1. On Tuesday morning, I walked into a quaint, little coffee shop in town, ordered an iced Americano, and asked the very nice woman who took my order what felt like an innocuous question: Hey, what should I do or see in Troon when I’m not taking in the golf?
I was greeted with a friendly-but-slightly-mortified grimace.
“Oh my,” she said. “There really isn’t much.”
One of the quirks of the Open Championship is that seemingly every year, it returns to a sleepy little town (usually by the sea) where a major sporting event should not — thanks to the modern logic of commerce and convenience — be held. The American mind could never wrap its arms around a place like Troon, a town of roughly 15,500 people. There are a few hotels, a few pubs, a kebab house, a Domino's pizza, a handful of very old churches, a couple of highly-regarded butcher shops and a pier. That’s not entirely it, of course, but it’s close. I tried to get dinner Monday night at a hotel restaurant with a promising menu and was told the kitchen had been closed for an hour. It was 8 p.m.
The Midnight Troubadour
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Americans have a tendency to over-romanticize some aspects of the Open, especially when we would never put those same quirks into practice in our own lives. But there is something hilarious about hosting arguably the biggest championship in golf in a place where your options for dining at 9 p.m. are often one of three fish and chips houses. Imagine the NFL hosting the Super Bowl every few years in a city only slightly bigger than Shelby, Montana (that’s where Cody grew up). Imagine Jerry Jones or James Dolan taking a group of actors, agents and influencers to the best local chippy shack, having greasy haddock and a Johnny Walker Blue. Try that in a small town!
And yet, places like Troon, Carnoustie, Hoylake and Sandwich navigate all the chaos and crowds way better than American cities do.
When the U.S. Open takes place on Long Island (Shinnecock or Bethpage), traffic becomes a snarling nightmare. Same with the PGA Championship, as Louisville recently proved. The Ryder Cup gets more bloated and corporate every year, its original mission now buckling under the weight of a half-dozen galas.
Yet at the Open every year, little Scottish and English towns, centuries old, pull off what is essentially a logistical magic trick. Buses run on time, despite transporting people down tiny narrow roads with crooked stone walls always looming. Local golf courses are happy to open up tee times to visitors (and media). Pubs are happy to have you, but they typically won’t stay open late, even if it means sacrificing revenue. Restaurants feel like they cater to locals, not tourists. There are some exceptions, of course, like in St. Andrews, where Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake are taking over a local cinema and turning it into a gastro pub likely to feature simulators and duckpin bowling. But for the most part, places that host the Open don’t have gaudy steakhouses or nightclubs or concert venues. They don’t pretend to be something they’re not, and while that’s inconvenient and maybe even a little boring at times, it’s also charming.
It’s not all charming and quirky, of course. It can be depressing when the sun doesn’t shine. Not every caddie here is a wise old sage with charming stories; many of them are wrestling with demons and disappointments. Scotland, just like the United States, is flummoxed by how to deal with a rise in opioid addictions. The food is — to put it nicely — not particularly healthy. There is an oft-told joke in Troon when tourists ask what they should do while in town: Take the train to Prestwick.
Yet the honesty of these little towns remains refreshing. When my barista handed me my coffee — with milk instead of half and half, because cream simply isn’t a thing here in Scotland — my new friend offered one final suggestion.
“I suppose you could ride the big wheel,” she said, gesturing across the street at what was, in fact, a giant ferris wheel that sadly didn’t seem to be in operation. “Or visit the beach. But only on a nice day. It’s kind of a nothing place.”
