Over the last 15 years the Irish have been transfixed by televised U.S. Television, a relatively recent arrival in the Emerald Isle, triggered the trend. Even a swiftly emerging crop of Irish architects is doing things the U.S.A. Palmer has stormed ashore, as have Jack Nicklaus and Robert Trent Jones, whose latest, at 200-year-old Adare Manor in County Limerick, is due to open in March. The sleek American parkland style, with all the accouterments, has invaded. The greens fee was a whopping $115 (as opposed to $45 at Ballybunion). Jaguars, Mercedeses and Daimlers dominated the parking lot at the clubhouse, a handsome edifice with an elaborate, burnished interior, where faultlessly coiffed, Burberrys-clad women sipped tea and nibbled salmon-and-capers sandwiches while waiting for their husbands to complete their rounds. A stately wrought-iron gate framed by gas lamps opened onto the property, which envelops a five-star country-house hotel and myriad sporting activities besides golf. Laborers and tycoons chased par at Ballybunion, but the three-year-old K Club was clearly an enclave for the elite. The occasional electric cart hummed from tee to green. Large grassy knolls, built to accommodate spectators, were everywhere. There were immense man-made water hazards. The tree-lined fairways looked like unrolled bolts of green velvet. No cemetery, no salt air mingling with wafts of manure, no rye-covered dunes, no long poots from off the green. Lobs are no good here."Īh, yes, this was the foreign province of touch golf.įOUR DAYS EARLIER I had played at the Arnold Palmer-designed course at Kildare Hotel and Country Club (referred to by locals as the K Club), some 25 miles west of Dublin. "A good shot to have on a links," suggested Jerry, "is the long poot " - that would be putt to you and me - "from off the green. My drive hooked far left of the cemetery, narrowly missing two pot bunkers, and Jerry Rowan and I took off for some golf the likes of which are bizarre to a Yank. History has it that Scottish regiments stationed along coastal Ireland during British occupation yearned for their native sport and went about walloping spherical objects into holes they'd dug in the ground - ground that eventually evolved into shrines to which millions of golf-addicted Americans would make pilgrimage.īack to the business at hand. As with all seaside links, Mother Nature was the primary architect. Erosion has robbed Ballybunion of not a little golfing turf.Ī century old is this course. The ocean and a broad strip of pristine shore can be viewed from several tees atop cliffs gouged by rain and gales that often exceed 100 mph. Yonder, across the flagstick-sprinkled terrain, was the crashing Atlantic, which, at this exact spot in southwestern Eire, is fed by the River Shannon. The cemetery was bracketed by dramatically contrasting sounds: on one side, the mooing of cows on the other, the thwack of golf balls. I half expected to glimpse Heathcliff stumbling about, searching for Cathy. Variegated, bunker-pocked, pasturelike fairways swerved and lurched through grassy, mist-draped dunes. Here was a quintessential seaside links: wild, raw, treeless, wind-whipped, shaggy - oppressively bleak and strangely beautiful. "You'll want to aim at the left corner of the cemetery," said my thirtyish caddy, Jerry Rowan, who has been lugging wood and iron over the fabled Old Course at Ballybunion since he was a lad of 10.Īs we waited for the foursome in front of us to move on, I surveyed the forbidding landscape. In 1989, during his first and only visit to Ballybunion, he sent his drive directly into the dead zone. Even the mighty Jack Nicklaus was unnerved. The graveyard, which extends along the right side of the first hole at Ballybunion Golf Club, is an ancient, lonely plot crowded with plastic flowers and mottled tombstones etched with tributes to Carmodys, O'Reillys, Collinses et al.
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