About

Over the years, as I have arrived at a deeper appreciation of his art, what shines through is Harold Riley’s ability to capture the individual rather than the player, to reveal a truth beyond the distraction of technique, fame or achievement.

Devereux Emmet trained to be a lawyer, graduating from Columbia Law School. The law, however, did not seem to interest him. In his typically self-deprecating manner, he would later observe that, ‘If I did not learn anything else at Law School, I learned to avoid litigation.

We were following our instincts, and golf in the Highlands is all about letting go of how one is supposed to participate in the game. We were feeling what a friend from down Edinburgh way had years ago told me what he felt about being out on Gullane’s links, his own home of golf. He called the feeling ‘an agreeable sense of fatigue.

If the journey to his new identity seems convoluted, it was nothing compared to the bizarre array of jobs on his resume. He served in Korea as a Marine Corps cartographer, then as a Santa Barbara police offer before becoming a meat salesman, maitre d’ at a posh Nob Hill hotel, lighting man at the infamous Condor Club, and a successful commercial photographer. For a renaissance man like Erik de Lambert, leasing a failing golf course from a city that had given up on it would surely be a snip.