"Don’t
you miss the
U.S.?’
It’s
a question I
get asked frequently, and the answer is always no. Although my wife
and
I moved to Scotland as a
sort of experiment (and I came for the golf) what we’ve
found is an overall
quality of life, simplicity, serenity and civility we’d
never known while living
on the outskirts of New York
City. As a result, the only two things
we miss
about the U.S. are our sons.
OK, I also miss cheeseburgers.
Recently, however, I’ve
realized there’s
a reason we don’t
miss the States’St.
Andrews is becoming very, very American. The owners of the place next
to ours
are from Ridgewood,
New
Jersey. The couple two doors
down is from
Greenwich,
Connecticut. The famed
Dunvegan is
owned by a burly, soft-spoken fellow named Jack Willoughby
who on summer
evenings fires up the grill on his deck just the way he
did in his native
Texas.
Hamilton Hall (the second most recognizable building in town
after
the R&A clubhouse) has been purchased by David Wasserman, a developer
from Rhode Island who is restoring the red sandstone icon to the
opulence it
knew a century ago as the Grand Hotel while simultaneously
converting it into
115 luxury timeshares, ranging from $1.3 million to
more than $3 million (for
nine weeks a year). The expectation is that
most of the takers will be
Americans’extremely
rich
Americans’in
the
manner of two early purchasers, Phil Mickelson and actor Will Smith.
Meanwhile, the leading hostelry in town’the
Old Course Hotel’is
now in the hands of
Herb (Whistling Straits) Kohler, who installed his sybaritic
showers in
all 144 rooms, upgraded the hotel spa with a ‘thermal
suite’
and put a hot tub on the
roof. Within a year he plans to bring to St.
Andrews a uniquely American brand of music when he
opens
the town’s
first jazz
club.
Attached to the hotel when Kohler bought it was a 10-year-old
parkland course, Duke’s,
designed by five-time
Open champion Peter Thomson. Now it’s
an 11-year-old faux
heathland course, its bunkers reshaped with erose
gorse-dotted edges to
mimic the look of England’s
Sunningdale. The
architect of this Britishness: Indiana boy Tim Liddy, a longtime protege of
Pete Dye.
The St. Andrews
Bay resort’a
209-room hotel and
conference center with two courses, has been sold to Fairmont
Hotels
and Apollo Real Estate Ad-visors, an investment company based in
New York
City.
Down the road is Kingsbarns, designed by Californians Mark Parsinen and Kyle Phillips, and
under
American ownership since day one. And why not’roughly
75 percent of the
play comes from visiting Yanks.
It’s
a similar
situation at the Old Course’even
in the dead of winter
you hear American voices as you walk the ancient links.
Several members
of the greenkeeping staff are on loan from Pinehurst as part of
an
exchange program with the St. Andrews Links Trust.
In the town center Starbucks and Subway have arrived’can
McDonald’s
and Burger King be far behind? (Personally, I hope they hurry’the
Brits have no clue how
to make a decent hamburger.)
Even the venerable University of St.
Andrews, a bastion of British education for
over 500
years, has adopted an American accent. Inasmuch as Scottish
undergrads pay no
tuition and students from the rest of the
U.K. pay a pittance, the
university gets a major
injection of cash by charging
U.S. students about $35,000 for
tuition, room and board. Close to 600 Americans study in St. Andrews, and this year two of the honorary doctorates
went to Charlie Sifford and Michael Douglas. In 2004 they anointed Dr.
Bob
Dylan.
Yes, in St. Andrews, no matter where you look, it’s
impossible to miss the
U.S.
