Portrush

Saturday, Oct. 5th - Portrush "Considine-Farrell-Haggerty-Healy Triumph in Ireland! Bring Ryder Cup back to U.S. soil. Davis Love personally thanks Lord Jeff Quartet for restoring American pride!" There is a reason Portrush is so highly ranked as a formidable and demanding test of links golf. It is hard. It is demanding. It is unforgiving of poor golf shots. Our scores today proved it. We didn't win the tournament, but we sexagenarians grinded our way to the finish line in chilly, windy, and showery weather. As the only American team entered in the Great North Links Challenge with a 72 team field, we more than held our own, posting a respectable team score of 84 at the difficult championship layout in Northern Ireland. Coincidentally enough, three players posted identical scores of 28 - while Commissioner Considine nipped at their heels with 27 points. Decent, respectable --and we prided outselves that we played hard to the end. We wish we could have brought The Cup back to the U.S. -- but that's OK. We made many new friends on our travels-- and the renewal of our friendship originally formed at Amherst made us proud and thankful. We are the winners here. Many thanks for following us along the Irish Fair Way!

Portstewart

Thursday, Oct. 4 - Portstewart---second round of the Great North Links Challenge. The bell rang: dong or ding? The first hole at Portstewart is possibly the most scenic opening hole in the links world. A chilly but stunningly sunny day greeted us as we teed it up for our second round in the GNLC. We checked -- our opening round team score of 98 was very good, but not good enough to bring home the daily prize. Some foursome reported a team stableford score of 112 points - which left us muttering in the gorse. Undeterred, we venture out onto the course, buoyed by our decent initial effort. Our team goal once again was to register at least 90 points, an average of 30 each. Doc Healy answers the bell and is steady all day, scoring a most impressive 35 points, just missing his birdie putt on #18 after a spectacular approach. Meanwhile the remaining trio struggle mightily at different times. Considine dings his first two holes and never gets going, tallying a steady and frustrating pair of unlucky 13's on the front and back nines, for a total of 26. Farrell storms out of the gate early with nine points on his first three holes, and then possibly sets an unusual GNLC record of five straight dings. Ever the gamer, Glenn re-tees twice after lost balls to scratch out valuable points. Highlight of the day: Glenn holes out a long bunker shot on his second tee ball on the par five 14th hole for a 6-5 to notch a point! Final score = 25 points. Haggerty strikes the ball well, especially on the front nine where he posted 15 points, but is stymied on the fast and occasionaly uneven greens. Score = 28. Team score of 89 doesn't quite equal the goal of 90, but is good enough to keep us in contention going into our third and final day at the toughest and most storied venue of the tourney: Royal Portrush - site of both this year's Irish Open and Senior British Open. This is links golf at its most demanding -- lengthy with narrow fairways leading up to difficult green complexes. We need our "A" games tomorrow. We spend the night fortifying.........For our followers, we have been technically challenged to post photos (no USB cable) --- we took plenty and we will add them stateside-------please check back in a few weeks.

Ballyliffin

The Great North Links Challenge has begun. The day dawned with bright sunshine and gentle breezes, after a night of heavy rain and gusting winds. Breakfast and exit from Rosapenna was smooth with excitement and The smell of competition was in the air. Our first round of the GNLC was scheduled at Ballyliffin on the Glashedy Course. Ballyliffin sits on the Inishowen peninsula in northern Donegal. We teed off in a gentle drizzle which was only present on two holes----the sky was bright blue with one cloud but the rain found us! Ballyliffin Glashedy is a terrific links course which is maintained beautifully. The greens were the best and most consistent we have played on this tour. The competition is a Stableford point system (bogey one point, par two points, birdie three points, eagle four points). Our goal was thirty points per man - which we thought would be competitive. The Ryder Cup was on our mind as we were probably the only American foursome in the tournament field. Concentration and grinding was the order of the day. Mission accomplished: Healy 30; Farrell 32; Haggerty and Considine 33 each. We attained our goal and registered a lofty (at least in our sotted minds) team score of 98, but we do not yet know how this score fared in competition with the GNLC field. The daily competition pitted Healy and Farrell against Considine and Haggerty. This match ended in a draw after Considine and Haggerty won the last two holes to earn the tie. More details later....after a few more pints of Guinness. Ballyliffin is one terrific place.

Sandy Hills

Tuesday October 2. 2012 The Ryder Cup is over. The Presidential debate is imminent. We have one more warm-up round before the Great North Links Challenge. Today our golf was played at the Sandy Hills course at Rosapenna. The weather projection was for wind and rain, but we escaped with raindrops on only a few holes. Today our challenge was the golf course. Sandy Hills is a difficult test of golf skills----in fact it is just too hard. The fairways are narrow, bunkers have collection slopes, elevated greens push approach shots off to the rough, and the long thick grass swallows golf balls in the rough like the eighteenth hole at every miniature golf course. Errant shots which stray only slightly from the straight and narrow are unplayable or lost. This is a golf-ball-eating machine. Haggerty and Healy took on Considine and Farrell in a rematch of the Donegal Duel. Mediocre golf dominated the day, but Wagon and Buff prevailed on the seventeenth hole. After the round, we revisited the incomparable Harbour Bar, ate another superb dinner at Rosapenna, and toasted golf and friendship with our new friends from Northern Ireland. Tomorrow we will travel to Ballyliffin to compete in the Great North Links Challenge. The reason we have traveled to Ireland. We have practiced enough. Tomorrow we need to answer the bell and somehow keep our tee balls in paly, and post 3 of 4 stableford scores. We need to salvage some American pride in the aftermath of the Ryder Cup debacle. Weather forecast: low 50's; 40% chance of rain; 30-35 winds. A warm zephyr over here. Stay tuned...

Rosapenna

Monday October 1, 2012 Our hotel for Sunday night, Caraween House in Narin, was closed for the winter and the person who agreed to open up for us was a no show. So.......we headed north to spend an extra night at the Rosapenna Hotel----this also brought us closer to our favorite bar in Ireland -- the epicenter of our travels, the holy grail of Irish bars -- The Harbour Bar in Downings. where the Guinness is smooth, the music is plentiful, and the craic is omnipresent. We four Irish-Americans fell truly blessed to have found this perfect bar where the Irish welcome is always in splendid display. We spent Sunday night eating and drinking in the Rosapenna Hotel bar and watching the Ryder Cup singles matches with rabid, but respectful, European fans. How could Justin Rose hit those big putts on such a big stage? When Furyk went down to Garcia, we knew it was over. The outcome of the match was disappointing and disheartening, but the fellowship with the golfers we met was memorable. Back to our golf. Monday morning we played a new/renovated course at Rosapenna----the Morris/Ruddy Old Course. We played the predecessor course in 1998, and it was not impressive. This new course was fun. The front nine is a quiet low-key circuit which is a nice test, but not very special. The back nine, which begins at the north corner of the Golf Pavilion, runs along the coast in muted dunes. This nine is impressive and tested every club in the bag. Quiet and elegant layout. Bravo to owner Frank Casey and the Rosapenna family for bringing the resort back to the main stage of links golf. The local news is that Casey recently purchased 36 more holes adjacent to the hotel on land which was originally going to be developed by Jack Nicklaus. Rumor has it that Jack may be brought back to lend his designing hand to the new course(s). No matter who develops this marvelous links land -- Rosapenna is here to stay on any golf map.

Sunday,Sept. 30th. We wake up and make the winding drive to the wild and windy coast of Northwest Donegal. Narin-Portnoo is one of our favorite links courses - a natural and unassuming club with a modest beginning few holes but a rousing series of holes along the coastal dunes which make this links a must play for links golf aficionados. We arrived and were allowed to enter a one-day stableford competition sponsored by a local hotel. Our rounds generally begin with a trip to the pro shop to purchase green fees, rent trolleys to carry our golf bags, and get water bottles and candy bars for the eighteen hole trek. Stableford competition assigns points for net bogey, par, birdie, eagle, and ace. A double bogey ("ding") results in zero points. We had no delusion of winning this competition, but we wanted to play well on the final day of the Ryder Cup at Medinah. We scored several points on the initial meadowland holes, and we continued strong play on the first several dunes holes-----but the golf gods were toying with us. Skies were blue, and there was no rain, but we played in wind which ranged from three to five clubs! Planning and executing shots in the wind was difficult and our scores ballooned. It was a spent foursome that returned to the clubhouse to register scores ranging from 22-27. Dings rang throughout our scorecards. Despite our lackluster scores, we were buoyed by the prospect of viewing the final round of The Ryder Cup on our opponents' soil. We couldn't lose, could we?