Feature Interview on golf in Ireland and Northern Ireland is posted

[Ran Morrissett]

If you want to do something more cheery than watch the funeral procession of the PGA Championship, have a read of this month’s Feature Interview. Richard Phinney and Scott Whitley take us on tour of Ireland and Northern Ireland and along the way, expose us to such gems as Cruit Island and Dunfanaghy. There, golf seems like an entirely different game than the dreary one we are witnessing on television (pity the new tees at OHCC are too hard for the world’s best – I am sure the members will get a lot of use/enjoyment from them ).

This Interview actually started ten years ago. My wife (then girlfriend) and I flew from Australia to Indianapolis for brother John’s wedding in 1998. John married into a real golf family, the crazy  Luigs. After the rehearsal dinner, and ever the social recluse, I was engrossed back in their golf library when I spotted the first edition of Richard and Scott’s book Links of Heaven. As my wife and I were heading off from Chicago to Dublin in two days, the book was particularly of interest.

Their reviews of the courses were honest and instantly appealed to this fan of golf course architecture. The chapter entitled Guinness is Good for You: a Guide for Drinking in Ireland was a mandatory read. A section on planning your journey was helpful and it was interesting to peruse their list of Ireland’s eighteen best holes. 

Of course, time marches on and thus it became time to update the book and it is this second edition that we discuss this month. The chapter Try the Bread: A Golfer’s Survival Guide to Cuisine in Ireland is now gone as the food quality has sharply improved over there. On thing hasn’t changed though which is this is still the best guide to golf in that part of the world. Like carrying a 3 iron for hitting snap hook recovery shots    from under the pine trees at Southern Pines CC, it is indispensable.

Cheers,

[Bill_McBride]

The chapter Try the Bread: A Golfer’s Survival Guide to Cuisine in Ireland is now gone as the food quality has sharply improved over there.

I don't where you have been eating in Northern Ireland, but the food last September when we stayed south of Newcastle and in Castlerock was generally inedible.  The only really good food we found was in the Water Garden Asian restaurant in Coleraine (near Portrush) and in an Indian place in Belfast. 

Sorry to distract from the golf article, but from the culinary perspective I must respectfully dissent. 

For example, NEVER order a "Caesar salad with bacon."   

[Jim Nugent]

In the interview they talk about "the project by Tom Doak at Kilshannig Cross."  This is the first I've heard of it.  Anyone have more info? 

[Mike Sweeney]

"Genuine Hackett links are becoming a bit of an endangered species, as architects such as Tom Fazio (Waterville), Pat Ruddy (Donegal) and Donald Steel (Enniscrone) have been hired to “update” Eddie’s work, or develop new holes on land that has become available more recently.   Since little of that has happened so far at Carne, it is probably our favourite.  Eddie himself was flabbergasted by the dunes on the site and once he had devised the routing and chosen the green sites, he let the terrain determine play to an extent that few others would have had the confidence to do.  And the result is an otherworldliness, but also a naturalness, that has few parallels.  There’s some hidden artifice – the diabolical 17th set high in the dunes took a lot of effort and money to get right – but Carne is the epitome of Hackett’s design philosophy: “I like anything where nature dictates the way you make the hole.”  Hackett assumed the club might well take out some of the most outrageous natural features, such as the extraordinarily deep hollow in front of the 18th green, or the rollicking moguls on the 15th fairway, but he told us he “could never touch them.”  There are few bunkers on Carne, and to say a hole didn’t need a bunker was, to Hackett, the highest praise. Hackett went to Mass every day, and it is perhaps not too much to suggest that he had a reverence for the linksland he found at Carne that comes out in the design. "

_________________________________

Maybe Ran needs to go to Mass tomorrow to finally see the light about Carne! 

[Jack_Marr]

In the interview they talk about "the project by Tom Doak at Kilshannig Cross."  This is the first I've heard of it.  Anyone have more info? 

I think this was planned a number of years ago. Tom Doak was going to design a course in Castlegregory in Co. Kerry, and Coore and Crenshaw were going to design the other one. I don't know if the project still has legs, but I believe planning premission was sought and refused initially.

[Tom_Doak]

That project was never even submitted for planning approval, though I never understood why.  They were two great sites for golf and the environmental issues did not seem insurmountable.  However, it would be extremely difficult to put the land deal back together now -- the property was held in joint tenancy by seven families requiring something like 23 signatures in total, and those agreements have expired.

[Pete_Pittock]

Ran,
   My computer must be old or the air tubes lack pressure because the latest interview I see is July's Greg Tallman and a wide picture that wipes out about a year of archives.
   'Tis a pity because I just read the book and am pencilling out a twoweeker from Carne to RCD a year or so from now.

[Garland Bayley]

Pete,

I believe this is about the June Feature Interview, the one before Greg Tallman.

[Pete_Pittock]

Garland,
That may be so, but the picture of Greg Tallman is so wide it overrides the links to about a year of interviews. How do I make the picture smaller?

[Garland Bayley]

Two suggestions Pete,

Make your browser full screen. (I suspect you may have already tried that.)
Resize you browser smaller until it works. Surprisingly this solves some of my problems with the website.

Also, try Firefox if youi haven't already.

[Buck Wolter]

www.golfclubatlas.com/interviewwhitleyphinney.html

[Pete_Pittock]

Buck,
Thank you

[Scott Whitley]

Thanks, all, for your interest in our interview, to Ran for his kind introduction above, and to Tom for his reply re Kilshannig.  Here is the old GCA thread that we were referring to:

http://golfclubatlas.com/forum/index.php/topic,7604.0.html