In January 1994, Greg Norman reigned as the “champion golfer of the year,” Nick Faldo sat atop the Official World Golf Ranking and Michael Bonallack was serving as secretary of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews.
That month was also when Jack Willoughby, a Texan and oil industry executive living and working in Aberdeen, Scotland, bought the Dunvegan Hotel in St. Andrews with his fiancée and co-worker, a lovely lass from Angus County named Sheena Gibb. It was a rather ramshackle establishment housed in a three-story greystone with eight rooms as well as a bar and restaurant. The clientele was just as derelict, made up mostly of hard-drinking St. Andreans who seemed to enjoy a good scrap as much as a proper pint.
Surprisingly, given its locale on the corner of North Street and Golf Place and just 100 yards from the 18th green of the Old Course, the Dunvegan had little connection to the game that had made St. Andrews so famous.
“For a while, we thought we had let our hearts rule over our heads,” said Jack, now 74 years old and the father of adult twin daughters. “I had quit my job in Aberdeen. But Sheena still had hers, as executive assistant to the company president. She’d come down each weekend to work with me on the Dunvegan. And it needed a lot of work.”
Sheena recalls those times all too well. “I stayed in Aberdeen because we still needed to have some income coming in,” she said. “It was around mid-June when I finally handed in my notice, sold my flat and moved to St. Andrews.
“I must have been in love,” she added with a chuckle.
But even that was not always enough to soothe the stress they felt from the flyer they had taken.
“Sheena cried herself to sleep a lot back then,” Jack said.
As difficult as those early days were, the couple found a way to make it work, transforming the Dunvegan into a place so convivial and full of golf fellowship that it came to be regarded as one of the finest 19th holes in the game.
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