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Irish Golf Tidbits: Stouts, Control, Separated at Birth

Irish Golf Tidbits: Stouts, Control, Separated at Birth

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

Still emptying the suitcase of the golfing mind, fresh off the Golf Road Warriors’ late-July tour of Ireland. Several matters remain unaddressed, and so they are tackled here. I reserve the right to keep this tab running indefinitely. Even so…

• Guinness Lite. Honestly — We had wonderful couple of days (less than 24 hours, actually, now that I think about it) in the very north of Ireland at Ballyliffin Golf Club. General Manager John Farren was our host, and he could not have been a better one. He looked the other way when we arrived looking like death warmed over (straight from a transatlantic flight and 4-hour drive from Dublin). He personally delivered Peter Kessler’s set of Adams clubs on the 8th hole of our round on the Glashedy Links. He even joined us in the bar for a podcast when all 36 holes had been completed. Somewhere in this blitz of activity, he made what I thought was a joke about offering us a Guinness Lite. I assumed he was joking; I mean, really… But lo and behold he mentioned it again during the pod, and upon drawing him out, it became clear he was perfectly serious. Guinness Mid-Strength is in fact the centerpiece of a “responsible drinking” campaign being waged by Diageo Ireland, Guinness’ current owner. Unlike American light beers that are marketed as being “less filling,” Guinness Mid-Strength was created to offer an unchanged taste experience without getting people so loaded. It weighs in at 2.8% alcohol, compared with the 4.2% we expect from the world’s most recognizable stout. I expressed mild shock and dismay at this development, but John urged me to try one. He even ordered me one from the bar, after the pod, but it was ultimately delivered to someone else — at which point I accused him of taking the joke a bit far. Still, I promised him I’d try one and report back. I did just that during our stay in Killarney and let me say I was impressed. Depending on how cold it’s served, a reasonable person might have trouble telling a Mid-Strength from the original. Indeed, because I’ve gone dozens of Irish posts and thousands of words without saying it, I’m obliged share the sentiment here: Guinness Mid-Strength. It’s magically delicious.

• Beamish, where art thou? — I love my Guinness. I’m no fool. But I do enjoy a wide variety of stouts. Why limit one’s self? The American craft brew renaissance, which pretty much coincided with my coming of age, has exposed me to just how many ways one can creatively brew a stout, the thickest and “stoutest” porter-style beer a brewery might produce. Gritty McDuff’s Black Fly Stout is one I enjoy regularly, as it’s brewed just down the road from my home in Maine. I like a Murphy’s every once in a while, and one thing I was dearly hoping to do in Ireland during this GRW trip was down a few Beamish, a lovely stout that I’d quaffed on previous trips to the U.K. Well, I wasn’t really expecting to find it up north in Ireland; Beamish was originally brewed in the south, in Cork, and folks up north don’t demand it. But I was dismayed to see it nowhere on tap in Killarney or any of the clubs we frequented in the southwest. Apparently Heineken International owns it now. There was a brief dalliance with international distribution, in 2009, but that’s been halted and it’s nowhere to be found on the streets of Killarney. What a shame.

• Eat, Pray, Love = Control, Feel, Trust? — So, each of the Golf Road Warriors was provided two golf gloves for our trip, courtesy of our friends at Hirzl. We received the Trust Control model, and the Trust Feel model. I can honestly speak only to the Control, which I donned at Ballyliffin’s Old Links and used throughout the trip. Great glove. No stretching, easy on and off, and the palm material (kangaroo leather apparently) was super grippy, without being tacky. I went for the Control because I reckoned we’d be playing multiple rounds in the rain (at which time, I would break out the Trust Feel model). But, as luck would have it, we played only one real wet round (at Carne GC), the Control provided just that, and it dried out in plenty of time for the next day’s round. I’ll report on the Trust Feel when the Control wears out, but don’t hold your breath. I’m thinking this could take some time.

• Time-Honored Tracks Enter Digital Age — Failte Ireland, the very capable promoters of Irish tourism (Failte, roughly translated from the Gaelic, means Welcome to), launched during the Irish Open an online search capability that allows visiting golfers to book tee times, in real time. Go to the Search and Plan section at www.discoverireland.ie/golf and you’ll see how it works. Many of the fine old links are represented among participating clubs, in addition to a bunch of top parkland tracks, including Open host Killarney Golf & Fishing Club. 

“If you want to play a number of courses over a few days, you can now make the most of your holiday by checking tee time availability at golf courses online in advance,” explained Keith McCormack, Failte Ireland’s Head of Golf. 

“Our tee time availability search facility will tell you exactly what slots are free. You can then book the tee time that fits your itinerary with your chosen golf course. All you have to do is decide where you want to go and what type of golf course you’d like to play on.”

English pro Chris Wood

• Chris Wood, Separated at Birth — As you may recall, I played in the pro-am on Wednesday of last week’s Irish Open at Killarney Golf & Fishing Club. Thankfully, no one was hurt. My pro was Englishman Chris Wood and the whole time around I’m thinking to myself, “This guy reminds me of someone. Not someone I know, but a public figure…” Couldn’t nail it down during the 18, but I did upon returning home. Indeed, I realized it was two guys who both reminded me the 6’6” Bristol native: NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Robin Lopez, center for the NBA’s Phoenix Suns. See the evidence below. Actually, Robin has a twin in the NBA, Brook, of the New Jersey Nets. But I’m going with Robin because 1) he dated fellow Stanford product Michelle Wie for a time, 2) he was on my fantasy team a couple years back, and 3) his flyaway, corkscrew hair is more reminiscent of Wood’s trademark, wind-blown, nest-like coiffure.

Robin Lopez

Dale Earnhardt Jr.

A True Golf Road Warrior Does It Behind the Wheel

A True Golf Road Warrior Does It Behind the Wheel

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

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 Ireland, courtesy of our not-quite-British-racing-green VW Transporter. Reputable tour companies, like our friends at Perry Golf, will hook you up with both car and driver, but you can dispense with the latter. Call me a control freak, but I’d rather our party controlled its own destiny. Highlights and observations from our Irish driving experience include:

• In total, I reckon we spent a full 23 hours driving to, from and between various golf courses. That’s nearly 1/9th of our entire sojourn, or 11 percent of our time here. Too much? Perhaps. I’ll drive an hour to play golf at home, each way. That’s 40 percent of the golf experience, not the day itself… I will say that if you’re playing 36 on a road trip like ours, you can’t afford to be driving any more than 2 hours between them. Even if they are right next to each other, at the same resort, that sort of regimen leaves little time for anything else (like blogging).

• On Day I, we landed in Dublin, secured our van and headed dead north to Ballyliffin, 4 hours away at the very northern tip of the island. That’s serious and immediate motoring immersion, but driving on the other side really isn’t that big a deal. Honestly. It’s disorienting for 10 minutes, and then everything locks in, mirror imaged, and you don’t think about it again — until you pay a toll. The urge to hand money to the person on the left is quite overwhelming…

• The big issue is leftward drift, or the tendency to not hug the centerline on Ireland’s famously ribbon-like roads. I don’t really have that center-line-hugging sensation when I drive at home, on the right side. I must do it instinctually. When that instinct isn’t contrived, in Ireland, you tend to hear it before you see it — either the brush of a hedgerow on your left sideview mirror, or maybe something like, “Curb, CURB, CURB!!” from your co-pilot.

• Our gas station/convenience mart of choice on this trip was the Topaz. We stopped at our first one in Northern Ireland, about 2.5 hours north of Dublin. I’m not sure we realized we had passed over this once dangerous, now fairly workaday border. Later we realized that signs in Northern Ireland no longer featured both English and Gaelic language words, but it certainly became clear exactly where we were when the woman behind the counter explained that we could pay in Euros, but she was obliged to give us change in pounds sterling. Hello, plastic…

• This signage dynamic stood in contrast to that which we discovered in the far west of Ireland, where, in Bellmullet, home to the superb Carne Golf Club, we discovered the signs to be written only in Gaelic.

• My mother’s been complaining for all my years about the poor signage adorning New England roadways. She’s probably right, and the signage in Ireland (like that in her native California, in the 1950s) is extremely detailed, copious and accurate. One can simply follow the various road names (N25, R344), or one can keep onesself headed toward the various cities that form the links in a chosen route’s chain, or one can do both. All in all, it’s difficult to get truly lost. That is, if one can read a map.

• I can read a map, and so can Tom Harack, my co-pilot for the great majority of our odyssey. We split the driving and orienteering. We screwed up only a couple times — mainly missed turns at roundabouts (nothing a quick U-turn won’t solve) or not properly divining the most efficient way around substantial towns, as opposed to through crowded city centres.

• We were provided a Garmin GPS plug-in unit along with the van, courtesy of the rental company. It was never once employed during this trip. It was eschewed in favor of a gigantic fold-out map of Ireland where one side featured the northern half of the island, the other the south. There are, as you know, hazards to map usage. Can’t see the left side-view mirror when someone has it fully unfolded in the passenger seat, for example. But there are comic advantages, such as the times I glanced over to see Tom reading the unfolded map but appearing to be hiding under it, as one might hide under a bedsheet.

• There are three major designations of roadway in Ireland: The M’s, like the M1, denote a motorway, or what we’d call an interstate highway in the U.S.; the N’s designate a “national” roadway, one that is pretty substantial, will provide passing lanes on uphill portions, and will more than likely connect major towns (it seems there are also N roads, like the N59, which seem to imply some kind of scenic byway designation). Then there are the R’s which are basically rural routes. They can range from roads of N-like quality to the most rudimentary country lanes. There are some L-designated roads, usually followed by 4 digits, as in the L2364. From a distance, these looked like deer paths and we never did venture down one, by choice or necessity, thank goodness.

• You really want to minimize your time on the rural routes. They’re often beautiful, no question, but they’re a freakin’ hazard and you generally make poor time. We picked up the R253, for example, on the way to Narin & Portnoo Golf Club on Day III. It was no wider than my driveway at home, questionably asphalted, and we were on that sucker for 38 kilometres! Luckily, it was early on a Saturday morning and we only encountered a handful of cars coming the other way. Each time, however, it was the same drill: See oncoming car, come to a full stop, inch by said car (checking both side mirrors all the while), continue on our way.

• Another disadvantage to the rural routes, and narrow Irish roads in general? Passing. Or, as they say over here, “overtaking” (undertaking on motorways, or passing on the left, is seriously frowned upon in the U.K., I’ve found). As indicated, on N and R routes, there is barely room for two cars to pass each other going in opposite directions. When you finally get some visibility and pull out into the oncoming lane to pass, occupying nearly all of that narrow passage, it’s a leap of faith.

• The one place we avoided a rural route where perhaps we shouldn’t have was some 30 km outside Carne, after our game there. We were headed dead east to Ballina and then took a right turn south to Castlebar, where we planned to pick up good road to Galway, then Limerick, around the River Shannon to Killarney. We had a chance to turn right and angle our way down to Castlebar on the R312 — it was clearly more direct, but we’d have traded an N for an R. So I opted against it. We may never know if this saved or cost us time. It’s a decision that may well haunt me for the rest of my days.

Tralee: Canny Punctuation to an Irish Golf Smorgasbord
The crazy-good par-3 3rd at Tralee, from the lesser of two killer nines.

Tralee: Canny Punctuation to an Irish Golf Smorgasbord

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

 

The crazy good par-3 third at Tralee Golf Links. [photo courtesy of John & Jeannine Henebry]

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 in a box. I’m happy to report there are at least 18 left and, God be praised, I’m actually swinging the club better now than I was at the start. That’s not typical. I’ve been on plenty of long golf trips were things get bad, before they get worse, and there they stay, excruciatingly. But I tallied an 85 at Tralee today and it could have been 81 or 82. For me that’s something to blog about.

But I won’t. Tralee Golf Links, not my 85, is the story today, and what a grand golf course it is. The back nine is among the best loops of links golf you’ll find anywhere, and after the brutally long, quite tight 10th, 11th and 12th holes, this Tiger does something unique: It retracts his claws and treats the sojourner to six exquisite holes of only moderate length, as they snake up, over and around some massive dune formations.

Tralee is a bit different than many of the links courses I’ve played, on this trip and previously. As indicated, it finishes very reasonably with two short par-4s, a par-3 and a short par-5 (no. 18). It’s nowhere near Tralee town; just a few houses are scattered about the hillside nearby. It sits way out on a point, surrounded by huge tidal lagoons and an estuary or two. The feeling of isolation would be total, if you weren’t looking down off tees over long beaches dotted with families, dogs, etc. When we walked back to the 14th tee, serving a magnificent 300-yard uphill par-4, we noticed a jet ski peeling its way out of a lagoon to our right, headed for more open water. Would’ve made a fine video… sorry we didn’t act quickly enough.

One of our colleagues at Failte Ireland, the estimable Michelle McGreevy, says that the back nine at Tralee is her favorite loop in the country. As a senior tourism official, that means something. As a former Irish Girls Champion who plays off 1, that means a little more. She’ll get no argument from this quarter. Tralee’s front nine is perhaps as beautiful — it skirts massive cliffs before looping back beside another lagoon, across which sit the ruins of some ancient castle — but the back nine is worth the trip on its own.

It was a helluva way to punctuate ours.

 

 

How the Irish and Ireland inform their golf
A quiet Sunday morning on the Diamond in Donegal Town. That's the road south, to Sligo.

How the Irish and Ireland inform their golf

by Hal Phillips 1 Comment

A quiet Sunday morning on the Diamond in Donegal Town. That’s the road south, to Sligo.

Sitting on a park bench this Sunday morning in the Diamond, the central square area of Donegal Town. The Road Warriors straggled back here, battered and bruised, late last night between rounds at Donegal Golf Club and Enniscrone. What we found upon checking into the splendid Abbey Hotel was a major league party underway, in our hotel bar/disco, and in every hotel and bar surrounding the Diamond. Saturday night in Donegal is no joke, and it wasn’t just the gaggle of young things strutting about. This was clearly a cross-generational night out. When I checked into my room, I shared an elevator with a 50something couple and another woman who had broken the heel off one of her 60s-era, black, Nancy Sinatra-style, go-go boots. The three of them were literally falling all over themselves in hysterical laughter at what had happened, and they wanted me to join in. When I crashed last night, sometime around 3 a.m., there was still plenty of laughter emanating from the Diamond.

It’s morning now, close to noon actually, and it’s quieter here in the square. A motorcycle club has gathered here on the stone plaza, but their comings and goings are the only break in the quiet remove of a Sunday morning after. You may think I’m crazy, but I believe I hear some Irish pan flute in the distance. Honestly. Some business establishment must be piping it in. I listen to the familiar chug of diesel engines (they predominate here) as lines of slow traffic putter by me. The three main roads all meet on this one spot, heading off south to Sligo, north Letterkenny and west to Killybegs. Nothing here in the square is made of wood. It’s all stone masonry, businesses on the first floor, resident apartments on top. People are out and about and the pubs are open for business.

I’m from Boston, so I’m used to the way Irish towns are laid out (i.e. around a square or town green — these forms of public architecture were imported directly to New England from the old country), and I’m used to the Irish. Growing up, I just assumed (up to a point) that everyone in America but me was Irish and Catholic. Everyone had relatives back in Ireland, just as everyone here has kin in the states.

The difference is (aside from the presence of a proper castle, Donegal Castle, just off the square), the Irish in Ireland are all too happy to chat you up about their relatives, where they live, where you live, what sort of trip you’re doing, have we played Sligo, there’s a pub round the corner you must try, and let me buy you a pint. The American Irish are nice enough; no more or less congenial than me, or any other immigrant population in the U.S., which is to say all of us. But the indigenous Irish are off-the-charts friendly.

Oftentimes the Scots and Irish people are compared, as the links courses in Scotland and Ireland are often compared. There is, I think, an austerity to life in Scotland, to the golf they play, to the courses they play, to their outlook on life. It’s nothing cold or perverse, but there is a reserve, a near asceticism to the people, culture and the courses. I love it there, but when you think of the Scottish links you’ve played, do you think green?

Well, this ain’t the Emerald Isle for nothing, people. It’s green and lush. The outlook is sunny, even if the weather isn’t always. Ireland and the Irish don’t do asceticism. They are, in contrast, generally garrulous and outgoing. Their golf courses run the gamut, naturally, but they generally reflect their keepers: they are greener, the dunes are bigger and more dramatic, the welcome in the clubhouse more genuine than those you find across the Irish Sea. Handsome is as handsome does.

Donegal Castle is just a stone’s throw from the town center, better known as The Diamond.

 

 

 

 

Old Links vs. New Links: Viva la difference
The 17th at Donegal GC

Old Links vs. New Links: Viva la difference

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

 

The 17th, a broad and beautiful par-5, at Donegal Golf Club.

 

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 Glashedy Links at Ballyliffin GC. Both courses are superb but severe, built amid the big dunes slightly inland from the older courses at both venues, on land Old Tom Morris (who did the original course at Rosapenna) would never have dreamed of using. I’ve written elsewhere that many of these new links suffer from agronomic issues: The rough is too thick, has not been burned off appropriately over the course of decades, and doesn’t generally have that wispy-penal-but-you’ll-find-it quality. But there’s more to it. Back in the day, Old Tom and his like didn’t have the technology to carve holes from terrain like this — so they wisely fashioned subtle holes amid the gentler topography closer to the ocean.

These new links are more dramatic but, as you might imagine, much tougher, too; the locals, who have the option to play either course at both Ballyliffin and Rosapenna, invariably choose the older courses, the staffs inform us. Sensible.

In any case, despite its relative youth, Murvagh has that ‘old course’ feel. The front nine circles around the perimeter of the property — an estuary dotted with dunes — while the back nine forms a separate central loop. Returning nines is perhaps a sign of its recent design, but what a golf course. Old Tom would have approved.

 

 

Ballyliffin: Old Links a Nearly Flawless Trip-Opener
The Old Links at Ballyliffin Golf Club

Ballyliffin: Old Links a Nearly Flawless Trip-Opener

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

 

The Old Links at Ballyliffin Golf Club

 

All you need to know about the Old Links at Ballyliffin is that, for the 4 hours we spent going round it, I never did consider laying down for a couple hours in the fescues. Not strongly anyway, for they were invitingly cushy and sunsplashed.

We arrived here on the northern most tip of Ireland pretty pooped, following a 4-hour drive north through Newry and Armagh and Cookstown and Londonderry, all the way from Dublin in other words. That drive (wherein I took the wheel) had been preceded by a 6-hour blogger-wrangling exercise at the airport, which had been preceded by the 5-hour flight from Boston to Dublin. I departed at 6:20 p.m. Boston time and landed at what would have been 11:20 p.m. my time, Boston time. There simply isn’t time to sleep, or for appropriate sleep-aids to take effect. So I didn’t, and they never did, and I’ve not slept yet.

It’s coming, and soon.

But first, Ballyliffin, which sports two courses, the Glashedy Links and the Old Links. With Glashedy Rock sitting like a monolith in the surf, a couple miles off shore, and Malin Head (that northernmost point) framing the view to the East, the Old Links — which aren’t THAT old; they were laid out in the 1940s, and renovated very subtly and deftly by Nick Faldo in 2009 — simply never serves up an ordinary golf hole. There aren’t the towering dunes we associate with some Irish links courses; indeed, the neighboring Glashedy, would appear to occupy that sort of ground.

Nope, the Old Links just fits the land like a glove, moves right and left, is impeccably bunkered, and sports the perfect combination of firm, fast, bouncy turf, the perfect combination of green and brown, never anything but a perfect lie in the fairway, and stern rough that punishes but rarely swallows the ball whole. It also features enough wind — in combination with holes that do, in fact, play markedly up and downhill — that 6,300 yards was plenty. One could go further back, to 6,937 yards. But why would four guys working on a sleep debt do that?

I’ve flown to the U.K. before, and it’s nearly always the same sort of drill: The first day is crazy. One gets off the plane and fights the jet lag by playing golf. Yet there’s something to be said for saving a day for the entire arrival ritual, for a long drive if you’ve got one in store, for a relaxing dinner overlooking the course you will play the next day. That’s the difference between an Irish linksfest organized by professionals, like those at Perry Golf, and those organized by a bunch of journalists cum bloggers.

We worked the Old Links at Ballyliffin in to the itinerary because one simply cannot come to this part of the world and not play it. Now we have. Glashedy tomorrow. But now, sleep.

New Links, New Rough, New Sleeve: Doonbeg Could Use Some Old-Time Greenkeeping

New Links, New Rough, New Sleeve: Doonbeg Could Use Some Old-Time Greenkeeping

by Hal Phillips 0 Comments

It’s been a couple years since I played Doonbeg Golf Club, Greg Norman’s “new” Irish links in the southwest of the country. I’ve thought about it quite a bit since because, well, a lot folks have played it too — it’s just south of Lahinch and just across the Shannon River from Ballybunion and Tralee — and we’re headed back to the Emerald Isle next week. Doonbeg GC is also coupled with one of the finest on-site golf hotels anywhere in the world. So it’s natural to stay at Doonbeg and play the course at least once during a weeklong tour of this stupendous golfing corner of Ireland.

That’s pretty fast company to keep, and Doonbeg is a new course, not even 10 years old, so perhaps it’s not surprising that it tends to suffer by comparison. I don’t see it frankly. I found the terrain, the routing and the greens to be of a very high quality, design-wise. Doonbeg is, as its critics contend, very difficult to play. Too difficult, one could argue, but I’ve decided this judgment has very little to do with the design.

Agronomics are important to the maximizing of any course design, but maintenance of the outlying areas on a links course is particularly crucial. We saw what an overzealous fertilization program could do to the best players in the world during the famous train-wreck at Carnoustie in 1999, and this is the nub of the issue at Doonbeg. The dunes through which the fairways quite masterfully weave here are covered with a thick matting of ball-eating, deep-green fescues. My opening drive at Doonbeg landed in the fairway and bounced some 5 yards into the rough, never to be found. I’ve heard tell that Norman himself lost 10 balls during his inaugural round. That’s nuts, and one begins to understand why even those players far better than I tend not to leave Doonbeg with that warm fuzzy feeling we expect following a round on the coast of Ireland.

I had played Lahinch the day before. As is my custom, I drove the ball all over the map. But the outlying areas at Lahinch were quite different, featuring as much brown matter as green. The fescues were high but sorta wispy. I found a dozen of my wayward balls in there and nearly always had a swing, albeit a recovery swing, at most every one. That’s what more than a hundred years of expertly burning off the rough can produce: The perfect balance of playability and penalty. Doonbeg is simply not there yet.

Will it get there? A murkier question, that. Despite the fact there had once been an ancient links on the site, Doonbeg’s modern development came with caveats. The club rightly touts what is a heavy emphasis on organic maintenance practices, but I’ve heard from several people in the know that Doonbeg isn’t free to do everything it would like in caring for these rough areas. I doubt very much the crews are fertilizing them, at all, but I’d bet they’re not allowed to burn them off as often as they’d like. Like I said, I played there two years ago and I’d wager they had never been burned off.

You gotta figure that today not every British course superintendent who graduates from turf school, or leaves his various course apprenticeships, with a working knowledge of how to properly burn off the rough on a links course. Not any more (and, of course, not every course in Britain is a links; most are not). Methinks the crazy-thick rough at a place like Doonbeg, or at Sand Golf Club (a fabulous Steve Forrest-designed “faux” links, which I played in Sweden the week before Doonbeg) is more the result of agronomic stricture, or a lack of ancient know-how in our modern age, than design intent. Here’s hoping it’s the latter, and it is ultimately overcome, because Doonbeg (and Sand) are both awesome tracks in need of, well, a trim.