It was the 1960 World Cup match that clearly marked the coming of age of Irish golf. During the four days of play, sixty thousand keyed-up spectators—a record attendance for the competition—converged on Portmarnock to troop after such illustrious champions as Sam Snead, Arnold Palmer, Peter Thomson, Bobby Locke, and Gary Player, and to root for the home team of O’Connor and Norman Drew, who was substituting for the ailing Bradshaw. O’Connor and Drew eventually finished fourth—a commendable performance. Perhaps it was a good thing that they came no closer to winning, for late in the afternoon of the final round, when all that remained to be decided was whether Snead could overtake Flory van Donck, of Belgium, in their battle for the individual prize, the excited gallery broke through the restraining ropes, the better to watch Snead’s progress, and roared down the last two fairways like a tidal wave, sweeping over hillocks and through bunkers. As one who was caught in the wild foam, I have often wondered what it would have been like if the Irish team had come to the final holes that afternoon with a chance to win, and a shudder goes through my bones.
In all, I have made three visits to Ireland. When I went there first, in the autumn of 1958, I played Portmarnock with Joe Carr. The virtues of Portmarnock’s handsomely varied holes are so obvious that I would probably have grasped them under any circumstances, but this opportunity to observe the superb shots Carr was required to produce in order to stay even with par made it plain as day why Bernard Darwin, the matchless English golf writer, had called the course “one of the few unquestionably great golf links of the world.” I came to know the layout much better two years later, when I attended the World Cup match there, and my fondness for it deepened, familiarity breeding anything but contempt in the case of a first-class golf course. At that time, though, I had no chance to inspect the other Irish links that I had heard such enthusiastic reports about over the years, and, accordingly, I undertook to do this on my latest trip. I was able to persuade an old friend, Paul MacWeeney, to arrange for a brief holiday—he writes about golf and Rugby for the Irish Times and acts as the paper’s sports editor—so that we could make the expedition together. I was sure that Paul MacWeeney, a pleasant, well-organized man in his middle fifties, with, for a Dubliner, a most untheatrical nature, would be the ideal cicerone, for he had long been the country’s leading golf writer and there was nothing about—and no one in—Irish golf he didn’t know. Unfortunately, the plans we worked out in an exchange of letters fell through. A few days before I was scheduled to fly to Ireland, I learned from MacWeeney that one of the key members of the Times’ sports staff had become ill, and that, as a result, he would not be able to get away from his desk after all. “You’ll have an excellent trip and an enjoyable one,” he assured me when we met early in the afternoon of my arrival in Dublin. “You’ll have no trouble. I’ve phoned the people at the different clubs. Everything’s fixed up. I’ve arranged for you to do your jaunt in two loops. First, you do a loop up north. They expect you at Newcastle County Down tomorrow and at Portrush the day after tomorrow, Wednesday. On Thursday, you return to Dublin. We’ll have dinner that night and I’ll brief you on the southwestern loop. That’s all set up, too—Lahinch on Friday, Killarney on Saturday, Ballybunion on Sunday, and back to Dublin on Monday.” MacWeeney handed me some papers relating to an automobile he had hired for me from Ryan Self-Drive, Ltd., and, along with these, a neatly written list of the secretaries and captains of the different clubs, the phone numbers of the clubs, and my estimated time of arrival at each of them. “You could string your trip out longer,” MacWeeney continued, with a smile that was both sanguine and cautionary, “but I’d advise against it. The hospitality at our golf clubs can be pretty formidable. About three years ago, I spent a fortnight myself gathering material for a series of pieces on fifteen or sixteen courses in the west and the south. When I got back to Dublin—limped back to Dublin would be more accurate—it took me three weeks to recover, for a fact. You’re wisest not to string it out.”
Later that day, MacWeeney drove me out to Portmarnock, after we had taken a quick look at Phoenix Park, an enormous tract on the western rim of the city. The park has a special significance for golfers, because it was there that golf was first played in Ireland, and MacWeeney wanted to point out the site of that first course—long vanished—which a homesick Scottish regiment had built around 1850. This was the course that during the height of “the troubles” of 1887 Arthur Balfour, then chief secretary for Ireland, insisted on playing—accompanied, necessarily, by a bodyguard of detectives. In those days, it was a rare thing for a public figure to be so smitten with golf, and though Balfour’s conspicuous love of the game did nothing to heal the centuries-old breach between Ireland and England, it gave golf a colossal boost. (At that date, incidentally, there were seventy-three golf courses in Scotland, fifty-seven in England, two in Wales, and six in Ireland—most of these in the north.) Two years after this, the members of the golf club in Phoenix Park closed that course and moved first to Sutton, on Dublin Bay, and then, in 1892, to a lovely strip of bayside land at Dollymount, three and a half miles north of the city, where their club, the Royal Dublin, still stands. We drove past it on our way to Portmarnock, which lies some six miles farther to the north, athwart a tiny peninsula shaped like Florida. Portmarnock was “discovered” in 1893 by W. C. Pickeman and George Ross, two Dublin golfers, who had a feeling that the land would be perfect for the growing game. At this time, the peninsula, the home of small farmers and fishermen, was a virtually sealed-off community, with its own brick plant and its own distillery. The land that was not farmed was a wild tangle of bracken and dunes, and there the Portmarnock Golf Club was established in 1894. Soon afterward, the little community on the peninsula began to disappear, for the club, as it acquired more and more property, chopped the bracken back and pushed its fairways to the edges of the water.
To reach the course in those early days, the golfers crossed Portmarnock Inlet, which is about half a mile wide, by boat or, at low tide, by horse and carriage. Today, a paved road leads around the northern end of the inlet to the clubhouse, a low white stucco building with an orange slate roof, which was erected in 1905 and has been remodeled periodically over the years. Except for the presence of the clubhouse, a visiting golfer’s first sight of the heaving green land across the inlet cannot be much different today from what it was for Portmarnock’s pioneers—and there are few invitations in golf as beckoning. The course, as you would expect, has been completely altered since 1894, but, happily, none of the improvements have introduced a note of artificiality. The chief credit for this belongs to H. M. (Guppy) Cairnes, an outstanding Portmarnock golfer, who between 1900 and 1930 took it upon himself to lengthen and revise the original holes to suit the changing game, and who succeeded so well that only minor revisions have since been necessary. Far more talented than most amateur architects, Cairnes laid out his holes so that they ran to all the points of the compass, and he routed his fairways adroitly through the sand hills so that there would be a minimum of blind shots. He installed new bunkers, which looked hardly less natural than the ones nature had provided, and though he placed several of his new greens at sites where the land rose or tilted sharply, he saw to it that a well-played approach shot would seldom be penalized by a freak bounce. When experienced golfers speak about Portmarnock, they invariably mention its “fairness.” Of the classic British links, only Muirfield, perhaps, is as free from caprice, and Muirfield, on the south shore of the Firth of Forth, occupies far less rugged terrain. From the back tees, Portmarnock today measures 7,093 yards and has a par of 71. It has yielded several 64s, but old hands at Portmarnock insist that the most inspired round ever played over it was a 74 by George Duncan on the final day of the 1927 Irish Open. A furious gale was sweeping over the links, and Duncan’s 74 enabled him to make up seventeen strokes on the third-round leader, who brought in a 91; nearly all the other scores were in the 90s. The story has it that Duncan played his historic round swathed from neck to toe in brown
wrapping paper, to keep out the biting wind.
At present, Portmarnock has around four hundred regular members and, counting the “five-day members” (who cannot play on the weekends), “country members” (who must reside seventy-five miles or more from the club), junior members, and overseas members, a total membership of about 750. It is the most truly national of the Irish clubs, for it serves golfers from all over the island, and particularly from the Republic, as a second club, much the way the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews serves as a second club for British golfers. Portmarnock, because it is comfortably close to Dublin, also draws an extraordinarily high number of foreign golfers—more than fifteen thousand last year. The sagacious tourist usually manages to work in a lesson with Harry Bradshaw, the Portmarnock professional. Bradshaw, who has apparently never talked economics with Snead, sometimes charges less than a pound, but never more, for a forty-five-minute lesson. His fee for an eighteen-hole playing lesson is a pound. There is no better bargain in golf.
On the evening MacWeeney and I called in, Bradshaw joined us in the bar, where we were talking with Rex Buck, the secretary. Bradshaw looks nothing at all like the standard modern golf professional. Now well into his fifties, he has the paunchy build and the round, florid face of an old-time baseball umpire. In his peak competitive years, he was not noticeably leaner, and the sight of him padding down the fairways with the flat-footed gait of a country mailman astounded American galleries when he appeared here in the 1955 Ryder Cup match. They were also startled by his casual manner of play. Disdaining the refinements of the overlapping grip, he simply grabbed the club in his gnarled hands and, after a quick squint at the flag, rocked himself into a wide, pivotless, slappy swing, which somehow or other sent the ball flying dead on target. No golfer of his class has ever played more swiftly, and it was typical of him that when, as a young man, he first came to national attention by shooting two 60s at the Delgany Golf Club, in County Wicklow, he completed each round in under two hours. Bradshaw, who was the pro at Delgany, has been at Portmarnock for more than twenty years now and has become a permanent part of the scenery. During our chat with him that evening, he poured forth a stream of amusing stories and observations, but I can reconstruct only one. It was prompted by a remark of mine to the effect that the first hole at Portmarnock must be one of the toughest starting holes in golf, what with the waters of the inlet lapping close along the right-hand edge of the fairway. “Ah, that it is,” Bradshaw agreed. “We get a lot of American visitors here who come into my shop and purchase a package of three new balls before they go out. They get on the first tee, and—wouldn’t you know it?—they slice all three balls into the water. Then they have to come back to the shop and buy three more balls. I believe this is what you people in the States call merchandising.”
Ireland—north and south together—is a rather small place, about the size of the state of Maine. Traveling around it by car, however, takes appreciably longer than a visitor expects it to, even in times of peace, which then prevailed. The roads are in fairly good shape, but as a rule they are only two lanes wide and offer few straightaway stretches, so if you get stuck behind a line of lorries your progress can be pretty poky. In any event, it took me over three and a half hours to do the hundred miles between Dublin and Newcastle—a seaside town, thirty miles below Belfast, that was once a fishing village and is now a popular holiday center. The trip was enlivened a bit by the grimness of the customs officials on both sides of the border, which the Dublin–Belfast road crosses halfway between the towns of Dundalk and Newry. As the Republic of Ireland man was checking my car-rental documents, I handed him one additional paper that the Ryan auto people had given me. “No, that’s not for us,” he said matter-of-factly. He then added, with a touch of asperity, “That’s for Her Majesty up the road.” Moments later, when I presented the documents to his Northern Ireland counterpart, I said, “Good morning”—standard procedure in the greeting-conscious Republic. The man said, “Take them to the second door,” indicating the small customs house, and I knew then that I was in a slightly different country.
North of the border, both the towns and the rural stretches seemed a shade more ordered, and in its general appearance, as MacWeeney had said it would, Ulster reminded me of Scotland. The area around Newcastle, though, is quite distinctive. The Mountains of Mourne, a chain of gentle green hills, slope down to the Irish Sea—or, to be more specific, to Dundrum Bay. They have been celebrated in song, and for good reason. Indeed, I wonder whether the links at Newcastle County Down, for all their golfing worth, would have attracted as many championships as they have if it weren’t for the lovely backdrop of mountains.
Although Newcastle County Down is what most people call the course—to set it apart from courses at sundry other Newcastles—its correct name is the Royal County Down Golf Club. It has been a royal club since 1908, when King Edward VII agreed to become its patron, but it was founded eighteen years earlier. The moving spirits were a group of Belfast men who liked the idea of playing weekend golf on real seaside terrain, which Newcastle offered. Old Tom Morris, the revered St. Andrews professional and one of the most sought-after golf architects of that period, laid out the original nine holes and outlined his suggestions for a second nine, which were built the following year. The club records show that Morris was to receive a fee “not to exceed four pounds,” so, regardless of how much farther money went in those days, it is to be hoped that he had the presence of mind to turn in at least a skeletal expense account. County Down’s original eighteen holes, like most layouts of that vintage, were soon modified by local hands—at every club there is always a member or two, be he credit manager or poet, who would rather be a golf architect than anything else in the world—and by 1897 the revised course extended to 5,490 yards. Just a few years later, however, the modern, more resilient, rubber-cored golf ball replaced the old solid-gutta-percha ball, and longer holes were needed to accommodate it. Here County Down was extremely fortunate, for George Combe, the member who supervised the necessary changes, possessed uncommon golf knowledge; the holes he devised were not only long and stiff but marvelously interesting. In the mid-1920s, the club was fortunate again, for C. S. Harden was appointed course curator, as the post was called. Harden, who went on to become chairman of the Joint Advisory Council of the British Golf Unions, stayed on at County Down for six years, during which he superintended many sensible alterations and brought the condition of the turf and the course in general to an exceptionally high level. Both Combe and Harden, like Cairnes of Portmarnock, had the intelligence to leave the physiognomy of the links essentially as it was. As a result, the fascination of County Down lies in its pristine naturalness. Much wilder in its overall character than Portmarnock, it is a froth of spectacular sand hills rising thirty or forty feet above the narrow, winding fairways. Once a golfer enters this wonderland, he is entirely cut off from the outside world, and as the moody grandeur of the links envelops him further he is transported back many decades in time, to the era of Old Tom Morris.
One gets used to everything, so it’s unlikely that the members of County Down find the course the heady experience that the first-time visitor does. At present, the club has 440 regular and associated members—a figure that does not include either the members of the Mourne Golf Club, established at County Down in 1947 for the workingmen of the town of Newcastle, or the members of the Royal County Down Ladies’ Golf Club, a separate organization, which pays an annual fee for the use of the links. On weekends, when the Mourne golfers and the ladies are not permitted to play the championship course, they get their rounds in on a second eighteen-hole course that County Down operates; this is a much shorter, quieter layout, farther inland. The Mourne Golf Club maintains a small clubhouse not far from the main one. The ladies maintain another, and they can almost always be found there, for a regulation that was propounded by the members of County Down in 1894, when the ladies formed their offshoot, still prohibits a woman from entering the main clubhou
se unless she is accompanied by a man. To Americans, so long accustomed to country clubs where the women are not only on equal footing with the men but usually in roaring command, this setup seems an anachronism, but it is fairly standard both in the British Isles and on the Continent. There, with few exceptions, the golf club remains primarily, if not exclusively, a male sanctuary. Most of the time, too, the clubhouse is a much more modest edifice than the adaptations of Mount Vernon or Chenonceaux at which the devotees of American country club life forgather. For example, County Down’s original clubhouse, which is still in use, is a gaunt Victorian structure that seems infinitely older than its seventy-five years. A sizable addition has recently been finished, and this is an excellent thing. I am thinking particularly of the old locker room, which, like many such rooms in Britain, is a dark and fusty cavern, in whose depths I wouldn’t have been surprised to come upon Old Tom Morris changing out of his hobnailed golf shoes.
The Only Game in Town Page 44