It’s an Irish Spectacle

It was the perfect testing ground.

If Ireland is the place so many pros come to fine-tune their game for the British Open, across the Channel at Royal St. George’s in Sandwich, England, why shouldn’t two hacks from Southern California come to the Emerald Isle to answer for themselves the ultimate golf question?

Should they quit?

We had slashed around on a fairly regular basis for several years. Age hastened the transition from games where you sweat to one where your major discomfort is if the beer cart is late. But we had enough pride to know that we didn’t like hitting so many balls in the water, or on the roof of somebody’s house.

And so, here we were, Barry and I, deciding to test our minimal skills on some of the greatest golf courses in the British Isles, perhaps the world.

We learned much about golfing in Ireland, including the fact that lots of Americans have been doing this for many years. There are tour buses everywhere, and nary does a trunk come open at any stop without golf bags emerging. At one stop, the Sheen Falls Lodge in Kenmare, hotel staff spent an hour or so early one morning loading a luxury bus with wicker baskets of fancy lunches, including tablecloths. The lunches were for the break in a day of 36 holes.

We also learned:

* The tour groups tell you not to come unless your index is 24 or less. “You will be asked every place you play to show your card,” they said. For Barry and me, neither of whom were card-carrying golfers, this had prompted three months of playing lots of rounds and turning in lots of scores to get an established index. The cards stayed in our pockets here. We were never asked.

* Leave the shorts at home. Even on a warm summer day here, long pants are the most intelligent attire for playing. Most days are overcast -- “A soft day,” the Irish say -- and temperatures rarely get above 75 degrees. The more likely scenario is that a warm, cloudy day will turn into a windy, chilling downpour. Long pants and waterproof cover-ups in your golf bag will serve best.

* Pop for a caddie. These courses are full of subtle challenges and it is best to know about the 72-foot pot bunker with the ladder before you hit. Plus, the banter alone is worth the price. “You lads are showing me places on this course I’ve never been to before, and I’ve caddied here for 30 years,” said one, Bobbie Payne. Another, John O’Grady, responded to a decent drive with, “Aye, you say you carry a 16 handicap now. That makes you a bit of a bandit now, doesn’t it?”

* Walking the course is wonderful. If carts are used, they are mostly for those physically unable or for the elderly, and because Barry was too proud to fess up to the latter, we walked. And the walking made it much more pleasurable, as well as making the sport slightly healthy. If you don’t get a caddie, get a pull-cart, or trolley, as they call them here.

* The tour groups will also push you to call well ahead and reserve tee times. While that may be needed on some courses and some days, we played as a twosome each time, walked out ahead of our tee time if they were ready, and never felt crowded or pressured on the courses. At a couple of stops, we asked if we could get out the next day with a last-minute decision, and the answer was always, “No worries.”

* The summer days are long here. If you want to play 36 holes, or you want to tee off late in the day, fortunately it doesn’t get dark during the heart of the summer until 10 p.m. We teed off for one round at 4:30 p.m., and when we sat down for dinner, after playing and taking a shower, it was 10 p.m. and still light.

* With one understandable exception, green fees were not out of line. We played three major courses: Killarney Golf and Fishing Club, home of the Irish Open in 1990 and ‘91, green fee $75 and caddie $35; The K-Club (Kildare Hotel and Country Club), home of last week’s European Open and home to the 2006 Ryder Cup, green fee $115 and caddie $35; and, the exception, the spectacular and expensive-to-maintain Old Head course at Kinsale, green fee $290, caddie $45.

* They don’t play the British Open in Ireland because, as the Irish are fond of saying, “We aren’t British.”

* The Irish service and hospitality were exceptional. One hostess said it best when she told us that we were in Ireland “to be minded.” We mentioned this to our wives several times and were duly ignored.

Old Head Golf Links

This was more of a sensory experience than a round of golf. The course is situated on a thin peninsula that is one of the southwestern-most pieces of land in Ireland.

As caddie O’Grady said, “Next parish, Boston.”

The wind blows so hard that trees could not survive. The cliffs are hundreds of feet high and the Atlantic Ocean is visible on every shot. Nine miles straight southwest, off the green of No. 14, is where a German U-boat sank the Lusitania in 1915. Near the entry to Old Head, there is a memorial to the hundreds who died that day.

O’Grady said this has become a course played mostly by Americans. Perhaps the closest thing to Old Head in the United States is Whistling Straits, the course in Central Wisconsin built along the cliffs of Lake Michigan where the PGA Championship will be played next summer. O’Grady said many Americans come expecting to get another version of Pebble Beach, but Old Head is much more severe and barren.

O’Grady also said that they don’t play major tournaments here, partly because the cost of insurance for spectators who might fall over cliffs is prohibitive, and the pros wouldn’t take on this sort of humbling experience.

“Phil Mickelson shot an 87 here, his worst round maybe ever,” O’Grady said. “Fred Funk has the course record, a four-under 68, but he got that on a perfect day. He was going to go out on another day, but the wind was blowing so bad he called it off. Said it would ruin his swing.”

They love to tell weather tales here. O’Grady said that he had one group that went out on a day so foggy that they never saw their ball 15 feet out from their drives.

“We played the whole 18 holes and one lady kept wanting to take pictures,” he said. ‘Of what?’ I asked her. We can’t see anything.”

Another caddie, overhearing weather talk, chimed in about the day the hailstorm hit.

“I was on the 10th green,” he said. “It felt like bullets hitting me in the back of the head.”

The 15th hole is named Haulie’s Leap. It honors the construction worker who lost hold of his expensive digging machine on one of the cliffs during the building of the course. The machine, valued at more than $250,000, plunged toward the ocean and Haulie plunged after it. Somehow, Haulie survived his plunge, but the machine still rests on the ocean bottom.

“We never saw Haulie again,” O’Grady said. “He smashed himself a bit, got up, went to town, had five pints and disappeared.”

Barry and I played from the middle tees, which were 6,451 yards -- “Only Tiger plays from the blacks,” said O’Grady, noting they are 7,215 -- and we both shot in the 90s. We left stunned, happy, amazed at the sights we had seen and pondering the senior tour.

Killarney Golf and Fishing Club

The most popular American golfer here is Payne Stewart, and that was the case long before his death in 1999.

“He’d come here a lot, especially to get ready for the British Open,” caddie Payne said. “[Nick] Faldo may have won here in ’90 and ’91 [the Irish Open], but he was a sourpuss. Payne Stewart would play a round and then stay around and talk to everybody, even when he shot lousy. I was here.

“I remember one time, people were all around him and the press was interviewing him and a little guy tugged at his sleeve and kept tugging and Payne just turned to him, took his golf glove out of his pocket, signed it and handed it to him.

“Lots of people saw that. They all still remember and talk about it.”

Tom Coveney has been the director of golf for more than 40 years. He remembered playing golf with a gentle little man from Los Angeles, a “famous pro teacher, I think,” he said. “Can’t remember his name, but he always said something like ‘Swing the handle.’ ”

Eddie Merrins, the little pro from Bel-Air.

“Aye, indeed,” said Coveney. “That’s the man. We had a wonderful day.”

We played from the middle tees and the course, listed in meters, played about 6,700 yards. Caddie Payne liked it when I tried to play “Irish golf,” lots of bump-and-running with six- and seven-irons. “Aye, it’s like the Guinness,” he said. “It’s in your blood.”

Barry and I shot in the 90s. Maybe we wouldn’t quit the sport.

The K Club

As we drove up, Vijay Singh was returning to the hotel, having just finished his round. I said the name “Annika” a couple of times as loudly as I could, but Vijay was fast as lightning, getting from his courtesy car to the lobby.

It was heaven here in the late afternoon. No caddies were available, so we went it alone. The fairways were so soft and manicured, I wanted to take a nap on one. It was almost hot, there was nobody in front or behind us, and we realized we had, to ourselves, a course that will be chaos in September 2006, when it plays host to the Ryder Cup.

Part of the reason conditions were so perfect was that the European Open had ended there a week earlier. This course, designed by Arnold Palmer, has become the annual home for that event in mid-July.

As Barry and I walked the course, spraying shots into every imaginable bunker and thick rough, the thought of Phillip Price’s winning 15-under score seemed almost laughable.

More mind-boggling yet was the card framed on a wall near the pro shop of Darren Clarke’s second round of the ’99 European Open, when he shot a 60. The card, attested by Ian Woosnam, had no eagles, but two 2s and eight 3s.

And the kicker? He didn’t win the tournament.

Barry wondered aloud if he had had two 2s and eight 3s in his life.

After Old Head, this was a return to plush suburbia. The K-Club is 20 miles west of Dublin, is dissected by bubbling trout streams and surrounded by multimillion-dollar homes. It costs about $80,000 for a 25-year membership. Again, Barry and I played from the middle tees, this time at a distance of 6,829 yards. I birdied two par fives but also killed several napping trout. There were so many trees and so much water and so much deep rough that we had become beaten men near the end. Barry took 26 strokes to play the last four holes; I took 25. I barely stayed under the 100 mark; Barry slipped over it for the first time.

Epilogue

As we pondered our future with the game, Barry and I found another scorecard framed near the pro shop at the K-Club. It was of the course record there, for a blind golfer. The score, by Bill McMahon IV, shot on Sept. 16, 2000, was 92. I went into deep depression. Barry was fine; he had already decided to quit.

I also found a picture on the wall of Tiger Woods, hitting out of a trap on No. 18. I realized that Tiger’s ball was about 10 yards behind where I had been on 18, just having cleared the trap with my drive. But my euphoria was doused when one of our wives suggested that Tiger probably used a seven-iron off the tee.

We remained uncertain about our future in golf. I said I had decided to follow one of the old Irish sayings: “Anything good is either immoral, illegal or fattening.” Because golf is none of these, it must be bad and therefore, worth quitting, I reasoned.

Barry shrugged off the philosophical stuff and simply said he was done.

“Right after my tee time Sunday at Azusa Greens,” he said.