell out there, and I want your mind and body to be a source of comfort, not something you fight. It should be a refuge, a sanctuary, like this spot here, where no one can mess with us. It might be a little Zen for your taste, but try to buy into it. It will help.”
For Saturday, groups are trimmed from three to two, and I go out second-to-last with Danish pro Thomas Bjørn. Although little known in America, he has a dozen wins in Europe and played in a Ryder Cup. He’s big and strong and known for his dark gloomy demeanor—Hamlet to my Lear.
When I step on the first tee, an enormous gallery is standing six and seven deep from the steps of the R&A to the corner of Market Street. Only a handful are Asian. Mostly they are locals, attracted by my Scottish name and heritage and the unlikelihood of a fifty-four-year-old not good enough to keep his card on the Senior Tour bidding to win the oldest and grandest major of them all. In barely decipherable brogues, they urge me to dig deep and represent. “Let’s go, laddie!” “Come on, McKinley!” “Don’t lose your nerve, boyo!” “One more time for us old bastards!”
There must be three thousand people packed behind the tee, and I have just enough time to locate my bunkmates. Overhead the sky glowers like Armageddon and the strength of the cold wind is terrifying. The wind and cold remind me of the dread I felt every morning as an eight-year-old at YMCA camp before being forced into the freezing lake whose Native American name I have thankfully forgotten. But when a gust blows a tweed cap off the scalp of a tournament volunteer and sends it bounding down the fairway like a jackrabbit, I experience a sudden adjustment in attitude and point of view. You might even call it an epiphany.
Generally harsh conditions will separate the wheat from the chaff, but when it gets ridiculous and crosses over the line, it does the opposite. Unplayable is unplayable, whether you’re Thomas Bjørn or Travis McKinley or even Tiger Woods. The wind, I realize, will level the playing field, and as the worst golfer among the leaders, if not the entire field, any leveling favors me most of all.
My ball flight is already low. I move the ball back in my stance, and I hit it even lower, like an intentional top. It doesn’t go fifteen feet off the ground but has an enormous amount of top spin, and on my first several drives it rolls twenty yards past the much younger and stronger Bjørn, making him an even more melancholy Dane. I open with five consecutive pars. When I get my first glimpse of the leaderboard at the 6th tee, I see that that’s enough to put me alone in first, and when I par the next four, my lead swells to three strokes.
I bogey 10, 11, and 12 but stay safely tucked inside my head as if in that becalmed space behind the dunes. On the next leaderboard, I see that my rivals did worse and my lead has stretched to four. I par out for 75, the best round of the day so far, and my lead is up to five strokes. Tied for second are Tiger Woods and Tom Lehman, who are just finishing on 18.
As I huddle with Seamus and try to digest the reality, a British reporter sticks his microphone in my face and asks who I would rather be paired with, Lehman or Woods? The reporter is about my age, and I recall my own short-lived attempt at on-course reporting, and how difficult it was to get golfers to say something/anything.
“I want to be paired with Tiger,” I say. “No disrespect to Tom or anyone else, but if I’m going to choke my brains out, I want to do it in front of the best golfer who ever lived.”
As I blather on like a candid fool, Tiger pours a twelve-footer dead center and punches his ticket for the final group. I think of something my mother used to say. “Be careful what you wish for, Travis. You just might get it.”