We're out at the Himalayas.
The ladies medal going on.
The excitement is palpable.
Just watching some of that stuff, I'm very happy that Randy and I made an excuse to go
see more of the town of St. Andrews.
The worst part was that I played really, really well the previous day at the Old Course, and,
like, one of the best rounds I've had this year, so I had really high hopes going into
it, and of course struggled and got our dicks knocked in.
Well we were happy to see more of the town of St. Andrews.
One thing that's really cool is just the fact that St. Andrews is as accessible as it is.
One of our first questions, we had a chance to sit down with some people from the Links
Trust and, one of our first questions was just "how does this place stay public?"
It's a St. Andrews thing but I think it's also inherently a Scottish thing.
That's our freedom to roam, and the way that links courses were born, were just rough patches
of ground next to towns on the coastal areas of Scotland.
What happens here in St. Andrews you'll see if you go elsewhere in Scotland in terms of
the courses that are on the coast are an intrinsic part of the places they're at and they're
part of the community, they're part of the residents, you know, experience, you know,
if you live in North Berwick, you want to play that golf course, if you live in St.
Andrews, you want to play that golf course.
And I think it's just part of our DNA and our relationship with golf that, we just wanna
make it accessible and affordable and give all people an opportunity to come out and
play.
The Old course is the coolest thing about St. Andrews, the town of St. Andrews is the
next coolest thing.
Listen, the kid loves seeing college towns.
As does Randy.
So sleeping in and just seeing the town of St. Andrews was, about as much of a thrill
as you can possibly have.
SIIIIICK.
So St. Andrews is a town that we're really fortunate that you have a huge university
that's just grown and grown over the years.
So it's kinda seasonal, in the summer with all of the golfers, and then the winter all
of the students are here.
And that's that knock on effect that, for a town of its size, because we've got a really
small resident population, it's got a great offering in terms of restaurants, pubs, things
to do and see, and you've got all of the history away from the golf course as well with the
cathedral, it's a real, picturesque, beautiful place.
How long did y'all sleep in till?
I think Soly and I were up at 6:15.
Oh gosh, yeah we slept in until like 8, 8:30.
Had a coffee.
Honestly, I don't wanna rub it in, but it was a delightful.... delightful day.
So one of the coolest things that you can see from the Old Course is the Himalayas putting
green.
The Him-All-ee-yuhs, as the locals like to call it.
And it's this putting green that Old Tom Morris built for the Ladies Putting Club back in
the 1840's-1850's I think.
And it turned out, it was all of these wives of the R&A members who basically were like,
hey we can, yunno, we like to putt, we don't really like to play golf.
We like to do stuff too.
So, like, they're like, cool!
Why don't you guys have this putting green and you guys go have matches out there.
So they have all of these different competitions out there and all these different medals,
trophies, everything that they play for, comps, and as someone who struggles to hit driver
on the planet consistently, the idea of like a one-on-one putting match is.... mind blowing.
That's as appealing as it gets to me.
No joke, Randy and I probably sat here for two hours, watching the ladies putting club.
It's incredible.
It's awesome.
They have absolutely closed off the waiting list to get into this club.
I think someone has to die before they let a new member in.
They've got an edge to them and they're all really chippy.
It looks like the most fun you could possibly have.
The most fun I've ever seen in my entire life.
Just these like, completely like no stakes, but also kind of all the stakes, like you
could tell it means a ton to all of these ladies.
You can see in the pictures here, this putting green is bananas.
It's so hard to lag it close, and they're soooo good from like 40 feet, put 'em to any
hole, and the cups change every day, so it's not like you learn every putt or whatever,
they change every day.
They're so good at knocking it to stone dead, every time, and then, they all have the yips
within like, they can't make a putt within like 2.5-3 feet.
I'm only laughing because I can't hit the hole from like four feet either.
They're going to extra holes!
I'm gutted.
The visor lady was putting on a really good charge.
Hitting really aggressive putts.
And it just caught up with her a bit at the last there.
She kinda left herself a tough downhiller.
But she made it pretty far in the bracket.
Now she goes to enjoy a bit of time on the yellow course.
It looked like there was quite a crowd there as well.
For sure.
Well I mean yeah.
Well actually, a lot of those people are public that got turned away.
Our man Kevin sets the course, he just took the job recently in the last couple of months.
I felt bad for him, he's gotta turn away all of these people who are just, they're chipper
and they're rolling up with their putters and "I'm sorry the course is closed just now",
and he's gotta explain that basically this piece of land is owned by the ladies putting
club and then they basically let the public use it at no cost, and then whenever they
feel like closing it down for competitions, they're well within their right to do so,
and uh, that's what happens three days a week.
"Did any of the ladies wanna come on camera?"
They did not wanna come on camera.
It is a very proper club and I think there's a hierarchy of things.
Basically the club secretary is allowed to speak for the club and I don't believe anyone
else is.
And I suppose when you're not accepting new members you kinda, don't wanna ruffle any
feathers, get yourself kicked out.
And one thing that was weird, and I don't get why they do this.
Is that the ladies have numbered flags, so they know what hole is which, and then Kevin
goes and he has to switch out all of the numbered flags for unnumbered flags so the public has
no clue what's going on.
It's a beautiful disaster.
I can't get enough.
I think we should start a putting club when we get back to Jacksonville.
Ladies only, and me and Randy.
Let's go.
So tell me what I missed, tell me about Crail.
Well Poosh joined us.
We got out to Crail, it was kind of a gloomy, gray morning.
Tell me about this secretary, because I saw a lot of this dude in all of the footage.
Yeah, he was a menace.
He knew basically anything about everything.
Or everything about anything.
Scotland was glaciated and when the glaciers melted and receded.
The land virtually sprung up a little bit.
So what you're looking at on Balcomie is a sand beach which is higher than the sea level.
It's the longest continuously inhabited piece of ground in Scotland.
They found Mesolithic artifacts from 6,000 to 9,000 years BC.
He was on another level.
He seems like the kinda guy you'd wanna have at like every cocktail party.
Yeah.
Because it was such a narrow strip of land and it was common ground, there was a great
deal of tension between the golfers, and the other people that use the ground.
A farmer paid a young boy to drive cattle a gallup up and down the golf course to ruin
it for the golfers.
He was like the Scottish middle aged version of Panther Mike.
That's the highest honor.
Shoutout Panther Mike.
Not only did he give us a history of this course, he gave us a history of their other
course, designed by Gil Hanse, it was his first solo design.
He gave us a history of golf in Scotland.
The glaciation.
The geological history.
The place was mad glaciated.
Eastern Scotland, the whole thing was, yunno Viking history, the whole thing was more than
I had bargained for.
I don't think I even had a cup of coffee.
You probably didn't need one.
No, no.
So Crail wasn't the first club to invent hole cups, but we were the first club to officially
record the use of them.
It's in our minutes from 1874.
Alan Robertson was the world's first golf professional.
He was the first guy to ever make a living from playing golf.
The 12th is a very difficult green to putt, well that's because there's a Viking defensive
structure runs through the middle of that green.
Actually of this was after we played, this was after we thoroughly got punched in the
face.
It's not a very long or, yunno, to the eye it's not a very challenging course.
And then, I thought it was ten times harder than most of the other courses we played on
this trip.
Well while you guys were getting a history lesson, we were doing a little bit of exploring
of our own.
Randy and I are huge into seeing college campuses.
This is probably, I think, our 5th or 6th of 2018 and the big guy just, what a thrill
to see him... this was the best... what a thrill to see him roaming around academia,
he loves it.
It's like some Harry Potter shit.
I'm big on seeing campuses.
I love seeing college campuses.
And this campus feels like like it couldn't be anymore college.
The most college.
What do you think?
It's magnificent turf.
Look at this quad!
This is a proper quad.
You could huck D's out here for hours.
You might need to pump some photos of Randy in college here.
Yeah so Randy played college basketball for a couple of years at Washington and Lee.
So he was a point guard, he's 6'8" and he was a point guard.
And then his coach got fired after his sophomore year, or after his freshman year, and the
new guy wanted him to bang down low.
It's not his style.
And Randy said, I'm just gonna quit.
It's gonna be a no for me.
And transfer to Miami.
Yeah this was a sign about someone that got burned at the stake at this spot.
It was pretty heavy stuff.
You better be careful expressing some of your views around here.
That's heavy.
I think Randy took more photographs and videos of cemeteries than he did on golf courses.
Yeah he, like, shoutout to Randy, but he's not always quick on the trigger with filming
on the course, but he shot like 15 cemeteries while we were in Scotland.
Very morbid.
He loves shooting video of cemeteries.
And this of course, he's a huge fan of the royal family, so this was quite a thrill as
well for him.
Crusin' weather.
You don't see a lot of people getting a convertible on their Scottish vacation, so shoutout to
BMW for making that happen.
And giraffe Randy, poking his head out.
But enough about that, let's get into the actual golf course.
So Crail, pretty compact property.
We really just didn't pack our game.
So "Boathouse" is the first hole.
You hit down, it's like this drivable par-4.
And along the right is this boathouse.
And there's lifeboats in there.
Soly drove it to the right side, he had to play over the boathouse.
And then a theme too, Poosh covers the ball so well with his sternum.
Poosh has some old school Ted Ray vibes.
So you go out, the first four holes, first five holes are along the coast.
And then you start coming back in, but they're all right on top of each other.
You guys really struggled here.
That's heavy contact out of the bunker.
That was OB.
Way OB.
There's barbed wire, there's like cows grazing over there.
It's so on top of each other that you're hitting into other groups.
Hitting chili peppers down the other fairway.
We saw the Australians that you played with.
We were playing up their fairway, they were playing up our fairway.
Nathan and Brendan and the boys.
I thought I flagged that one.
Didn't.
Another theme is on a trip like this, obviously we're trying to make everything as authentic
as possible but we played so bad that.
Alright no one wants to see us miss this - like, that was a shank.
Nobody wants to see us miss this many putts, so we started... like alright, we gotta, I
think this was like the fourth take of that and I still couldn't even get it remotely
close there.
So we started, like, we obviously need to start making some putts here.
usually we're pretty authentic on the scores and stuff, but we just needed some video of
putts going in the hole.
And it looked like you guys had a massive struggle trying to make that happen.
That's a bad....
God that's a bad effort.
Obviously we weren't playing Tilt, Musselburgh, and Crail we did not play Tilt.
And Cullen we didn't play Tilt either, later in the season.
Were you guys playing the friendly Herman Cain.
I don't even think we were playing anything.
I think by the 8th hole, it was like, yo I need some action guys.
There's groups everywhere, and its quaint and, super old school, and it's kinda rustic
golf in a sense.
God It looks like you're just hitting into everybody all the time.
Yeah I mean that's the tee box for the next hole, short right where all of the bad players
miss, that's where the wipey scrape lands, yunno.
Here's Poosh talking a little bit more about that.
There's no tee shot at Crail where you stand on the tee and you don't think you could possibly
kill somebody with your tee ball.
Really deep in the process, trying to find the secret in the dirt.
We were deep in our own process to be totally candid with you.
We hit up a local farmer's market, picked up some fresh strawberries.
God it was delightful.
Crack on!
That was something about Scotland, the produce was.... the produce was off the charts, the
produce was off the charts and the fish is really good too.
Listen, you wanna talk about the food?
People bitch about the food, but the food was good.
That was kinda the best surprise of the trip.
I mean obviously they've got meat and potatoes, but they've got plenty of good fish, a ton
of good veggies.
We eventually started kinda golfing our ball.
The par-3's for whatever reason I had like 5-iron into all of the par-3's.
I played exceptionally well on those.
You don't see a lot of balls stopping and spinning in Scotland, that's a little concerning.
Soly was hitting stingers all day, shoutout Pete Dye.
Was this an original Pete Dye?
This was like the 1850's version of Pete Dye. Lang wang here, par-5, my only birdie of the
day.
I've watched this putt like 25 times, and I'm pretty sure, like, it goes in, right?
Like, it's definitely in, definitely in, definitely in....
Oh that's brutal.
Did you fix that?
I went back and fixed that after I holed out, I felt terrible.
That's disgusting.
It was so firm.
That's true it probably didn't matter.
So Poosh, for a big big man, extremely flexible, extremely live.
I think he's kind of a Yogi.
So you go down this path, and go back to the last four holes of the course and you think
it's kinda gonna run out of gas, but actually those last four holes are just as good, those
are behind the clubhouse.
the clubhouse sits up, great view over those four holes and the rest of the course on the
other side.
There's this Robert Louis Stephenson lighthouse that, it was the original lighthouse upon
which all other lighthouses henceforth were modeled after.
The big guy loves infrastructure.
I do.
Guilty.
Obviously we wanna remain objective about courses, but to a certain extent that's just
impossible, it was gloomy and gray when we started playing, right when we were leaving
the light came out, we threw the drone up, and it just started popping.
It was night and day versus what we had teed off in.
I wish we had another crack at Crail because we could really go back, and I think a lot
of the features that we didn't even see because they just looked flat in flat light, popped.
So that really set the tone for the afternoon, the most spiritual experience of my life.
We'll see that next week.
Excuse me, trying to get to Elie.
How's it look?
Magnificent.
How do you feel?
Not right now guys.
The integrity of golf is preserved.
Alright we're checking out this Indian food.
Good stuff on the way in.
You know it's good, if he's been here.
Monty, Boris Johnson.