September 6, 2010 Issue

John McPhee, one of my favorite writers, is in the magazine this week. McPhee’s piece, “Linksland and Bottle,” is about St. Andrews and the 2010 British Open. In the first half of it, McPhee seems overly caught up in the social scene that surrounds the Old Course, what he politely calls “the class stratigraphy,” and what I would less politely call snobbery. For me, the piece doesn’t really take off until, about five thousand words in, McPhee finally leaves St. Rule and the Artisans and all his highfalutin friends with their Ph.D.s and pedigrees behind, and gets down to describing the course and the game being played on it. I can actually pinpoint the exact moment in the story when this happens. McPhee says, “Play had resumed, but the wind had not much subsided,” and his piece finally tees off. As in McPhee’s previous golf piece, “Rip Van Golfer” (The New Yorker, August 6, 2007; included in McPhee’s 2010 collection Silk Parachute), “Linksland and Bottle” is not so much about the golfers or the golf game as it is about the golf course. And this is as it should be because no writer describes landscape more precisely, vividly, and lyrically than John McPhee. For example, from “Linksland and Bottle,” here is McPhee’s description of the Old Course at St. Andrews: “From this same grandstand perch, the eighteenth tee and the great home fairway are right in front of us as well, where the Swilken Burn, straight-sided and in cross-section no less engineered than the Los Angeles River, leaves town in ampersand fashion on its leisurely way across the eighteenth and first to the sea.” Other subjects are also superbly noticed and given their artistic due: Angel Cabrera’s swing (“hay is hanging from his follow-through like Spanish moss”); a difficult Tiger Woods shot (“Woods conjures a high parabola that sits down close to the hole”); seagulls (“If you are in the top row and the wind is coming over your back, seagulls hang motionless and stare into your eyes, a club length from your face”). Is “Linksland and Bottle” as good as “Rip Van Golfer”? I don’t think so, not quite. Why I say this goes back to all that snooty high society stuff at the beginning of “Linksland and Bottle,” which “Rip Van Golfer” is mercifully free of. And in “Rip Van Golfer,” McPhee had the benefit of a number of very funny Bubba Watson one-liners, which he skillfully incorporated into the piece, and which helped keep the game in perspective.