Byline: by Dermot Bolger
IT is time I faced facts - I will never don football boots and run out at Wembley, the San Siro or the Nou Camp. Tolka Park is probably out of the question and even an epidemic of swine flu, beriberi and bubonic plague would not convince Giovanni Trapattoni to pick me for Ireland while there are still pensioners with plastic hips available.
But, in contrast to soccer, the odd thing about golf is that, after this week's British Open, mere hackers like me - or at least hackers with Stg[pounds sterling]210 to spare for the green fees - can play the exact same fairways that Tiger Woods, Padraig Harrington and (to salute an Irish achievement in qualifying) David Higgins will walk in Turnberry this week. Yes, we can play the landmark ninth hole with its tee box on a cliff, with waiting rocks below, and be able to tell our grandchildren that we lost golf balls in special places.
There is a term for poor golfers like me - bunnies. We are not to be confused with bunny girls - a younger species who allegedly spend long hours romping in deep beds with an octoge-narianamed Hugh. For us bunnies life is more about 'fore' than foreplay. We rarely romp but we do spend long hours in the deepest rough.
Unless you have a fetish for Pringle knitwear, golf is not a sexy sport. It was seen as so potentially career-damaging for pop singers that Alice Cooper and David Cassidy, in their heyday, had to be smuggled onto golf courses at dawn in the boot of cars in case the record-buying public discovered their secret. Being a demon who snapped the heads off live bats on stage was one thing, but being a demon for snapping an eightiron out of the rough hadn't quite the same credibility.
But golf is a guilty pleasure for thousands of Irish people. Indeed Harrington's success has lured the most unlikely people to tune in. I watched his USPGA victory in a pub packed with hurling fans, with two GAA men behind me analysing his shot. 'That was a mighty putt,' one remarked as Harrington made a birdie. 'It was a good length,' his friend replied grudgingly, 'but there again he was unmarked.'
TURNBERRY is open again to the public after the Open finishes this Sunday, but my greatest golf memories have little to do with championship courses. I did get to play the Old Course in St Andrews once and by a miracle parred the famous 17th road hole where you drive over the roof of the old hotel, but as a child I already possessed my own version of St Andrews, with its Hell Bunker, Principal's Nose and Valley of Sin. Naturally my version of these features were considerably more condensed than on the actual Old Course - being squeezed between old potato beds in my father's long back garden in Finglas. But this did not take away from the magic as I played this homemade miniature course on childhood summer evenings after watching the British Open on television.
Aged 12, I progressed to Tolka Lodge pitch and putt course at Finglas bridge, with immaculate greens on fiendish slopes and blood being pumped into the river from an adjoining slaughterhouse. Today people learn golf by buying complete sets of clubs and taking lessons. But back then, everyone I knew was self-taught, possessing an assortment of clubs. My memories of teenage years are of cycling to play golf with three and four clubs strapped to my crossbar. Indeed my first long-term relationship was with an old Clery's eight iron. We would still be together if the massive head hadn't come off during my first visit to a driving range. A golf bag was a luxury, though in the recession-ridden early Eighties I acquired an antique one from a skip, which my friends and I agreed (after one of our girlfriends painted it with white shoe polish) looked virtually new.
We all honed our skills on a parthree course near the Hell Fire Club and at Howth's Deer Park, where men slept in their cars to be first on the tee box and where I once saw an elderly Japanese man - who had been told it was important to address the ball properly - bow to his ball in greeting every time before he hit it. We lost golf balls on the brilliant links that Fingal County Council run at Corballis (still great value) and I lost hope and most of my hair at Sillogue in Ballymun, still a challenging test.
And gradually - in so much as one ever does - we learned to play in those pre-Celtic Tiger times when golf courses did not necklace the city of Dublin. For the next four days, I'll live every shot played by Irish competitors in the Open, but for me golf is not really about professionals and crowds and the huge prize money. The biggest thrill for me remains attempting (and generally failing) to take three euros off my big brother. Sibling rivalry is friendly but intense. Long may it last, but the other great pleasure of golf is that it does last. Men and women play into their 70s. They still play when they can barely walk, but they play for the company and the thrill of that one good shot which makes everything worthwhile.
The Scottish poet, Andrew Greig, summed up golf's essence by recalling his father teeing up a Dunlop 65 found in the rough as he played with two old friends: 'Unhurried, absorbed yet not that bothered, they get around with the minimum of fuss. As always they play briskly, with few words and some brief chuckles.'
When you hear some commentators talk about golf it is a maze of statistics that sound like pure maths or something mechanical. Maybe at one level it is, but golf is really about friendship and tiny private victories to be savoured, because in the long run, golf always wins. The moments I treasure on the golf course are ones that would seem unimportant to anyone else.
AS Greig once noted, 'golf doesn't tell us what we'd like to be told, it remorselessly shows up our pettiness and failures of character. Our impatience, anxiety, childish grumpiness - they're all there.'
But it is a deeply honest game. The great Bobby Jones was baffled when praised for calling a shot against himself that nobody else had seen. He said it was simple honestly and he no more needed praise than being praised for not robbing a bank. Golf is about standing alone on a fairway, with life and death temporarily suspended, as you watch a ball seemingly hang forever in mid-air before dropping onto a green - and you have, in that moment, the sense of truly being alive.
This summer, I've been teaching my teenage son to play, though with a full set of clubs and nothing strapped to the crossbar of a bike. We dodge between showers, like everyone else this month. We shelter under trees and take wet gear on and off so often that it feels like a Chippendale routine. It is a joy to watch him find his way around the course at Donabate Golf Club (where there is brilliant deals for visitors these evenings) and witness his pleasure at making a good drive. Seeing his anticipation on every tee, I remember the same sense of excitement I felt as a eight-year-old in a Finglas back garden when I won the British Open most evenings, threading my way past my own Hell Bunker, Principal's Nose and Valley of Sin.
CAPTION(S):
Role model: We'll be gripped by Padraig Harrington as he tries to retain the British Open this weekend
Pure bliss: For Dermot Bolger, golf suspends life and death
