Golf Logo Explained: County Louth Golf Club, Baltray, Ireland

Posted on May 27, 2014 by David Owen

County Louth Golf Club is an Irish links course near the intersection of the Boyne River and the Irish Sea, about 35 miles north of Dublin. It’s often referred to by the name of the nearest village, Baltray, which is sort of a suburb of the ancient port of Drogheda — a city whose name is easier to pronounce correctly if you have a mild case of bronchitis. Drogheda was founded by Vikings more than a thousand years ago. In medieval times, it was surrounded by a wall, a few substantial parts of which remain. And if you visit St. Peter’s Church, on West Street, you can see the preserved head of St. Oliver Plunkett, an Irish clergyman, who was drawn, hanged, and quartered in England in the late seventeenth century:

In 1908, when Plunkett had been dead for 227 years and County Louth Golf Club was 16 years old, a local man named Col. McWeeney wrote the following tribute:

Doctors may boast of their skill pharmaceutical,

Measure out drugs in a grave sort of way,

If you want health to pervade every cuticle,

Go and play golf on the Links at Baltray.

Tuberculosis is cured in two doses there,

All the wild ills of the flesh fade away;

Double pneumonia, asthma, insomnia,

Weep for their sins on the Links at Baltray.

There’s a good deal more than that (including “Burn all your bandages, rise to health’s pinnacle/Crutches are golf sticks in play at Baltray”). Based on my own experience, I would say that the medical advice in the poem is sound. Here are J.P. and David M. taking the cure at Baltray during our trip to Scotland and Ireland earlier this month:

The head pro at Baltray is Paddy McGuirk, who was in the golf shop when we checked in. This is what he looks like:

He had some success in professional tournaments in the 1970s, when he looked like this:

I took my first golf trip to Ireland in 1992, on assignment for Golf Digest. One day, I gave a lift to an elderly man, who had approached me in the parking lot of the Royal Dublin Golf Club and asked me if I could drop him in the city. He said his name was Michael Dorgan. I asked him how long he’d been a member of Royal Dublin, and he said:

I am a caddie. I have worked on a hundred and fifty-seven golf courses—eighty-three in Ireland, seventy-one in England, and three in Scotland. As I lie in bed at night, I recite their names. I used to carry between twelve and fourteen bags a week, in season; I now carry two, because I won’t work for less than I am worth. I preferred caddying in England, because the pay is better there, but my wife missed her family in Dublin and wanted to return. I couldn’t cook, so I had to come along. I was born in Cork. I have caddied for ten Ryder Cup players, some before, some after, none during. I caddied for Paddy McGuirk when he won the Carroll’s International, in 1973. He insisted on carrying a ridiculous selection of clubs. He carried a 1-wood, a 2-wood, and a 5-wood. He couldn’t hit the 2-wood, and he didn’t need the 5-wood because he also carried a 2-iron. He hit his driver from the fairway sixteen times in that tournament. He would grip it down, cut the hell out of it, and pray.

McGuirk’s professional competitive career was cut short by the yips. (That’s the Carroll’s International trophy he’s holding in the photo above.)

During my visit in 1992, County Louth was celebrating its hundredth anniversary, and to mark that occasion the club had created a centenary logo, which you can see at the top of this post. I believe that that logo was a variation on one the club had been using for a long time, but there used to be another logo, which consisted of just a crescent moon, a star, a pair of crossed golf clubs, a (small) golf ball, and the name of the club. In 1992, I bought a shirt with that other logo on it, and for years and years it was my favorite golf shirt. Eventually, I must have worn it to tatters and thrown it away, because it’s no longer in my closet.

When I packed my suitcase for my this year’s trip, I left plenty of room for new Baltray-themed merchandise, including several replacement shirts exactly like my old one. But when I got to the club, I couldn’t find a shirt or a hat or anything else in the golf shop with the logo I remembered. All I saw was stuff with logos like the one on the divot-mix bag in the photo below. As you can see, there’s a tiny crescent-moon-and-star incorporated into the ribbony part at the top (as there also is in the centenary logo) but it’s so small that it’s easy to overlook:

I asked an old guy in the golf shop what had happened to my beloved old moon-and-star logo, and he said there had never been any such thing. That made me worry that I was losing my mind, because I remembered my old shirt quite clearly. Luckily, in the locker room a little later, I asked an even older guy, and he said yes, now that I mentioned it, the club had once had another logo, like the one I described. And, sure enough, when our tee time finally came, I saw an image like the one I remembered engraved in a block of stone near the entrance to the course (which the old guy in the golf shop had apparently never noticed):

And after our round, in the bar, I saw another version:

That’s almost exactly what the logo on my old shirt was like! I want another shirt just like it! Please bring it back!

While I wait for the club to comply with my wishes, I can tell you that the Drogheda United Football Club has a logo very similar to the one I remember:

And the city of Drogheda itself has a moon-and-star image at the top of its official crest:

By now, you may be wondering where the moon-and-star image originated, and how it came to be associated with a golf club, a football club, a city, and a shirt that used to be one of my favorite articles of clothing. Well, as you’ve probably noticed, it bears a strong resemblance to the flag of Turkey:

One explanation I’ve read is that during the Irish Potato Famine, in the eighteenth century, a sultan of the Ottoman Empire (Turkey’s predecessor) sent an emergency shipment of food and money to Ireland, by way of the port of Drogheda, and the city, as an expression of thanks, incorporated the empire’s symbol into its own. The only problem with that explanation is that Drogheda had been using the same image for five or six centuries prior to the famine. A more plausible explanation (probably) is that the image was brought to Drogheda during the Crusades by an Irishman who had spotted it in the land of the infidels and, like me, thought it looked cool. Anyway, wherever it came from, I want it back, in shirt form. The vest Tim is wearing in the photo below isn’t enough:

Incidentally, during our trip there was a certain amount of cigarette-smoking by guys who don’t usually smoke. When Peter A.’s wife, Denise, saw the photo below, which was taken at Baltray, she thought it showed him “drinking from a juice box.”

Great Golf Courses: Machrihanish and Machrihanish Dunes

Posted on May 23, 2014 by David Owen

Machrihanish Golf Club, near Campbeltown, Scotland, May, 2014.

Machair is a Gaelic word that means pretty much the same thing as links, the sandy, wind-shaped coastal grasslands where the game of golf arose. It’s pronounced “mocker,” more or less, but with the two central consonants represented by what sounds like a clearing of the throat. The word is still used in parts of Scotland—for example, on the island of South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides. The photo below, of me and my golf clubs, was taken on the machair at Askernish, the ghost course, on South Uist, in December 2008:

The word machair is also preserved in a number of places in Ireland and Scotland: Magheramore, Maghera Strand, Machair Bay, Macharioch, and Machrihanish. Those last two are villages on the Kintyre Peninsula, in southwestern Scotland. The southernmost tip of the peninsula, called the Mull of Kintyre, was celebrated in 1977 in a song by Paul McCartney, who owns a house nearby. A few miles north of the Mull is Machrihanish Golf Club, which was founded in 1876, with twelve holes, and was enlarged three years later by Old Tom Morris. Here’s the view from the first tee at Machrihanish — one of the coolest opening shots in golf (the beach is very definitely in play):

And right next to Machrihanish is a second course, Machrihanish Dunes, which was designed by David McLay Kidd, the architect of Bandon Dunes. It opened in 2009. It has my favorite kind of clubhouse:

Machrihanish was the setting of Michael Bamberger’s book To the Linksland, which was published in 1992. One of the most and least appealing features of Machrihanish is that it isn’t easy to get to. If you’re traveling by car, the round trip from Glasgow can be more than seven hours, without much in the way of golf along the route. Flying is possible, although scheduling can be problematic, especially if you’re trying to connect from an international flight. The workaround my friends and I used during a recent buddies trip—with help and planning from Celtic Golf—was to go by water, on a chartered boat, which was operated by Kintyre Express. We made the trip, from Troon, in less than an hour and a half. The boat ride turned out to be one of the week’s many highlights:

We passed this lighthouse on the way:

And this is what we saw as we entered the harbor at Campbeltown, the town closest to Machrihanish:

Our hotel was right on the harbor, a short walk from where the boat tied up:

And both courses were just a short drive (by van) from the hotel. This is Peter A., putting from a fairway at Machrihanish:

The two guys in the photo below, who were out for a walk with their wives in Campbeltown, chatted with us about golf, and then came back without their wives to tell us a story about Tony Lema. I think they were interested in us partly because I had played two Scottish courses they hadn’t believed any American golfer would even have heard of: Reay and Strathpeffer.

The photo below is a view of the water from Machrihanish Dunes. The course was built, with numerous conservation restrictions, on what the British call a Site of Special Scientific Interest. The maintenance crew doesn’t use fertilizer, and there’s no irrigation system. Only a tiny fraction of the land was disturbed during construction. And the course is terrific.

The photo below is of a former R.A.F. base, which borders both courses. A U.S. Navy SEAL commando unit used to be stationed there. Part of the facility still functions as Campbeltown’s airport. The runway is so long that even I could land an airplane on it, probably.

After three days at Machrihanish, we got back on our boat and headed to our next destination: Northern Ireland, which is actually closer to Campbeltown than Troon is. Here’s the skipper, loading our golf bags in Campbeltown harbor:

That's Robert G. holding my awesome Sun Mountain Atlas golf-bag travel cover, which I bought years ago, after Northwest Airlines snapped the head off my driver during a trip to Bandon Dunes. It has traveled all over the world with me. I'm sorry to say that Sun Mountain doesn't make it anymore.

That’s Robert G., on the left, holding my awesome Sun Mountain Atlas golf-bag travel cover, which I bought about ten years ago, after Northwest Airlines snapped the head off my driver during a trip to Bandon Dunes. My friends call it R2D2. It has traveled all over the world with me. I’m sorry to report that Sun Mountain doesn’t make it anymore.

On the way to Northern Ireland, we passed the Mull of Kintyre, an area of weird currents and whirlpools, a place where a guy had recently drowned, a goat (basking on some rocks) that was descended from goats that were brought to Ireland by the Spanish Armada, and what used to be the cottage of Gugliemo Marconi—whose name was not derived from machair, and who may or may not have been a golfer, but who was one of the inventors of radio. In fact, he made his first long-distance transmission was from the cottage, which is right on the water, to an island a few miles away. Here’s the cottage as it looks today:

The weather was perfect during our trip. The skipper took us close to both coasts, so that we could get a better view.

Here we are landing in Ballycastle, where the first thing we did was go to a grocery store and buy about a thousand dollars worth of junk food. Then back to golf.

My Two Favorite Irish Golfers

Posted on May 18, 2014 by David Owen

At the driving range at my club, golf balls are promiscuously available. There’s a big steel bin, like a junior Dumpster, and you can help yourself. The balls don’t pop up automatically on rubber tees, the way they do at some ranges, but they might as well. Some golfers scarcely look up between shots. As soon as one ball is gone, they toe another into place.

You spend more time on a practice shot if you own the ball. Because you have to pick up after yourself, you think about ways to tighten your landing pattern. Because you pace the yardage as you walk to retrieve your balls, you learn how far your irons really go.

In a practice area at County Louth Golf Club, in Baltray, Ireland, a few days ago, I watched a member practicing the old-fashioned way. When he was finished, he walked in a loose spiral around his target, using a wedge to flip each ball into an open bag, which he held in his other hand. He never bent over. He seldom dropped a ball.

We chatted in the parking lot later, and he told me he was practicing for the member-member. His name is Richard Murray, and he’s my second favorite Irish golfer.

I met my favorite Irish golfer two days later, at the Island Golf Club, in Donabete. She’s twelve years old. She was on the practice green, sinking ten-footers as though they were tap-ins. Her mother and father told me that golf is her favorite thing in the world. I got my camera and asked her if she could sink one more—and she did. Remember her name: Shannon Mohan.

In early July, she sent me an update:

Hi, David. My new handicap is 26. I have lost ten shots in the last two weeks. I have won four out of five ladies’ club competitions and I came runner-up in the fifth one. I qualified in top position with 41 points for the match-play Leinster Trophy. It was my first time playing match play, and I won 7 and 6 in the quarter-finals and 3 and 1 in the semi-finals, and unfortunately I lost 2 and 1 in the finals and came runner up, but I still got 40 euro. I won the May medal and the June medal stroke play, and I’ve made 100 euro in my golf career so far. I hope you are enjoying your golf this summer. Yours in golf, Shannon Mohan.

Traveling to Golf by Air, Land, and Sea

Posted on May 14, 2014 by David Owen

I don’t like to fly on the same plane with soccer teams, Cub Scout dens, Shriner lodges, or similar groups, because it’s too easy to imagine the headline the following day: “Plane Carrying All Members of Small Order of Spanish Nuns Goes Down in North Atlantic.” So I felt more than slightly anxious when, a few minutes before our scheduled departure, two dozen members of a Scottish cheerleading team, who had had to run to make their connection, boarded our plane. I learned later that the team was from the Blast Cheer & Dance Academy, in Glasgow, and that they had just won an international title of some kind at a big competition in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Miraculously, the flight went smoothly, and on Saturday morning at 7:30 eleven friends and I landed in Scotland, ready to play golf. We were met at the airport by a bus from Celtic Golf, which planned our trip.

Our bus driver’s name was Dave, and that’s also the name of a quarter of the people on our trip. The only kind of people we have more of is lawyers. When the lawyers reply-all to golf-trip emails, the boilerplate disclaimers at the bottom pile up like litter against a parking-lot fence.

That first day, straight from the airport, we played two rounds, one at Western Gailes and one at Dundonald, which is next door. Everybody loved Western Gailes and was basically OK with Dundonald, which is owned by the people who own Loch Lomond. The picture below is from Western Gailes, and two of the people in it are named Dave.

Dave the driver had told us to be ready to roll at 10:30 the next morning. I didn’t see Peter A. as we were loading our stuff onto the bus, so at 10:35 I called his room from the front desk of our hotel. He picked up after about twelve rings, and said, Yeah, yeah, I’m on my way—and five minutes later we left. That afternoon, he told me that he had actually been asleep when the phone rang, and that he had set a personal record for getting dressed, packing a suitcase, and vacating a hotel room.

That morning, the bus took us not to a golf course but to Troon Harbor, where we boarded a chartered twelve-passenger motorboat, owned by a company called Kintyre Express. The boat took us to Campbeltown, the home of Machrihanish Golf Club, on the Kintyre Peninsula.

Machrihanish is hard to get to by car; going by boat knocks a couple of hours off the trip. Nice scenery, too.

Machrihanish has been on my golf dream list for a long time. I’ll have more to say about it later. After three days there, we had to get back on our boat, and move on to our next destination, so that we could play more golf, but somewhere else. I’ll have more to say about that soon, too. In the meantime, here’s what Tony and David M. had for dinner our first night in Campbeltown:

Bag Pipes, a Dead Guy, and a 50-foot Putt for $5,000

Posted on March 24, 2014 by David Owen

A gentleman is someone who knows how to play the bagpipes and doesn’t–or something like that. This gentleman, whose name is Geordie, is from England. He says that he has “never touched a golf cue.” He was the official greeter at the 2014 McCormick Irish Open.

Each spring, on either St. Patrick’s Day or the Saturday immediately after St. Patrick’s Day, the World’s Second-Best Golf Club conducts a tournament called the McCormick Irish Open. It’s a five-man scramble, flighted by handicap. Mike Riley, who runs it, told me, “Every team gets their total handicap divided by ten. That’s not very fair, but I’m bitter.” The tournament is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Byron H. “Doc” McCormick, who died in 1998. Before this year’s tournament began, a participant sanctified Doc’s memorial plaque, near the lower putting green, by pouring Irish whiskey on it:

Don’t worry about the waste—there was lots more whiskey:

Before everyone teed off, someone sang “Danny Boy”, from sheet music:

Then, green beer:

There was golf, too, of course. But there was also a raffle. The winner was Pat, who bought lots of tickets and wore a kilt:

Pat’s raffle prize was one chance to sink a fifty-foot putt for five thousand dollars:

The World’s Second Best Golf Club is in northern Florida, so their fairways aren’t three-quarters covered with snow. You can read more the club here, here, and here.

Donald Trump Goes to Ireland

Posted on March 11, 2014 by David Owen

In 2006, I traveled to Ireland with three other Golf Digest editors, and among the courses we played was Doonbeg, about an hour and a half down the coast from Lahinch. (A useful rule of thumb, when estimating travel times on older Irish roads, is to think of the kilometers as miles, and multiply by two.) In the magazine I wrote that, after playing the course twice, I wanted to take back nearly every unkind thought I’d ever had about Greg Norman, who designed it. Several of the holes, I said, were permanently memorable, including the teensy but murderous fourteenth, a par 3, which has a green scarcely large enough to contain a foursome (shown above).

The only part of Doonbeg I didn’t care for was the club itself, which, in contrast to the course, seemed distinctly overdetermined. Doonbeg was created, in 2002, by Kiawah Development Partners, of Kiawah Island, South Carolina, and there was a powerful American-style screw-you quality to many of the amenities, both inside the huge gray-stone clubhouse (where golf balls in 2006 were selling for a hundred dollars a dozen) and on the grounds beyond the course, where the walls bordering the endless private drive had been draped with sod that appeared to have been cut on Savile Row. Well, reality finally caught up with the owners, and the property went into receivership in January. Last month, the whole thing sold, for about twenty million dollars, to my close personal friend Donald Trump, who subsequently sent a letter to Doonbeg’s (mostly non-Irish) members and apartment owners. Here’s the first part of his letter:

A downside with Trump is that he names or renames everything after himself. But the rest of us can continue to call the course Doonbeg, and I think the members and the Irish and golfers in general ought to be pleased, because, as Trump demonstrated at Doral last week, when he buys a struggling golf property he doesn’t fool around. No matter what you think about him, he has been extremely successful—and shrewd!—at cleaning up golf messes made by other people. So good for him.

Some of the en-suite luxuries in my room at Mar-a-Lago, where I spent one night in 2012.

The Adventure of a Lifetime, and My Golf Buddy Johnny Browne

Posted on February 3, 2014 by David Owen

Royal County Down, Newcastle, Northern Ireland, November 11, 2013.

I have an article in the February issue of Golf Digest called The Adventure of a Lifetime, about Royal County Down, in Northern Ireland. In it, I mention that, before teeing off on the eleventh hole one day, my playing partner and I climbed into a jungle of of whins and briars to look for a century-old relic that a caddie had told me about in 2011: the remains of a small stone building, which the maintenance crew had uncovered during an aggressive gorse-removal project. We found it, at some risk to our clothing, although it was so overgrown that we couldn’t see much more than one corner:

The caddie’s theory was that the structure had been the house of the original greenkeeper, but Harry McCaw—a past captain of both Royal County Down and the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews—told me this past November that he thought it might once have served as the literal “club house”: the place where early players stored their clubs. When he said this, we were standing in the current R.C.D. clubhouse in front of a glass case that contained, among other mementos, the red coat that was McCaw’s official uniform during his captaincy of the R. & A.

A past R. & A. captain (not McCaw), playing the Old Course. That’s the R. & A. clubhouse in the background.

Captains of the R. & A. begin their term by “driving in” from the first tee of the Old Course. That is, they hit a ceremonial tee shot, accompanied by a cannon, in front of a large crowd of club members, townspeople, and miscellaneous onlookers. I asked McCaw whether driving in had made him nervous, and he said that it had and that he’d had plenty of time to brood about it because new captains are tapped roughly nine months before they take office. I don’t have a photograph of McCaw’s driving-in, but here’s a video of the ceremony in 2012:

The playing partner who accompanied me into the jungle to find that old stone building was Johnny Browne, a Belfast physician and a three-time R.C.D. club champion. Johnny played his first round of golf at Ormeau Golf Club, a muny in Belfast, where his father was a regular. He said that, during and after the Second World War, golf balls were so precious that boys at Ormeau would look for them by lying down in the rough and rolling around. Johnny has two brothers, both of whom also play golf. His younger brother, Tim, is a past R.C.D. champion as well, and Johnny said that, of the three, Tim is the most obsessed. “His wife is a Presbyterian minister,” he said. “She gives the same sermon three times every Sunday, and Tim is such a good husband that he sits through all three—although during the second and third he’s probably mentally reviewing golf holes and golf courses.” When Tim and Johnny attend church together, they pass ball markers back and forth. Johnny has a large collection, and Tim has a huge one. (Their older brother, Connor, “has a more balanced view of the game,” Johnny said.) Here’s Johnny during one of our rounds at R.C.D.:

Johnny’s earliest memory is of the 1953 Irish Open, which was held at Belvoir Park Golf Club, in a suburb on Belfast’s south side. (“Belvoir” is pronounced “Beaver.”) “What I remember is Dai Rees getting on his knees to talk to me,” Johnny said. “No wonder I’m a golf nut.” Johnny is a member of Belvoir Park, which was designed by Harry S. Colt, and he once jointly held the course record there (66) with a good local amateur and Peter Alliss. He lives in an apartment overlooking the eighteenth hole. He is the honorary secretary of the club, and he runs the youth group at his church, and he is deeply involved in a non-profit organization called Macmillan Cancer Support, which he began working for when his wife, Linda, was dying of ovarian cancer, two years ago. Here’s Johnny talking about Linda and cancer care in a video he made for Macmillan last year:

Reader’s Trip Report: Ballybunion on New Year’s Eve Eve

Posted on January 8, 2014 by David Owen

Seventh hole, Old Course, Ballybunion Golf Club, Ireland.

Seventh hole, Old Course, Ballybunion, Ireland.

American golfers often speak of the Old Course at Ballybunion as though it were the only golf course in Ireland, so when I first visited, in 2006, I was predisposed to be underwhelmed. After actually playing it, though, I realized that it belongs right where it’s always listed, with Royal County Down and Royal Portrush and, therefore, with the greatest golf courses not only in Ireland but also in the world. At least half the holes would stand as the best hole on any number of very good courses. I could have played Ballybunion until immigration officials (or my wife) came to drag me away.

Dan Tani, seventeenth tee, Ballybunion, December 30, 2013. That’s Jeremy and Anthony on the bench. (Dara took the photo.) Rainbows are officially disallowed in golf-course photos published on this website, but every once in a while one slips past the censors.

Dan Tani, an American reader (photo above), joined Ballybunion as an overseas member in 1998, when the cost was next to nothing. Two years later, he married a woman from Cork, and so now is obliged to visit twice a year. (He proposed at the stroke of the millennium, after playing Ballybunion in the afternoon and rehearsing his lines on the drive home.) Ever since, he’s made a point of playing at least one round very late in the year. This past December, he played on New Year’s Eve Eve—December 30, 2013—with three Irish guys whose fourth had exceeded the legal limit on showing up late.

Seventeenth tee, Ballybunion, December 30, 2013.

Highlights from Tani’s trip report:

Golf in Ireland in December can be wet and cold, but it can also be surprisingly mild. I’ve played in short sleeves and in full winter rain gear. This year, it was cool—about forty degrees, but dry, clear, and sunny—and the wind was only about ten miles an hour. I joined Anthony, a local publican, hotelier, and landscaping-company owner; Dara, a former assistant pro at Ballybunion, now an accountant in Dublin; and Jeremy, a greenkeeper currently working on a new course in Finland. They were old friends from years ago, getting together over the holidays. Dara is from Newcastle, Northern Ireland, and he grew up as a member of Royal County Down. He had a beaten-up golf bag with the R.C.D. logo on it.

Dara, seventh tee, Ballybunion, December 30, 2013.

Dara and his R.C.D. golf bag, seventh tee, Ballybunion, December 30, 2013.

One thing I have noticed when I play Ballybunion is that I am always the oddly dressed golfer on the course. If I wear beaten-up clothing with various golf clubs’ logos, I end up playing with three guys in full Ballybunion gear: jackets, hats, etc. This time, I wore my Ballybunion sweater, and, of course, the other guys were dressed like they’d just rolled out of bed: tattered pullover sweatshirts, Converse sneakers, jeans. I envied them and wished I could be cool enough to shoot even par in sneakers and pub wear, too.

Eighteenth tee, Old Course, Ballybunion, Ireland, December 30, 2013. That’s the seventeenth green in the foreground. The eighteenth fairway is at the far right, receding into the distance, toward the clubhouse.

After the round, we went to the clubhouse for a lunch of “toasted specials,” which are the real national dish of Ireland. We finished at three. I had about ninety minutes of sunlight left, so I went out on the Cashen Course [which was designed by Robert Trent Jones, Sr., in 1984]. I played the first seven holes, teed off on the eighth (a six-hundred-yard par 5), then picked up my ball and went to the fifteenth tee and played in from there: eleven bonus holes. I saw only an occasional golfer, on a distant hole. My only regret is that I didn’t have any light-up balls, as I did in 2010. That year, after thirty-six holes and a full dinner in the clubhouse, we went out again, at eleven p.m.:

Tani indirectly makes a point that I myself have made before: rather than going to Myrtle Beach for winter golf, why not go to Scotland or Ireland? The weather is often worse in Myrtle Beach. Anyway, here’s one more rainbow shot, as long as we’ve broken the rule. Tani took this one from his car on the way to the course.

Remarkable Golf Swing: The Bruen Loop

Posted on November 29, 2013 by David Owen

When I was in Northern Ireland recently, I saw a photograph of a golfer I knew nothing about: Jimmy Bruen, shown above, who was born in Belfast in 1920 and held the course record at Royal County Down for twenty-nine years. He won the British Boys’ Championship, at Royal Birkdale, when he was sixteen.

This, remarkably, is what sixteen-year-olds looked like in the olden days.

He played in the Walker Cup two years later, and was credited by his teammates with inspiring Britain and Ireland’s first-ever victory over the United States (and their last until 1971). He had qualified for the team by shooting 71-71-68-72 on the Old Course at St. Andrews, a feat that caused Henry Cotton, who had won the Open in 1934 and 1937, to write: “Fancy a 17-year-old doing 282 in four rounds on the Old Lady of St. Andrews. I know what a stern course it is, long, difficult and tricky, but here was a mere boy playing it with a wise head and a technique which left everyone gasping.”

That technique—which came to be known as the Bruen Loop—was highly unconventional, as you can see in the photo at the top of this post and in the video below. The British golf writer Pat Ward-Thomas described it this way:

He drew the club back outside the line of flight and turned his wrists inward, to such an extent that at the top of the swing the clubhead would be pointing in the direction of the teebox. It was then whipped, no other word describes the action, inside and down into the hitting area with a terrible force. There was therefore in his swing a fantastic loop, defying all the canons of orthodoxy, which claims that the back and downswing should, as near as possible, follow the same arc. There must have been a foot or more between Bruen’s arcs of swing.

Henry Cotton, Open Championship, 1937.

Bruen routinely drove the ball over three hundred yards, and he had a deadly short game. (He won the British Boys’ by chipping in for eagle on the twenty-seventh hole of the final, making him eleven up with nine holes to play.) He lit up Irish golf before the war, and he won the first post-war British Amateur, in 1946. (He was the first Irishman ever to win it.) Cotton called him “the best golfer—professional or amateur—in the world.” He was widely favored to win the 1946 Open, but withdrew because, he said, his business left him insufficient time to practice. (He was an insurance broker.) He severely injured his wrist while working in his garden in 1947, and, following surgery that was only semi-successful, virtually stopped playing competitive golf. His last Walker Cup was 1951. He died in 1972, at the age of fifty-one.

Ward-Thomas wrote: “Bruen was the most fascinating golfer I have ever seen or probably will ever see. There was no limit to what he might have achieved had not the War come and had he so desired.” George F. Crosbie published a biography in 1999. The Golfing Union of Ireland established the Jimmy Bruen Shield in his memory in 1978.

November Golf in Northern Ireland

Posted on November 13, 2013 by David Owen

The mystery golf course in my previous entry is Kirkistown Castle, on the Ards Peninsula, in Northern Ireland. (Adam Heyes, who also identified Ardglass Golf Club, from photographs of some cannons and a life preserver, got Kirkistown right, too, but he let me know by email so that others would have a chance. Tralee wasn’t a terrible guess, but it credited me with the ability to teletransport myself and my golf clubs to the other side of Ireland and back.) I played Kirkistown last week with Kevin Gallagher and Jonny Breen, both members, shown above. You can see the ruins of the eponymous castle in the distance, between their heads. The structure on the right is the remains not of a castle but of an old tower windmill. It stands on one of the two sand hills that are the most conspicuous topographical features of Kirkistown:

Kirkistown was founded in 1902, and the modern routing was created by James Braid in 1934. Among the few significant changes since then has been the sod-revetting of quite a few of the bunkers, a project undertaken with enthusiasm by the current greenkeeper, shown here in one of his ongoing creations:

To get to Kirkistown, I drove from Newcastle to Strangford, through an area that a road sign identified, correctly, as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (A.O.N.B). There was also quite a lot of unnatural beauty, including this row of houses along the Strangford wharf:

I then had to cross Strangford Lough on a small ferry—which, naturally, was pulling away as I arrived:

Small ferries are one of my favorite things in the world. I wrote about some even smaller ones in the Atlantic Monthly a long time ago. The Strangford ferry runs every thirty minutes, so I didn’t have to wait long for the next one. Here we are arriving at Portaferry, on the other side:

Kirkistown is just a few miles up the road from the ferry landing, on the other side of the peninsula. Rory McIlroy—who would have arrived from the opposite direction, since he grew up in a suburb of Belfast—played at Kirkistown often as a junior. A recent golf bag of his is displayed in the trophy case in the lobby of the clubhouse:

I intentionally took an unnessarily long way home, by doing a sort of figure-eight loop around the entire peninsula. The sun was gone by the time I got back to Portaferry—where, once again, I just missed the boat:

I was in Northern Ireland mainly to write about Royal County Down for an upcoming issue of Golf Digest. The weather during my rounds there was mostly spectacular, too—much better than the weather at home:

On my first day at Royal County Down, I played with Kevin Markham, who has played every eighteen-hole golf course in Ireland:

We were accompanied for nine holes by Kevan Whitson, the club’s longtime professional. (Nearly everyone I played golf with on this trip was named either Kevin, Kevan, or Johnny.)

I’ll have more to say about Royal County Down in the magazine—and here, too, probably. Toward the end of our round, I told Kevin I was never going to take another picture of a rainbow on a golf course, or anywhere else. But then I did.

My Usual Game: David Owen

ADVENTURES IN GOLF

Category Archives: Ireland