Stories submitted by: The Order Archive - Brother Devereux

Editor’s Note: The following account has been preserved from the Order’s archives. Some minor adjustments to wording have been made for modern readability, but the spirit and substance of the original telling remain unchanged.

If we do not tend our stories, someone else will rewrite them. That is why I speak to you now, in the twilight of my years.

Do you believe history was written in parliaments and palaces? Or do you suspect, as I do, that its course was bent in quieter places, on fairways swept by wind, in rooms where men gathered after the last putt fell?

I have seen such rooms. I have walked the courses where history turned. The Cuban Missile Crisis did not end in Washington. It ended on a green in Nassau, with two men and a bottle of rum. The handshake that opened China began not in a hall of state, but with a missed putt and a laugh in Kobe. The whispers that shaped Bretton Woods were not born in a conference chamber, they began after a round at Royal St George’s when a banker and a diplomat shared a glass and a story. And the deal that launched a technology empire, the one that changed the way you live today, was struck not in Silicon Valley but over a beer after a lost round at Shinnecock Hills.

For sixty years, I have kept these stories. I have crossed oceans to find them. I have sat in rooms where voices carried the weight of nations, and I have written them down because if we do not tend our stories, they vanish.

The Order was never a club. It was never a building. It was a principle: that a round is not finished until it is shared. That principle has endured wars, revolutions, and the slow erosion of memory. It has crossed continents in the pockets of sailors and the ledgers of merchants. It has lived in whispers, in gestures, in the laughter that softens grudges after eighteen holes.

I have seen it survive the Blitz, when London burned and men still gathered in cellars to raise a glass after a round played on ground scarred by bombs. I have seen it endure in Kobe, when the world was at war and a single shared drink kept two enemies from becoming executioners. I have seen it flicker in Calcutta during the monsoon, when rain hammered the roof and men spoke of futures that would never be written in newspapers. I have seen it roar in Long Island bars during the age of money, when fortunes were made and lost between the last green and the first whiskey.

And I have seen it fade. The rooms are fewer now. The voices are scattered. The world moves faster than ever before. Golf has become a spectacle, a business, a televised circus. The 19th hole is under threat, not from suppression, but from forgetting. The principle that held us together for centuries is slipping into silence.

That is why I open the doors. That is why I place these stories in your hands.

You are here because these stories matter. They are not mine. They belong to centuries of men and women who understood that golf was never about the scorecard. It was about the company, the conversation, the moment when the game gave way to something greater.

I have walked the fairways of St Andrews at dawn, when the mist curled like smoke and the stones whispered of Liang’s cart, the humble barrow that began it all. I have stood on Leith Links where MacLaing moved a sign and made a fortune, and where Calder dreamed of an invisible hole that no architect could draw. I have followed Rowan’s path through Edinburgh taverns, where a phrase opened doors and a nod sealed alliances. I have heard Morag Fisher’s name shouted in Musselburgh, when a fishwife humbled a laird and gave birth to a grudge that men still call GOLF. I have tasted whiskey in O’Donnell’s back room on Long Island, where pros and millionaires struck deals that shaped the modern game. I have felt the heat of Calcutta’s maidan, where Cartwright lured a tiger away with a haunch of meat so a round could finish in peace. And I have sat in Nakamura’s quiet room in Kobe, where sake was poured without words while the world outside burned.

These stories are the spine of the Order. They are the proof that the 19th hole is not a place. It is a principle. A way of ending a round with your full self intact. A way of turning rivalry into fellowship, chance into destiny, strangers into allies. It is the unseen hole, the one that matters most.

Now the task falls to you.

Read them. Keep them. Share them. Tend them as you would a flame in the wind. And when you have a story of your own, a story worth telling, submit it. Add your voice to the chorus that has carried across centuries. Because if we do not tend our stories, someone else will rewrite them. And if they vanish, so does the soul of the game.

The 19th hole is not a place. It is a principle. Tend it, whatever form it takes.

Brother Devereux, London, 2005