
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.

Recreational golfers from all over the world filled its tables and gathered at its bar, telling stories about the rounds they had just completed as they soaked up the spirit of a burg where golf has been played for centuries.
Tour professionals started to find the Dunvegan as well. Tom Kite, Fred Couples and Steve Elkington stopped by for burgers during the Dunhill Cup in 1994, and Jack remembers Kite “really word-of-mouthing” the food quality afterwards. A year later, John Daly ambled in for a pint after winning the Open Championship in St. Andrews.
“One day, Arnold Palmer showed up with Tim Finchem,” said Sheena, who turns 65 next month but looks at least a decade younger. “Mr. Palmer bought a half pint of lager and toasted his old caddie, Tip Anderson (a longtime regular who had died in 2004 but still had a table in the bar with a plaque bearing his name). Then, Mr. Palmer went outside to finish his beer on the front patio. People were waving and honking their horns as they drove by, and he was grinning from ear-to-ear.”
Business grew steadily, among Americans making once-in-lifetime pilgrimages to the Home of Golf and locals who appreciated the new golf-centric bent of the place as well as the good food and drink. R&A members often found their way into the Dunvegan when they visited St. Andrews during the spring and autumn meetings, bellying up to the bar in their blue blazers and club ties.

And there were celebrities, too. Jack and Sheena served fish and chips to Clint Eastwood and poured drams of whisky for Michael Douglas and Jack Nicholson. Astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon, wet his whistle there on a few occasions. Sean Connery once ate a steak dinner accompanied by a bottle of red wine in the Willoughbys’ attic office when all tables in the bar and dining room were full.
In time, they came to realize that their decision to buy the Dunvegan was, in fact, an inspired one.
They ran the place as owners for 23 years, during which time St. Andrews hosted five Open Championships. But in 2017, they sold out. That, however, did not mean Jack and Sheena were going away, for they had retained a 10-percent share in the business, with Sheena agreeing to serve as brand ambassador.
That arrangement has been a blessing, for it has allowed them to stay connected to a place that has long been such a special part of their lives – and those of their customers. And this year is a particularly meaningful one for the old proprietors, as it is not only the 30th anniversary of their buying the Dunvegan but also the tricenary of their marriage, which took place on November 12, 1994. After the ceremony, the happy couple posed for a photograph on the Swilcan Bridge even though it was rainy and blowing a hoolie. Then, it was on to the Old Course Hotel for a two-night honeymoon before it was time to get back to their place of business.
The Willoughbys have dubbed the occasion “Cheers for 30 years,” and it certainly seems like something worth celebrating.

Jack and Sheena met when they were employed in Aberdeen by Vetco Gray, a Houston, Texas-based drilling equipment company. He was from Liberty, Texas, born quite appropriately on the Fourth of July. And she hailed from Forfar, a village some 13 miles northwest of Carnoustie. Neither played golf, but they took up the game with great vigor when they started dating in the early 1990s – and began making weekend trips to St. Andrews. They occasionally visited the Dunvegan after their games on the links, and during one lunch there in 1992, Jack remarked offhandedly to the owner that he should phone if he ever wanted to sell.
Some six months later, the owner called to say that he was ready to do just that.
“I had no experience in running a bar or restaurant,” Jack said. “Neither did Sheena. But I had been a customer of places like that and thought I knew how I could make it work.”
Local bankers, however, did not find that to be a persuasive argument. “The first two turned us down,” he said. “But I kept at it, and after six months, I was able to secure financing. Then in January 1994, Sheena and I drove down to the Dunvegan. The owner handed us the keys, we gave him a check, and the place was ours.”
Jack says the first order of business was gutting the interior. “We also needed to attract a different sort of clientele,” he said. “We wanted to make it a comfortable place for golfers. It needed to have more of a golf feel and be a place that truly evoked St. Andrews. David Joy [a local historian, author and artist] really helped us in that regard.”

Things moved slowly at first. “Remember, this was before the internet was widely available and before social media even existed,” Sheena said. “We had to rely almost entirely on word-of-mouth, and that takes time to work.”
According to a 2002 article in Golfweek by Dave Seanor, Jack did what he could to speed up the process.
“All the people who had been banned [from the Dunvegan] came back [when the Willoughbys took over],” he told Seanor. “We had fights in the bar. We had staff problems.”
One evening, Seanor wrote, Jack stumbled onto an effective tactic. After the bar had begun to fill with “St. Andrews University students and the assortment of usual suspects” who were playing new-wave and punk music on the jukebox, Willoughby put on some country-and-western, which cleared out the place almost immediately.
Sheena remembers thinking that the tide had turned during the 1999 Open at Carnoustie, which is about 25 miles away.
“We were very busy during that championship,” Sheena said. “Some of the caddies came down for dinner. So did Nick Price and his wife. We seemed to be in a good place.”

By that time, the owners had settled into a nice rhythm. Jack handled the morning shift, taking 5 a.m. deliveries of kegs and other supplies and making breakfast for guests before they headed out to the links. And whenever St. Andrews was the site of an Open, he cooked hamburgers on a grill he set up on the front patio.
“I was more the backroom guy,” he said. “Sheena was the one who was out in front, dealing with the customers, serving food and drink and making sure everyone was happy.”
Sheena also came to handle all social media for the Dunvegan, a task she continues to perform to this day.
As for their quarters, the Willoughbys lived for most of the time that they owned the Dunvegan in the hotel.
“We had a bedroom, living room and office,” she said. “It was a working environment, with boxes everywhere. It wasn’t a homey home.”
But about a decade before they sold, Jack and Sheena purchased a flat just around the corner from the Dunvegan.
“It was close enough to work but at the same time just far enough away,” she said.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the affection they have long felt for the Dunvegan, the hundreds of people they met and served through the year and all the friends they have made along the way.
Many things have changed for Jack and Sheena since the sale in 2017. They are much less involved in the day-to-day operations of the Dunvegan and spend more time in the States, where they have a home in College Station, Texas, the site of Jack’s alma mater, Texas A&M.
“I’m more or less in the States in the winter, arriving in St. Andrews each golf season in early April and leaving in mid-September,” Sheena said. “Jack comes in early June and leaves at the end of August.”
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the affection they have long felt for the Dunvegan, the hundreds of people they met and served through the year and all the friends they have made along the way.
“We have always loved interacting with the golfers who came to stay with us and eat and drink here,” Sheena said. “It’s one of the things that has made the Dunvegan so special for us.”
And for anyone who ever patronized that establishment.
Cheers, indeed.
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