In Dublin's fair city

Day Three: Carton House G.C.
This is where I should tell you about Lawson Little. For years, I used a set of hand-me-down irons that belonged to my father. They had shafts made out of a revolutionary new material called "fiberglass." They carried the autograph of Lawson Little and, once, I made fun of this in print only to be deluged by angry letters from Lawson's descendants regarding his U.S. and British Amateur championships, his U.S. Open championship and, generally, the fact that I was unworthy to swing clubs bearing his name. Out of respect, and in penance, I still carry the 2-iron from the set. On the 15th at Carton House, I pulled Lawson—yes, it has a name—out of the bag.

We were playing Mark O'Meara's course. (The other course here, designed by Colin Montgomerie, was being prepared for the Irish Open.) O'Meara has done a brilliant job conforming his layout to the terrain, winding it with painterly precision through woods along the River Rye, and around a large central rise topped by Tyrconnell Tower, which is thought to have medieval origins. Atop the rise, the course opens itself to the countryside the same way the oceanfront courses open themselves to the sea. From next to the tower, you can see all the way down to the old seminary in Maynooth, and the effect is to render the course less insular than the K Club is.

A steady rain had blown off toward the distant mountains, and I was in a bad spot along the 15th fairway, but I was in the fairway. The fade had returned from wherever it had gone, and I couldn't miss a fairway nor hit a green. I was fed up. I didn't fly across an ocean, battle the devouring gorse, and get heckled by crows to lay up. Lawson was coming out, and we were going to carry the Rye and run up on the green. I stung the ball and my hands—the revolutionary fiberglass shafts tend to vibrate—and it took off on a low line, clearing the water and very nearly clearing the wall on the other side.

"Thought you had it," Steve said, as the ripples faded on the surface of the Rye.

Still, I thought, pursuing my revelation, it's a really lovely place to play, and a great peace descended upon me, and it lasted just long enough for me to knock my tee shot into another part of the Rye on the next hole, a par 3 that O'Meara, that criminal genius, threw across the river and toward the trees.

Day Four: Portmarnock G.C.
This is the place to SUM it all up—a links along the sea that it shares with the European, that already possesses all the history that the K Club would like to have, and that seems to rise organically from the topography the way that Carton House seems to track the Duke of Leinster's old demesne. They first teed it up at Portmarnock in 1894, and they ran the Irish Amateur across it five years later. That same year, Harry Vardon won the first professional tournament played here. And, through the years, the last five holes have come to be known as one of the game's great set pieces.

In that closing stretch there are three par 4s, a par 3 and a par 5. Steve parred the 14th brilliantly, playing his approach to exactly the right spot on a huge green that rolls like the ocean does on the other side of the dune. The 15th is a par 3 along the beach; Ben Crenshaw calls the 190-yard hole "the shortest par 5 in golf." So far that day, the course had won my heart, but the game had not. I was hacking my way into triple figures again. I hit a shot high into the breeze and watched it carry, left to right, in the general direction of Wales, and then I saw the sea breeze push it back the other way, gloriously, toward the heart of the green. The two to get down got me a par--take that, Crenshaw--and I didn't even mind much that, on the 17th, a virtual hurricane blew up, with cold raindrops the size of quarters, forcing us to play the Portmarnock Two Step up the fairway and through the rough. By the time we got to the 18th tee, the sun was out again. We sipped a couple of pints in the clubhouse and watched some poor souls carving themselves out of the rough a ways up the fairway. What stayed was not the 10-minute hurricane, or the hole we halved with 11s. For me, it was how bright my golf ball looked, framed against the blue sky and being brought gently back onto the green on 15. The memory came back, again and again, like the in-rushing tide in the inlet below.

Charles P. Pierce is a staff writer at The Boston Globe Magazine and a contributing writer to Esquire. His book, Moving the Chains: Tom Brady and the Pursuit of Everything, will be published Nov. 1 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.