The royal and ancient game’s last attempt at innovation was street golf — a rather contrived form that, some years ago, saw groups of young urbanites tee off in cities from Paris to Auckland, aiming for holes located up alleyways and across vacant lots. It was fun, but never really took off. Now comes a development that could refresh the sport not by situating it in the urban jungle, but by returning it to its original home: the links.
The Scots, who invented the game, typically played golf on grassy sand dunes and rugged coastal stretches, which they called the links because they “linked” the ocean to inland areas. Golf played on such harsh, marginal land is known as links golf, and it has always been enjoyed in the U.K. and Ireland. But as golfers tire of the heavily watered, manicured greens that have come to dominate modern international course design, links are cropping up elsewhere. A handful of links courses have taken root from the U.S.’s West Coast (Bandon Dunes in Oregon) to Canada’s East Coast (the new Cabot Links on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia) and as far afield as Australia’s island of Tasmania (Barnbougle Dunes).
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