Poets, Punks, Rockstars, and Royal Birkdale
A Depeche Golf Online Original by Peter Jones with an introduction by Mark Horyna
With the Open heading back to Royal Birkdale this week come some interesting memories. The place has an outstanding place in Open history. Since first hosting the championship in 1954, the Southport links has crowned a remarkable succession of champions, from Peter Thomson and Arnold Palmer to Lee Trevino, Pádraig Harrington and Jordan Spieth.
Peter Thomson lifted the Claret Jug here twice, winning in 1954 and again more than a decade later in 1965. Arnold Palmer's victory helped grow American interest in the last remaining European Major, Lee Trevino's triumph marked the championship's centenary edition, and Jordan Spieth… well everybody remembers Spieth’s shenanigans in 2017. An Englishman, alas, has yet to be victorious here. The course was the first course on the men's rota to be placed into the women's rota, having hosted the first of its 6 Women’s Open in 1982.
With such heritage and history, regular readers will not be surprised to find that the place has also been an inspiration for artists. In this online original, we follow our long-time collaborator Peter Jones as the professional-turned-painter reimagines the place and its history and sheds light on some of the game’s more unlikely, maybe unexpected golfers - none of them champions. Peter Jones was a junior assistant professional at Royal Birkdale, where attempted to qualify for a home Open in 1961. He would later go an to play in the 1967 and 1968 Opens at Hoylake and Carnoustie. After many different stations as a teaching pro all over Europe, Peter settled down in Portugal, where he is still tirelessly honing his painting skills.
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If a painting succeeds, explanations, even titles, should be unnecessary. Yet we now live in an age that expects instant access to information, quick answers and knowledge at the touch of a screen. So let us begin.
In the center and background of it all is Royal Birkdale itself, along with its iconic clubhouse. The club’s relocation in 1935, from its original house near Selworthy and Lancaster Roads to its white Art Deco home beside the then fourteenth green, redefined what a golf clubhouse could look like.
Local architect George E. Tonge, whose design won the competition to construct the now iconic building, is often quoted comparing the structure to a sea liner. “I visualized the kind of clubhouse that I thought ought to intrude itself onto this lovely course. I imagined the lines of a liner at sea; the perfect balance of the ship at whatever angle and from whatever side it was seen.”
The new building's location also transformed both the course and the spectator experience. The traditional outward and inward routing gave way to two returning loops of nine holes, bringing players back to the clubhouse at the halfway point. In 1965, the original seventeenth hole was given up for a new twelfth, while the eighteenth tee was repositioned to improve crowd movement during The Open. The same thinking has continued with the creation of the new par-3 fifteenth hole for this year's championship, replacing the previous fourteenth and easing one of the course's principal spectator bottlenecks. The place remains a stern test of golf and a worthy venue.
In the foreground of the painting, I have put four figures whose appearances conform no more to conventional ideas of golfers than Royal Birkdale's Art Deco clubhouse conforms to traditional ideas of golf clubhouse architecture. Of course, many people from the art and entertainment world play golf, though most adopt the expected attire and etiquette, particularly in the celebrity Pro-Ams that have become part of the game's culture. That tradition goes back to Bing Crosby's "Clambake", first played in 1937, before evolving into today's AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, and to the Bob Hope Desert Classic, which began in 1960.
On the right we see shock-rocker Alice Cooper, to many better known for smashing guitars and stage props than driving golf balls. The former alcoholic has often described golf as the “life-affirming addiction” that saved him from all the life-threatening ones that afflicted him. Not long after he took up the game, he found himself playing thirty-six holes a day (everyday!), often in the company of touring professionals instead of drinking his brains to mush. With that level of devotion, it is hardly surprising he became an exceptional golfer. Cooper has regularly shot his age and, remarkably, once recorded a 65 at the age of seventy-one. An achievement rare even among professionals… Well, unless your name is Gary Player.
In the opposite corner is Willie Nelson. The country-music legend does not only play golf but owns his own nine-hole course. Pedernales Country Club, also known as "Cut 'n' Putt", lies near Lake Travis, to the west of Austin in Texas. Nelson approaches golf rather differently than the overtly dedicated Cooper. He has been known to abandon a round halfway through. When inspiration comes, he will just wander off to his recording studio conveniently situated beside the course. Somewhere or other I’ve heard it rumoured that Bob Dylan once accepted an invitation from Willie to give golf a try.
Below Willie appears, perhaps most unexpectedly of all, Patti “Godmother of Punk" Smith. Her connection with golf is slightly harder to trace. But among the keepsakes she treasures most is a battered golf ball with which her father supposedly played his final round. An object she claims she would never sell at any price. Her late husband, Fred "Sonic" Smith, also played, and after they settled outside Detroit to raise their family, golf may well have become part of their shared life. In 2013, during the Milan Fashion Week, Smith was much more interested in speaking about a recent trip to Scotland than about anything else. While there, she had attended The Open at Muirfield, describing it as her favourite championship, and was excited to see the Scottish links and coastline she had admired for years on television.
The fourth figure strides directly towards us, bottle of Gin in one hand, book in the other, as though stepping out of the canvas itself. This is Malcolm Lowry, remembered as much for his excessive drinking as for his novel Under the Volcano, the masterpiece finally published in 1947 after many years of rejection and revision.
Readers of the novel will know how much richer it is than John Huston's 1984 film adaptation. At least from a golfing perspective. For the film deleted whole characters, none more importantly than Jacques Laruelle, whose friendship with the principal character Geoffrey Firmin carries many of the novel's golfing memories. Without Jacques, the film loses remarkable passages describing childhood holidays on the French coast, where the two boys played among the dunes with battered hickory clubs, before driving their worn-out balls gloriously into the sea.
Later, visiting Geoffrey's family home on the Wirral, their adventures continued over the links at Hoylake. They courted girls among the bunkers, hid in the famous Hell Bunker, and played the course with the carefree seriousness only the young can muster. Lowry's descriptions of carrying the long eighth in two or watching a well-struck ball appear over the crest towards the Alps green are among the finest golfing passages in literature. These are not incidental details but part of the novel's deeper symbolism, where golf mirrors both life's discipline and, in the Consul's case, its capacity for self-destruction.
The coming weekend will show if Birkdale will continue its tradition of crowning a likely champion. Or, if it might this year favour an outsider. One thing though is clear. The course meandering through the high dunes of Merseyside, will hold many a chance for self-destruction.