'It Was The Most Ridiculous Idea In The World': Inside One Golf Lover's Ambitious Mission To Play Every Links In Great Britain

A couple of months ago, a colleague asked if I wanted to follow up a feature idea with Sam Cooper who, some of you may remember from his social media channels, spent well over a year playing every links in Great Britain around the time of Covid.

I’m not going to lie, I had very slightly mixed feelings. Why? Well, 20 or so years ago, inspired by various golf travelogue books I’d read, I had the bright idea for a trip to play every links in the UK&I, then write a book with the godsend of a title: No missing links.

Of course, it never happened – wrong time of life what with kids and a mortgage, insufficient funds, and then all the other practical reasons that prevent the vast majority of people with aspirational ideas from ever seeing them through.

Cooper, based in north-west England, had no kids and youth slightly more on his side, but he did have a wife and a job in residential real estate, and his life was no doubt edging, seemingly inexorably, towards that ‘now or never’ point when it comes to doing something radically different. But do it he did in a camper van and his LinkedIn page bears the following entry for September 2020 to December 2021…

Professional development - career break: “Over a two-year period, I left my former life of residential real estate to pursue a career in golf. I played every links course in Great Britain (225 in total) over the period, documenting the process. I now have a number of roles in the golf industry.” His main role now is as a golf course architect.

Ultimately, my curiosity and desire to find out more about his trip overcame any tinges of envy that he had been able to realise what I hadn’t. A while ago I sat down with him for over an hour on Zoom to hear his story…

How long after the idea did you think, ‘I’m going to do this’?

I spent probably more time trying to convince my wife, Harriet, that it was a good idea. I probably convinced her before I convinced myself.

On a scale of one to ten, how on board was she initially?

Well, it wasn’t very high up that scale - I’m going to say as close to the bottom as you could possibly get. Probably a one; marginally above a zero. But because it was Covid, there was that bit of escapism to it. If it wasn’t for Covid, it would have been negative territory.

How did it all come to fruition?

It was the most ridiculous idea in the world but we were living with the most ridiculous imposed lockdowns and all the rest of it. We’d gone on a trip in 2019, which I think was part of the attraction, without realising it at the time. We’d driven round the North Coast 500 in Scotland for two weeks that summer. There was this juxtaposition between having had this great adventure in the Highlands and then being subjected to several lockdowns.

We realised just how nice it was to be up there, the freedom you got from it and how much else there was to explore. I played at Dornoch, my favourite course, and at wonderful Durness and Brora as well. It wasn’t really a golf trip but we were driving past all these courses thinking, ‘Oh, it would be nice to stop there.’

How did it all get started?

The first leg was from mid-September 2020 to the week before Christmas. I played 75 courses over that three-month spell, but probably about 105 rounds – so quite a few courses multiple times. East Lothian was one of the places we were allowed to go to with the Covid tiers in operation at the time.

I had a couple of friends at places I particularly liked, and because they lived locally and a lot of their friends lived in Edinburgh and weren’t allowed to come down, they invited me for games perhaps more often than they might have done otherwise. I benefited from a couple of extra invitations to North Berwick and Muirfield.

How much of the trip was planned and was it largely clockwise?

I live in Hoylake but we started in Kintyre. If we’d got to mid-September, when we began, and started at the courses two minutes from my front door, that would have felt like we were probably wasting a nice window of weather we had in front of us.

It was beautiful that September and, as it turned out, October and November as well. We started in Kintyre because we thought we may as well drive up to the north of Scotland while it’s as nice as it is. From that point, we did go pretty much clockwise.

What was the first course on that first leg?

It would have been Carradale and then Dunaverty, Machrihanish, Machrihanish Dunes and Tarbert as well, which isn’t a links but we played it on the way through. We didn’t do any of the Outer Hebrides courses then - we went back and did those the following year.

But we did then go pretty much clockwise on the mainland for that three-month stint and certainly did it properly all the way to Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire. The reason we skipped Angus and Fife was the Covid tiers, which were different in East Lothian at that time.

Did you sometimes wait for decent weather to get the best photos?

Yes, and that was the beauty of the campervan. The beauty of links golf for me is often in the contours, shapes and bumps that you just don’t see if it’s cloudy or the middle of the day with the sun shining straight down. But I did want to have nice photographs, so it did lead to a lot of waiting around.

If we had been booked into a hotel or Airbnb we wouldn’t have had that flexibility to hang on for those windows of weather. With a lot of those courses in the north of Scotland, for example, they aren’t booked up from dawn to dusk, so if it was chucking it down, we could just take a view on it.

Where was the worst weather you played in?

Southerndown in south Wales. I was by myself for this section. Harriet had a family get-together or something, so she left me to get my head down and play all the courses from Bristol up to Aberdovey, I think - 14 in about a week.

I was planning on playing Southerndown just after lunch but the weather was absolutely awful, and wasn’t getting any better the later I was leaving it. It was quite late in the day when I ended up playing. I went to drown myself in the showers afterwards to try and warm up because I was absolutely frozen and there was no indication the clubhouse was in danger of being locked up until I got out of the shower and all the lights had been extinguished.

I had to dry myself, get my clothes on and race downstairs, and there was this porter walking around by himself. I don’t know if he realised I was up there alone but I might have spent the night in Southerndown’s clubhouse!

What was the best shot you hit?

I holed a shot on the 16^th at Furness with a 4-iron, I think. A lot of people say their enjoyment of the golf course comes from how well they play and I absolutely understand that. But if I’m not playing well, I don’t really care because all I’m interested in is the golf course to the point where I can’t really remember how I played.

I can remember the course, the holes, the walking round, but I couldn’t tell you whether I played good, bad or indifferent. There are many different reasons we enjoy golf but, for me, it’s about the golf courses and the people you play with.

Which courses proved the biggest surprise packages?

Good question. I’ve grown up playing in north-west England and know how fortunate we are on our stretch of coast, but I don’t think anyone ever talks about the Northumberland coast or north-east coast of England as a golf destination.

In terms of surprises - so being impressed with the quality relative to expectation – probably the biggest was just how good all of that section is from Seaton Carew up to Goswick. There are probably a dozen courses you could play on any golf trip and you would struggle to find better value.

I really enjoyed Warkworth up there where the first four holes are fantastic even if it then goes a little off the boil…

Probably one of the big takeaways for me is that, if you’re looking for 18 holes of pure links golf, then more often than not you’re going to be disappointed - even the very best links in the world have two or three holes that aren’t quite up to the standard of the others, and that’s just the inherent nature of linksland.

But if you accept that you’ll get nine or a dozen holes that are really exceptional - pure links golf - there will be a lot of places that surprise you and are wonderful, but there might be a few slightly less exhilarating spells within them. The same could be true at Newbiggin-by-the-Sea up there or Hartlepool.

Yes, Hartlepool really comes alive after the first six or seven, doesn’t it…

I mean, it’s brilliant, isn’t it? But how many people know anything about Hartlepool as a golf course?

Did you get flak from people saying certain courses weren’t really links on social media?

Absolutely. To be honest, that’s part of the reason I wanted to do it and part of the reason I ended up playing 225 courses. Categorically, all those courses I’ve played are not links. Some would have been included because someone on social media or by email said, ‘You must play such and such - that’s a links course.’

It was good to err on the side of caution and make sure I didn’t miss anywhere. But that’s what I wanted to do and that’s a big part of what the accompanying book series, Links from the road, is about.

What about somewhere like Iona? People will either ‘get it’ or turn their noses up and say, ‘That’s not really a golf course...’

Can they not both be right at the same time? That’s one of the beauties of golf, especially in this country. I think in other countries, what a golf course is, is probably a little more formulaic, whereas the breadth, variety and number of courses we have - especially the Scots - throws all of that out the window.

It shows you that a golf course is something that has a teeing ground - even then, it can be a very informal teeing ground – so somewhere to throw your ball down, and somewhere for you to pick your ball out of, and there can be any number of those holes along the way and everything else is up for grabs.

You can have a beautifully manicured, gorgeous, interesting course with the most extraordinary clubhouse and facilities, but it just so happens that Iona lives at the opposite end of the spectrum, with no clubhouse, no car park and nothing else. But they are both golf courses and, to different people, each is perfect.

What did you most learn about yourself from the trip?

From a golfer’s perspective, when I said earlier that I really don’t care so much about how I play, I think that really did start to develop on the trip, to the point now where I hardly play card-and-pencil golf at all. I play a lot of club matches, society matches and I love playing golf - don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any less passion for playing golf but it really did help me dissociate my level of enjoyment on the day from how I played.

Might there be an Ireland follow-up, or maybe a heathland one?

My focus right now is on building this Links from the road series, and there’s plenty to be getting on with. But if people continue to enjoy it as much as they seem to have enjoyed volume one, which took me by surprise, once all 18 volumes have been exhausted there’s plenty that could be written about and explored still, so who knows?

The other thing I can’t quite believe is how lucky I am to now be working as a golf course architect. It’s one thing to write about courses but another to actually be able to influence them. I do have quite a few ‘pinch myself’ moments when I’m consulting at places that I often played for the first time on my tour.

I’ll be walking along holes with the greens chairman, general manager and course manager, with work going on, and will often just stop and think about when I was there with Harriet and our two dogs, living in a van. It’s a kind of circular feeling and I can’t believe it has all led to this.

Links from the road

Sam’s adventure with his wife, Harriet, two cocker spaniels and enough golf clothes for all seasons in a hastily purchased camper van spanned 225 links golf courses across Great Britain. Sam has now turned his travels around the coast into a stunning series of journals.

Over 18 volumes, the Links from the Road series will document Sam's journey and love for links golf through photographs, illustrations, essays and memories from this experience. Volume 1 is available to purchase now from linksfromtheroad.com for £17, with subscription offers also available.