Replaying a golf course called Ireland

Bestselling golf author Tom Coyne wrote about trekking across Ireland for sixteen weeks in search of the greatest round of golf ever played. He shares his experience and excerpts from his book A Course Called ireland exclusively for Irish America

One hundred and fifty years ago, a dozen young men and women set out from towns in the west of Ireland, traveling by cart and by foot, headed for ports in Ballina and Westport, County Mayo. They bundled up their lives and stepped onto crowded ships pointed toward a place they had never seen before. One of those young women carried with her a mahogany cupboard with delicate glass doors, flowers hand-carved into the panels. Today it hangs in my parents’ living room, next to a fifty-two-inch flat-screen television.

The names of those people, why they came, or precisely where they came from, had been lost in my family’s shuffle. It had been my experience that the one thing Irish families did better than talk was whisper, and generations of whispers – who was unlucky and who was ungrateful, who drank too much, died too young, who was a good daughter, a lazy son, who never married and, more quietly now, why not – blended into a collective hush. I found myself looking at that cupboard from time to time, covered with the next generations’ macaroni Christmas ornaments, a ceramic teddy bear, last month’s Mother’s Day cards. There was a golf ball in one of the nooks, a Titleist with a purple-and-red logo on it and the letters BGC: Ballybunion Golf Club. That cupboard came to America in the arms of a woman trying to put Ireland behind her, and now it hung on the wall showcasing a golf ball from County Kerry, reminding some of us how much we wanted to go back. And as I stood on my first tee box in the southwest of Ireland, looking out over golden dunes and black cliffs holding back a frothy sea, I felt certain that over the next 119 days spent walking the longest possible path to Ballybunion, I was going to figure out which one of us had it right.

My friend Denis had children my age, but we’d become good friends over the years as semi-regular golf partners – he divorced, me self-employed, we had high golf availability in common and found ourselves sharing a cart on many a Tuesday afternoon. And over those many Tuesdays, I came to understand that Denis dearly loved two things in the world – golf and Ireland (and his kids, I’m sure, but that wasn’t really relevant during twilight golf). For golf in Ireland, his availability was extreme – grandson of immigrants, he even had an Irish passport. He was packed for the trip before I even got around to inviting him, booking a spot during my first week, a stretch that promised more links than most.

It was widely known among golfing circles in southeastern Pennsylvania that Denis was a golfer who could come up short from almost anywhere on the golf course. We called him Captain Layup. Facing a carry over a lake, a pitch to the green, or a six-footer to the hole, rest assured that Denis had worked out some way in his subconscious to keep his ball from getting there. It wasn’t that he couldn’t hit it; rather, Denis was perpetually ready for that once-in-a-century five-iron that was going to travel a three-wood’s distance. But if it was going to happen this century for Denis, I hoped that it would happen here, on our first hole of the Irish golf course, a 373-yard par-four on a sleepy little seaside course called Kilkee.

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Nster.com