The Amateurs by John Niven

watched the players moving along the distant fairways, dots of red, white and yellow in an emerald sea.
    ‘Sorry, Bert,’ Gary said finally, just remembering to say‘Bert’ and not ‘Mr Thompson’. He had known Bert since he was a baby. He had golfed with Gary’s dad.
    ‘Och, wheesht, son,’ Bert said pleasantly, screwing the cap back on the little flask. ‘By Christ, yer no the first man that’s been in that state over a round o’ gowf. And damn sure ye’ll no be the last.’
    ‘I don’t seem to get any better. I practise, I read everything I can, I understand in my head what you need to do. All the shots, I know what I should be doing, I just can’t…’
    Bert had been a golfer for nearly seventy years. He had heard all this before: high-handicap players weeping with rage and despair over what was essentially the gulf, the chasm, between thought and expression. It was a commonplace problem in art and–make no mistake–Bert Thompson considered golf to be art. What some people found in museums or galleries, or in the pages of books, Bert found in the arc of a good drive.
    ‘Do you know what the golf swing is, son?’ he said.
    Gary looked at him.
    ‘It’s muscle memory . You’re talking about hundreds of individual movements all taking place within a couple of seconds. This–’ he tapped Gary’s forehead–‘doesn’t have time to think about any of that. It just triggers the sequence and hopefully, like an engine if it’s firing properly, everything falls into place.’
    ‘But I keep shanking it, Bert.’
    Bert stopped just short of crossing himself and thought for a moment before he continued.
    ‘Well, ye know, son, some o’ the greatest players ever born have shanked a ball. Ah remember, the summer o’ ’62, doon the road. Big Arnie.’ Bert looked off into the distance, down over the golf course, over the gyppo camp and out towardsArdeer and the sea, the present dissolving and falling away as he performed the very ordinary miracle of time travel: in half a second there were Austins and Ford Zephyrs in the car park behind him rather than Mondeos and Cavaliers, there were no mobile phones chirruping, John F. Kennedy was in the White House, the Beatles had yet to release a single, and Bert was walking these same fairways with men long dead.
    Bert was talking about Arnold Palmer, at the Open in Troon in 1962, when the great man bested one of the hardest links courses in the world. The Open was coming back to Troon this summer. Just six miles away. The greatest championship in the game. Gary had already booked the time off work.
    ‘Me and your father,’ Bert carried on, ‘we went over for the whole thing. Hot. Course was dry and running fast. We followed Arnie for four days. By Christ, whit that man could do tae a gowf ball. Hitting the driver aff the fairway like it was a seven-iron. Anyway, it’s the third day and we’re pressed right up the ropes at the eleventh, the long par five that runs along beside the railway. Massive crowd. Like your boy Linklater gets nowadays…’ As Gary listened he was there with them too–the Irish Sea sparkling, the sun on his face, the cream-and-burgundy trains running by on their way to Glasgow, and his father alive, young and healthy in this story about golf. ‘Arnie’s playing his second shot, three-iron it was.’
    Bert Thompson had regularly forgotten his wife’s birthday over the years. He could not tell you any of his children’s home phone numbers. There were men around the town who he had known his whole life whose surnames he could not remember. But he could tell you shot by shot how Arnold Palmer put together a 67 at Royal Troon on a summer Saturday nearly half a century ago.
    ‘He gets the ball well back in his stance, trying tae punch it low, like, brings the club doon and–by Christ–does he no shank it!’
    ‘Palmer?’
    ‘Shanks it? He nearly puts it oan the railway line!’
    ‘What did he do?’
    ‘Well, first he hauds the club