Ballyliffin Archives - Hal Phillips

Hal Phillips, A Fine Golfing Ambassador: 1936-2011

Hal Phillips — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:30:42 +0000

My father and namesake, Harold G. Phillips Jr., passed away Saturday, Aug. 27, after a 15-month battle with lymphoma, and so I’ve been thinking and writing a lot about him this past week. Most of this bittersweet rumination has nothing to do with golf but some of it surely does. He’s the guy who introduced […]

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A True Golf Road Warrior Does It Behind the Wheel

Hal Phillips — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 04:13:28 +0000

You can’t call yourself a proper Golf Road Warrior, no matter how far you travel from home, if you merely settle in one place and encounter only the courses in that vicinity. You’ve got to cover some ground, laddie, behind the wheel — and that we did over the course of our nine days in […]

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Tralee: Canny Punctuation to an Irish Golf Smorgasbord

Hal Phillips — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 20:54:19 +0000

The odyssey is complete, our nine-courses-in-nine-days schedule has been dispatched, and it’s all over but the ibuprofen withdrawals. Eight links, one parkland track. Three venues in the very north, four in the west of Ireland, and three more in the southwest. I arrived with a bag full of balls and 24 new ones […]

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Ballybunion, Enniscrone and Carne: Discuss

Hal Phillips — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:52:58 +0000

About 50 minutes outside of Bellmullet, bearing down on Ballina, headed east so that we might eventually tack south to Castlebar, Galway, Limerick and Killarney, it registered with me that we were playing Ballybunion the next day. So I was thinking, “How many links golf courses are rated higher than Ballybunion, I mean, […]

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Old Links vs. New Links: Viva la difference

Hal Phillips — Sun, 24 Jul 2011 01:33:39 +0000

The assumption is that all the links courses here in northwest Ireland are “ancient”, but that’s not the case. Donegal Golf Club, also known as Murvagh, was built in the 1970s, though you’d never guess it. We’ve played two even newer links on this trip, the Sandy Hill track at Rosapenna, and the […]

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Making room for new memories of Ireland

Hal Phillips — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:02:49 +0000

The last time I visited Ireland, my brother and I chaperoned the old man around the Southwest, taking in the links at Doonbeg, Lahinch, Tralee and Ballybunion. That was nearly three years ago and our timing couldn’t have been better. I don’t want to go all Jim Dodson on you, but my dad has since […]

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