This Bus Stops for Open Championships

We were weary from the miles and the golf. Six days on firm links fairways—we still felt each of them in our heels—but when our driver Keith slid on his shades and pulled the microphone toward his mouth and said, “You know what time it is,” a smile crept across each of our faces because we absolutely did.

As we approached each destination this week, Keith pushed play on our bus’s radio and through the speakers came a jangling Irish country tune to which we couldn’t help but bop our chins. I’m the messenger boy, bringing my love to you….It was an old hit by Christie Hennessy—very old from what I could gather—but Keith was a dedicated Hennessy fan from County Kerry. The day before he picked us up at the Dublin airport, Keith had been out on his farm cutting turf that he’d dry and give to his sister to heat her family’s home (if you’ve been to Ireland, you’ve likely smelled dried bits from a bog burning in a fireplace somewhere, the most lovely and warm and evocative of Irish scents). By our final day, we knew all the words and sang along. At least those of us in the front of the bus did. The back of the bus was a world I rarely visited, and its customs and practices were a foreign and yonder affair.

It started as a collection of curious but wary golfers—24 strangers, mostly. A few Broken Tee Society members came in pairs, but the majority had never met before, and as we sang together and laughed awkwardly at Keith’s jokes with punchlines that got lost in his accent, I wondered how a crowd that had never crossed paths before was now a team, a golfing family, a band of traveling brothers who knew one another’s on-course quirks and dining preferences and tastes in golf apparel.

I’ve been riding shotgun on golf bus tours since I was a teenager on trips with my dad, and while the idea of sharing long coach rides with strangers and their damp golf shoes seems as appealing as a bargain Caribbean cruise, I’ve come to cherish them as the best weeks of my golf life. You’ll hear of well-off visitors with chauffeured helicopters that drop them at Ballybunion before a quick extraction for a loop around Royal County Down, and I pity them for the joy they’re missing. We know golf breaks down the barriers of geography and class—spend four hours playing aside an unknown face (five if you’re newcomers on a links, hunting for balls) and golf’s shared struggle makes peers of us all. But add a tube-shaped community that wanders from one course to another like a vinyl peddling rock band, and the trials and triumphs of the road forge kinships to be treasured in this world of passing and virtual acquaintance.

Golf bus dynamics require you to not just commiserate and seek consensus—who’s hungry, where should we stop, who’s pitching in for beer and who’s going to brave the on-board bathroom—but unreliable cell service forces you to speak to the person behind you. And you want to, because you both just experienced the first tee at Portmarnock or Ardglass and need to tell someone what your caddie had to say about your shot into No. 6—You’ll get there with 7-iron. Eventually. On this trip, we had more to talk about than most groups, because after six days of playing golf, we paused to watch it at the Open Championship.

Sociologists should study how a group of men who only know one another through time shared at rest stops and on fairways are able to organize themselves into squadrons for dinner, or in our case, into spectating cadres marching toward the Open’s dunes to pick a vantage point or time their collective shopping or pick the Thursday threesome they most want to follow. As a trip leader, it should be my responsibility to ensure everyone has a buddy with whom to walk, but when it’s time to assemble groups or identify self-roaming singles, I hide. I let golfers’ good nature take the wheel. So many trips have taught me: bus mates look after bus mates. Front-sitter or back-sitter, you don’t abandon that bond when the coach door finally swings open.

I’ve been on tours where cliques have gotten too cliquey, and I’ve traveled with loaners who’d rather call room service than catch up with the pack. Those lines generally deteriorate by the day, but on this trip, they were never drawn at all. We all had The Golfer’s Journal in common, which meant a few things—we could talk golf, play golf, and talk golf some more. We knew what a great golf course was, and we wouldn’t complain about the weather as long as we were visiting another one. 

As seats become regular spots over the course of a week, front and back tribes emerge, two distinct colonies divided by the mid-bus stairs down to the don’t-stink-us-up latrine. Each develops its own atmosphere and volume and inside jokes, and the gamblers gravitate toward the card tables in the rear. The front’s a little quieter—good for napping—and by day 2, you find a row that suits your temperament. But this journey’s vibe was uniquely even, thanks to a communal giddiness about all of us attending our lives’ first Open.

We whispered down the aisle about our hopes for the merch tent and our shopping strategies. Blake had heard that the selection was more subdued than at other majors, but we vowed to overcome and wondered whether there would be places to check our loot or a kiosk for shipping it home. We plotted our arrival time—we settled on a 7 a.m. departure from Belfast, with a 5 p.m. return time that would allow proper time to chase Lowry in the morning and Rory in the afternoon. By 10 a.m. we were spread across the hills of Portrush, snapping shots of follow-throughs and sharing them on WhatsApp, exchanging intel on short lines and best vantage points by text. We all made sure to spend a few minutes in the grandstands around the 18th green, no matter the group playing it. Sitting beneath the yellow Open scoreboard we’d watched on television since we were kids was a stirring moment of awareness and arrival.

And then it rained. Not birdies, but buckets.

Our tickets offered access to a free food and beer pavilion beside the first fairway, and without any texting required, we all found ourselves assembled in one of its corners as the water blew across Portrush at a particularly Irish angle. Scouts ventured out from our standing spot to hunt for open tables, searching for a few chairs we could rotate through our reassembled team of 24. I knew it was a pointless endeavor—there were 1,000 Irishmen and women here seated at tables where servers were delivering free pints of Guinness. In local parlance, we were witnessing the start of a session, and nobody would be moving any time soon. At least not until the rain stopped, and when it did, we hustled back out into the dunes to watch Rory drop a bomb on No. 5 (well, we sort of watched it—his gallery was like trying to get front row at Glastonbury, so I held up my phone, turned on the camera and made a makeshift periscope for our crew).

Without input from this trip leader, the group decided they wanted to push our departure to 6 p.m., and our text chain said that Keith had given our plan a thumbs-up. Some of us took the bonus time to camp out ahead of Rory; others headed for a less-crowded shopping pavilion that exceeded expectations (they stocked shirts, hats, hoodies and mugs in scoreboard yellow, and I bagged all of them). Six o’clock came quickly. I’d worried that whatever day’s duration we chose would disappoint half the group and tire out the other, but when I reached our bus at 6:05, the BTS agreed we’d struck a goldilocks ideal—not too much golf, but not too little.

Keith hightailed it to Belfast, and if there was any doubt as to whether we’d enjoyed ourselves, when he told us that we knew what time it was, we shouted Hennessy’s words in full-throated unison as the buildings of Belfast returned to view. It was the best day of a best trip, and as I watched tired and smiling faces step off our bus with heavy hauls of scoreboard yellow showing through clear plastic bags, I counted again just to be sure. Not a single friend left behind.

Featured image by Charlie Crowhurst/R&A/R&A via Getty Images