If you’re going to search for the soul of the game, is there a better place to do so than St. Andrews, Scotland?
Sean Zak, who writes regularly at Golf.com, chose wisely during the Summer of 2022 and penned a book about his quest to redefine his relationship with the sport in “Searching in St. Andrews: Finding the Meaning of Golf During the Games Most Turbulent Summer.” (Triumph Books, $28)
Place this book under the category of I wish I thought of this and persuaded my editor to let me live abroad when I was single and turning 30 like Zak did. [Side note: we should all have an editor who signs off on such outlandish ideas. Here’s to you, Alan Bastable.] You may have taken a buddy trip to Scotland and played the Old Course and poured back a few pints of Tennent’s Lager; you may have attended a British Open there and raised some hell at the Dunvegan, but you haven’t immersed yourself in life in the Home of Golf the way Zak did.
Ninety days of summer mean you haven’t had the experiences he shares with readers. It’s not bragging if it’s true and he not only takes us on a tour of all the great nearby links courses – I related to his description of playing North Berwick as feeling as if playing a game of Ultimate Frisbee on the college quad, “not a care in the world” – but also takes us to where the locals go for the best fish and chips, shares that Jannettas Gelateria scoops the best ice cream and dishes that the steak and ale pie is the best meal the Dunvegan serves. You can trust him because he’s tried them all.
Zak was living his best life and then he wrote a book about it. In my book, he had the best summer since George Costanza got laid off by the New York Yankees in Seinfield. (You do remember the “Summer of George” episode, don’t you?) Zak’s esteemed colleague Michael Bamberger may have put it best in one of my all-time favorite jacket cover quotes: “Zak, you sneaky bastard masquerading as a Wisconsin frat boy. And here you are, in your first book, taking us deep into the Scottish golf experience…Well done, Sir, you’ve done it all.” I hope Zak keeps mining this genre the way Tom Coyne went from his native Ireland to Scotland and then America in his hit series of books.
When I got a copy of Zak’s adventures in March, it was the thick of what I call #GolfBookSzn and I had a stack of them already waiting for me to read. Trying not to play favorites, I told him my policy was simply to go in order based on when I received them. I told him it probably would be a while before I got to his. But one night, the cover was just staring at me – or so it seemed – and curiosity got the better of me. I thumbed through a chapter or two of Zak’s book and I knew I couldn’t resist moving it to the front of the line. I put it down temporarily but not for long. He writes in a breezy style and while I didn’t read this in one sitting, I pulled it from the stack that had only gotten slightly smaller in July and packed it for my own overseas trip to Scotland, where I was headed to cover the Scottish and British Open. It seemed to be the appropriate time to read it but truth be told I was too busy living my own Scottish golf adventure, playing holes until darkness and then too exhausted to keep my eyes open beyond the late-night gab sessions at the pub. But on the flight back, I picked up the thread of the story where I left off and couldn’t put it down until I finished, jet-lag be damned. (I really wish I had read tips such as the locals swear Dunbar is the most underrated course in East Lothian before rather than after I’d been there, but I digress.)
Zak gives an insiders take of the Scottish Open as caddie for Joel Dahmen, arguably my favorite chapter of the book and then a faithful account of the 150th Open that brought a magical week I had enjoyed in St. Andrews back to life in new ways. I loved this anecdote he shares about Tommy Fleetwood’s caddie, Ian Finnis, getting notification around 10 p.m. of the first-round hole locations on the eve of the Open and getting up from the pub and walking all 18 holes that night. I didn’t pay enough attention to the women’s Open at Muirfield so Zak’s up-close account of South Africa’s Ashleigh Buhai’s surprise victory warmed my heart. He takes readers inside LIV’s kickoff event in London and peppers the pages throughout with lots of insider knowledge from the pro game that comes only from being in the trenches. I had no idea that Charley Hoffman’s “greatest skill may not be his ball-striking but rather his ability to form runs and sequences and take your money in a game of gin” and Zak drops in tidbits such as LIV dangling Australian Wade Ormsby, one of Adam Scott’s best mates, to try to attract the popular past Masters champion to the renegade league. That turned out to be a swing and a miss.
Zak meets so many characters along the way that remind him why the game is the best of them all and he rediscovers a bit of that magical feeling that made him fall for the game so long ago growing up in Wisconsin. Yes, Sean Zak had a summer worthy of being bound between two hard covers. I’d almost feel bad for him that it had to ever end except when I chatted with him near the end of the Open at Royal Troon last month, he wasn’t heading back across the pond like most of the writers’ filing stories on deadline from the media center but rather off to gay Paris for two weeks at the Olympics and to continue living his best life: The Summer of Sean, 2.0. To borrow a phrase from Bamberger, Well done, Sir, you’ve done it again.