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He mentioned certain "Presbyterian features" of the course--the Valley of Sin, the Pulpit bunker, the bunker named Hell--pointing them out as we passed them. St. Andrews' pot bunkers are nothing tiffany the scalloped sands of other courses. The many dozens of them on the Old Course are small, cylindrical, scarcely wider than a golf swing, and of varying depth--four feet, six feet, but always enough to retain a few strokes. Their faces are vertical, layered, stratigraphic walls of ancestral turf. As you look down a fairway, they suggest the mouths of small caves, or, collectively, the sharp perforations of a kitchen grater. On the sixteenth, he called attention to a pair of them in mid-fairway, only a yard or two apart, with a mound between them that suggested cartilage. The name of this hazard is the Principal's Nose. Hamilton told a joke about a local man playing the course, who suffered a seizure at the Principal's Nose. His playing partner called 999, the U.K. version of 911, and was soon speaking with a person in Bangalore. The playing partner reported the seizure and said that the victim was at the Principal's Nose bunker on discount Tiffany Bangle sixteenth hole on the Old Course at St. Andrews, in Scotland; and Bangalore asked, "Which nostril?"As the Old Course expanded in the nineteenth century from a single track to a closely paralleled double track, seven of the new pairs of fairways ended in common greens, as they do today. These double greens, each sporting two flagsticks, are even weirder than the pot bunkers. Their cardinal feature is immensity. Putts on them are sometimes described in yards rather than feet. An approach shot blown off course can result in a putt with fifty yards to the hole. Standing beside the expanse shared by the fifth and thirteenth flags, David Hamilton said it was the largest. American football teams could play an exhibition game on this green.

While the greens are outsized, the Old Course, as a unit, is much the opposite. Championship golf courses in the United States typically occupy about a hundred and sixty acres. This ancient links course, with its contiguous fairways and longitudinal economy, fits into a hundred and twenty. It is like a printed circuit with its sibling courses on a linksland peninsula between the estuary of the River Eden and the North Sea. When I was twelve years old, I was so naive that I thought golf links must be called that because the game was played on a sort of chain of consecutive holes. Jimmy Kahny, also in the eighth grade, introduced me to the term as a result of my telling him that I needed money so I could buy an all-weather basketball and dribble my way to school. He said, "There's good money at the golf links, caddying." The good money was one discount Tiffany Bracelet for toting two players' bags, a service known as doubles eighteen. I got my basketball, but--in those caddying seasons--no hint that links were called links before golf was played. The word comes from Old English and refers to a coastal topography behind a beach, a somewhat dunal and undulating landscape, untillable, under bushes of prickly gorse, scattered heather, and a thin turf of marram and other grasses. Scotland is necklaced by these essentially treeless linkslands, brought up from the deep by the crustal rebounding of a region once depressed by glacial ice, links about as vulnerable to sea surges as Los Angeles is to earthquakes, common grazings good for little else but the invention of public games, where marine whirlwinds could blow out the turf and create ancestral bunkers--for example, Turnberry, Muirfield, Dornoch, Crail, Carnoustie, Prestwick, Royal Troon. Carnoustie, to the north of St. Andrews, was just past the Firth of Tay. "If you can't see Carnoustie, it's raining," David Hamilton said. "If you can see Carnoustie, it's going to rain." We could not see Carnoustie. David Hamilton--in moccasins, cotton trousers, a blue shirt, a maroon tie, a beige sweater-vest, and a billed cap that said "The Old Course, St. Andrews Links"--seemed unaware of rain, as befitted the author of "Golf--Scotland's Game" (Partick Press, 1998), an attractively written definitive history, amply and informatively illustrated.

Golf links are wherever you call them that. There's a difference between golf links and links golf. Linksland is where links golf is played. It differs substantially from landlocked, parkland, A to B to C to D golf in this way, among others: it is less linear, and there is greater freedom to select a line from tee to green. For example, on the Old Course players can aim anywhere on the mated fairways. Tiger Woods goes off the first tee to a strategic lie on the eighteenth fairway. Players we watched on the sixteenth were driving up the third to avoid the Principal's Nose. Never mind the discount Tiffany CuffLink high hedgerows of impenetrable gorse, the rippling hay, the patches of heather; most of this wide and treeless panoramic savannah is a carpet of smooth grass; you could all but use a putter from tee to green. It looks easy until you see John Daly hunting for his ball on the third fairway, which, typifying a links fairway, has the loved-in texture of a rumpled sheet. A ball lost in a fairway! A player has five minutes to locate a lost ball, and Daly and his entourage need it. The third fairway, like nearly every other Old Course fairway, has the pit-and-mound topography of a virgin forest, but it wasn't made by trees.