For the well-traveled golfer, Lahinch Golf Club hardly needs a formal introduction.
The quirky, charming links along Ireland’s west coast welcomes thousands of visitors each year from around the globe, many of whom return annually for the golf and the ambience of the adjoining village. Various course rankings perennially place Lahinch among Ireland’s top four.
Oddly, though, for all its renown, Lahinch never hosted its nation’s premier tournament. That void gets rectified this week, as the Dubai Duty Free Irish Open introduces the casual golf fan to a locale long cherished by connoisseurs.
“When they see what we have to offer,” said Paddy Keane, Lahinch’s general manager, “it’ll be on their bucket list to visit for the next few years.”
Keane expects about 80,000 people at the course and village during the tournament. Lahinch has opened its fairways to only two professional events before, the last in 1975.
The timing could not be better — in two weeks, Northern Ireland’s Royal Portrush Golf Club ends a 68-year wait to host another British Open.
Lahinch is “one of the great Irish links courses, and I think it was an excellent decision by Paul McGinley,” said Padraig Harrington, a three-time major champion and next year’s European Ryder Cup captain.
Credit McGinley for pursuing the match. The longtime European Tour mainstay, best known for captaining the 2014 Ryder Cup winners, serves as this year’s Irish Open host and recommended Lahinch to tour officials.
Lahinch is where McGinley captured the 1991 South of Ireland Championship, serving as a springboard to turn professional.
Returning two years ago for the club’s 125th anniversary celebration, he rediscovered the charm of how the club and town are intertwined.
“Lahinch is one of Ireland’s great golfing venues, not just because of the golf course but also the town, which is right on the doorstep of the golf club and is always buzzing with life,” McGinley said when the selection was announced.
Lahinch is often called the “St. Andrews of Ireland,” and golf is built into the town’s fabric, not unlike the Scottish original. Lahinch’s second hole pushes against the town’s tourist hub, the green not much more than 100 yards from a pub.
It is not uncommon to see visitors on the sidewalk with golf bags over their shoulders, looking into bookstores and surf shops while on their way to the club.
“It’s not just the golf; it’s about walking through the village with your clubs on your back, meeting the locals, enjoying the craic,” Keane said, invoking the Irish word for good times. “The 19th hole is very important.”
At McGinley’s behest, the Irish Open has created re-entry points that will allow people to leave the course to go into the village, then return to the tournament.
McGinley took the idea from his experience at the Australian Open, where the neighboring community would often create a festival atmosphere around the event.
Keane said the community and its businesses had engaged in getting ready. He said that evenings would feature live music and other activities. “The whole place has gotten a face lift.”
Lahinch Golf Club dates from 1892, when officers from the Black Watch Regiment of the British Army stationed in Limerick went to Ireland’s west coast in search of land suitable for building a golf course. A vast expanse of dunes just beyond the town caught their eye, and a hastily contrived course was laid out.
Two years later, the fledgling club invited Tom Morris, who was known as Old Tom Morris to distinguish him from his son, to design a new course. Morris, who won four of the first eight British Opens, said Lahinch was the “finest natural course” he had ever seen.
Alister Mackenzie, who would codesign Augusta National, overhauled Morris’ design in 1927 and moved many holes closer to the sea. That layout remained largely untouched until 1999, when Martin Hawtree restored Lahinch’s eroded contours back to their original Mackenzie vision.
It took four years to complete the project, which included four new constructions.
The result is a thread of all three designers, mixing Morris’ quirkiness with Mackenzie’s intricate green complexes and Hawtree’s modern touches.
Lahinch’s two most famous holes are Morris originals. The par-5 fourth, called Klondyke, tees off into a narrow valley, only for golfers to be faced with a totally blind second shot over a large dune. A sentry atop the hill informs players when the green beyond the dune has cleared.
Next comes Dell, a par-3 that requires only a short iron or even wedge, but plays to a tiny green obscured by another grassy dune. A small white rock atop the hill indicates where the flagstick is.
“I think a lot of folks here can’t wait to see how the professionals play these holes,” Keane said. “It’s quirky, but that’s what links golf was.”
Hawtree’s sixth, seventh and eighth holes blend into the flow, before Mackenzie’s work takes over. At No. 13, a drivable par-4, the tee shot must flirt with a sizable pit to reach the angled putting surface.
“I think the course itself will look amazing to golf viewers,” Keane said. “They’ll really enjoy seeing the pros try to maneuver their way around.”
The notion might be to call Lahinch a well-kept secret, but it is difficult to be a secret when the club says it has about 2,500 members and welcomes more than 10,000 visitors to its fairways. It’s a staple of Irish golf tourism along with Royal County Down Golf Club, Ballybunion Golf Club and Royal Portrush.
Lahinch has never made it a priority to go after big events. It does host the South of Ireland Championship each year, but the last professional tournament held at Lahinch was the 1975 Carroll’s Irish Match Play, won by Christy O’Connor Jr. Before that was the 1961 Irish Professional Championship (now Irish PGA), where O’Connor’s uncle, Christy O’Connor Sr., won.
If not for McGinley’s devotion, Lahinch wouldn’t have considered the Irish Open.
“We debated long and hard about the pros and cons,” Keane said. “The positives far outweighed the negatives.”
Another significant sporting event to come to Ireland’s west coast was the 2012 Volvo Ocean Race, where Galway was the final destination. That brought “tens of thousands” of people to the region, Keane said, noting that, with the British Open at Royal Portrush, “In July, Ireland will be the No. 1 focus right across the golfing world.”
For Lahinch, it could be a one-time event.
“We’ve always said it’s a once-off,” Keane said. A return engagement is “not something that’s on our radar currently.”
Lahinch certainly isn’t going anywhere, except back into the pages of golf travel brochures. For decades, that has been more than enough.
“We tend to say people come for the golf, but they come back for the experience,” Keane said. “That really sums up what Lahinch is all about.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/03/sports/golf/lahinch-irish-open.html
2019-07-03 14:28:36Z
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