Game Of Love

"We're good to go!"

"Then go!"

Love cleanses all sins, supposedly, and at about the 7th hole, which plays to a pretty strand of Eden Estuary, I had the distinct feeling that St. Andrews had forgiven me mine. We had been sent off with two singles: Whitney, an American lawyer, and Burt, a big Swede with a small bladder who stopped to pee in the gorse on every hole, marking his territory.

When you play with strangers, insincerity usually abounds. "Ah, you were robbed," you say, when what you really mean is, "You're hopeless!" Today, however, the bonhomie was genuine. We pulled for one another like teammates. Burt's bogeys felt as triumphant as Whitney's birdies. Something magical happened that afternoon on the Old Course. St. Andrews is the ecclesiastical center of Scotland , and following a ruling dating from the 16th century, the town prohibits golf on the Sabbath. The prohibition flies in the face of everything spiritual. Golfers aren't merely searching for pars and birdies, they're searching for a kind of religious experience. Those who don't play golf, who think it the snooty pastime of the idle rich, might think it absurd, all these lawyers and doctors and dentists and accountants yearning for grace and transcendence. But that really is what we golfers are doing, every one of us. Each hole is a search for that indefinable "it," and when on a long birdie putt the ball falls into the cup after a run of double bogeys or worse, you feel as if you've finally found that elusive something separating us from our better selves.

Anyway, that's how I felt. My peevish muttering ceased. As if I'd come upon a ball I'd given up for lost, I suddenly found my sense of humor. I was having fun. We all were. The rain had stopped, the wind had abated. After missing makeable putts all week, I finally started draining them on the back nine. "You're hitting 'em like a pro," Whitney said. And it was true. I was, weirdly, not simply holding the slippery greens on approach shots but also getting my ball to back up sometimes. On the 316-yard par-4 12th, with the wind at my back, I drove the green with a one-iron and tapped in for eagle, my first ever.

"What is [golf] but the comin' together of our separate parts?" says one of Shivas Irons's companions in Michael Murphy 's Golf in the Kingdom. My separate parts had long been just that: estranged, at odds. I loved golf and I loved being with my dad, but since those golden weekends of childhood, these two sets of feelings had been at sixes and sevens. They didn't need to be, which is what my father had told me.

He played only O.K. The bunkers were his undoing. Yet he was as giddy as I was. I'd like to think he sensed that the way I was playing--happily, gratefully, lovingly--was an expression of how I'd always felt about him. The 39 I shot on the back nine seemed evidence of those feelings. Not that I really needed numerical proof. Long before we'd finished, I already knew that I had played the best round of my life, regardless of the score.