My Last Round

A longtime editor for this magazine returns to the golf course where he fell in love with the game to say goodbye

- John Barton

ONESUNDAY MORNING THIS PAST DECEMBER, in the pre-dawn winter half-light, I teed off alone at the Freshwater Bay Golf Club on the Isle of Wight, off England’s south coast, for my last round of golf.

I chose Freshwater to say goodbye to the game because it had been the scene of the first hello, in July 1976, when my father and I escaped from the doldrums of a family holiday one afternoon and retreated to the links where he used to play as a boy with his father.

The summer of ’76 was what the Brits call a scorcher. Golf balls ricocheted off the baked, domed fairways of Freshwater, performing a series of antic bounces before disappearing into a gorse bush, or down a rabbit scrape, or coming to rest perfectly camouflaged in an outcrop of chalk stones.

On that day, we shared a set of antique clubs that had belonged to my late grandmother and hadn’t been used in years. They were an assortment of unmatchable implements—hickory-shafted woods, mashies and niblicks, some irons with punch holes instead of grooves, and others with no markings on the face at all—awkwardly assembled in an ancient carry bag whose canvas hide was now petrified and brittle after decades of duty under an Indian sun, on the colonial fairways of Tingrai and Digboi, in Assam, where my father’s father had managed a tea plantation during the closing chapters of the British empire.

In the summer of ’76, I’d just become a teenager and was gangly, loose-limbed and uncoordinated. I’d tried golf only once before, in a group lesson at school, hitting balls over the rugby fields. Dad hadn’t played since the 1940s. He gave me a stroke a hole and won easily. A 13 at the devilish last hole gave me a score of 152. I was thrilled. I had arrived. I was a golfer.