By Tom Callahan
Photo By Stephen Szurlej
October 2006
On the thorough-fares of Belfast, citizens passing by toss each other a
wistful and kind of backward or sideways nod that takes practice to
Looking out the window from room 1034 of the stately Europa Hotel, the
most bombed hotel in Northern Ireland ("In Europe," says the concierge,
"if you please"), the Divis Flats are visible in the background. They
are a high-rise Catholic ghetto on the Falls Road. In the foreground is
a typical and beautiful mural of an Ulster Freedom Fighter (Protestant)
wearing a ski mask and toting a machine gun. The painting announces:
"You are now entering Loyalist Sandy Row." In a few days, the alleged
South Armagh home of a Provisional Irish Republican Army commander named
Slab Murphy will be raided at dawn by helicopter. In a few weeks, an
alleged IRA turncoat named Denis Donaldson will be found shotgunned to
death at his house in Donegal. But the "Troubles" are said to be easing
steadily.
British border guards once blocking the roads between Northern Ireland
and the Republic have packed up and gone away. Two army watchtowers,
mysteriously known as Golf Two Zero and Golf Three Zero, are scheduled
for dismantling. By many accounts, the most dangerous thing left in
Ulster is the Ulster fry, a breakfast of egg, bacon, sausage, mushrooms,
tomatoes, grease, more grease and thoroughly (almost incredibly) baked
beans topped off by potato pancakes, fried bread and black pudding.
"Sure, you'll be going to Portrush first," says an Ulsterman encountered
in the Crown pub (directly across the street from the Europa and the
Grand Opera House), "unless you're not the full shilling, or you're as
queer as a bottle of chips, or you're running around like a griskin with
the head-staggers, or it's Newcastle [Royal County Down] first instead.
If it's not one of them two [Portrush or County Down], I'll give you a
looter, so I will."
I think I know what a looter is. What's a griskin?
"You must be jokin'! Are you daft? It's a horrible wee creature that has
never been described, but when people around here use the term, you can
dead believe they know what they're talking about."
As a matter of fact, Portrush is first.
"Grand. Brilliant. I knew you weren't an eejit."
Royal Portrush: Almost as good as it gets
Is Dr. Moore's locker still operating?
"Indeed it is," says Wilma Erskine, in her 22nd year as secretary and
foreman. "For that matter, so is Sam Moore." (He isn't really a doctor,
by the way, but he has a medical turn of mind.) It was the graceful
British writer, Peter Dobereiner, who, years ago, recommended stopping
off at Sam's locker on the way to the first tee. From a white apothecary
pail emblazoned with an official-looking red cross, a rusty but fresh
solution is dispensed through surgical tubing: whiskey, Drambuie and
ginger—"a penny a small go."
Three pennies are spent this morning; it's raining. Alongside the
opening hole, a conversation is struck up with a compact, silver-haired
man named Sid Carruthers (no relation to the nylon money, he says with a
distressed grimace), who likewise is waiting out the storm. The
caddiemaster here once, Carruthers is retired now. Sid more than knows
the lay of the land.
"We have peace of sorts in Northern Ireland today," he says. "It's
better than it used to be. My father before me, and his father before
him, said, 'If you take my advice, you'll get out of this cursed
country. You'll pack up all your possessions in a little brown parcel
and go get a job in Scotland or somewhere else, because it will never be
the way it should be here.' But I said to Dad, as he probably said
something of the kind to his dad, 'Haven't you been out to the fifth
hole at Portrush? Haven't you looked back from the white rocks? From the
green by the sea all the way up the fairway? Isn't that the most
wonderful sight in the world? How can you think of leaving it?' It's as
good as it gets. Almost."
As the caddiemaster, Sid collected memories, but only first-hand ones.
"I didn't rate any of the people who came by unless I talked to them
personally," he says. "Howard Keel. Johnny Mathis. Michael Douglas. Dan
Marino. Of course I was looking at Marino's navel as we spoke. Davis
Love III was here with Brad Faxon, and Faxon asked me, 'How's the course
playing at the minute?' I replied, 'Look, I play off a 14-handicap, and
you're asking me? I'll tell you what--you let me know how it's playing.'
And he did! When Faxon finished his round, he came and found me to say,
'It was this, it was that, it was the other.' What a grand man he is.
And how much he loves links golf. It shines in his eyes.
"When Dan Quayle was here, I asked him after his game, 'How did you like
Calamity Corner?' [A reference to the 210-yard 14th hole, where short,
long or left are inconvenient, and right is dead.] He put his hand on my
shoulder and said, 'I had to endure a lot of calamities today, and a lot
of cruelties, too. These guys behind me never let me up. But, I'll tell
you something, they wouldn't have made so much fun of me when I was vice
president.'
" 'No, they wouldn't,' I told him.
" 'Well, come to think of it, they did,' he said. 'Everybody did.' And
he laughed. We all laughed. I rate him a hell of a good guy."
Later, drenched in the locker room, sodden shoes are pried off under a
photograph of Darren Clarke that he has signed "To my favorite 'home.' "
Royal County Down: Ireland's jewel gets even better
Even Portrush can't compete with the front nine here, and the back nine
has had its face lifted in recent years, magically. Where once they were
a bit abrupt, now the finishing holes are almost worthy of the start,
and every scrap of new mounding or bunkering already seems 100 years
old. The second shot to 18 is no longer blind. The 17th green suddenly
fits the rest the course. The 16th hole, still a short par 4, has been
promoted from poor relative to a members' favorite. "They're proud that
their course is so hard," says the head pro, Kevin Whitson, "and they're
proud that it's so beautiful. The mountain views are fantastic, of
course, but it's the holes that make you look over your shoulder, away
from the mountains—like the third--that are the real glories.
"Unless you take a good striking game to this golf course, you're
playing on a knife's edge. But if you make extremely good decisions, and
even pretty good shots, the rewards are huge. Jim Furyk stopped off here
on his way to the British, just to find out what Tiger and the others
had been talking about. ["I shot an 83 at County Down once," Woods says
with a grin, "and was the low man in my group."] Furyk had the ball on a
string that day, absolutely on a string. Shot 69, I think. He didn't
seem to want to leave. If I had said, 'Come on, finish your Guinness,
let's go play another nine,' I just know he would have."
Old friend Royal Portrush
still sits on the Antrim Coast, teetering on the same cliff's edge as
the ruins of Dunluce Castle, above the Giants Causeway, 40,000 stone
columns (most of them six-sided, a few of them 40 feet tall) left behind
either by some volcanic anomaly that the geologists can't explain, or by
a certain Irish giant named Finn MacCool. Portrush is the only Ulster
course to host an Open Championship (1951), the only one to nurture an
Open champion (Fred Daly, 1947). The golf shop has been moved. A wall
has been constructed. A practice ground has been expanded (a handsome
one, too). But neither the mist nor the mood has been tampered with. In
a cacophony of bird song, magpies still compete with larks. Foxes still
jitterbug in the fairways. The rough continues to consist mostly of hay
thatched with thorny-fisted wildflowers (the yellow ones smelling of
almonds) and 19 kinds of orchids. The sea is everywhere around.
The co-champion golf
course of Northern Ireland is Royal County Down in the green and purple
Mountains of Mourne where, when the Masters is on in America, a
bedspread of buttercups overwhelms the heather, and the children of
Newcastle (Protestant and Catholic alike) swoop in like locusts to pick
the gorse and whin for dyeing Easter eggs.
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