Dooks Golf Club

For the first eight decades of its existence, Dooks was an off-the-beaten-path nine-hole course, among the oldest in Ireland. Ireland’s patron saint of golf architecture, Eddie Hackett, one of the profession’s true minimalists who designed and expanded courses all over the country on shoestring budgets, added a second nine in the 1970s. This set the stage for Dooks becoming a destination for American players traveling between Tralee and Waterville beginning in the 1980s and 1990s when golf tourism in Ireland exploded. Dooks still feels like a small-town country course, situated on the Atlantic Ocean with holes the cut back and forth over a piece of sublime, subtle linksland.