THERE will be no shortage of American accents popping up around Portrush this week – but some of the US contingent are a little more familiar than others with the lay of the land around the north coast.
Last year, the men behind the popular Fried Egg website and podcast made it their business to get up close and personal with some of the wonderful links courses they had only ever watched from afar.
An authoritative voice on course architecture and design, as much as the big names who help drive interest week on week, this was bucket list material; a golfing pilgrimage, or ‘eggsploration’, that took the team north and south, broadening horizons to levels none could have anticipated.
“It had always been a priority of ours to get there – for our own education and obviously for our own audience,” said Fried Egg head of content, Brendan Porath.
“The trip feels larger and more out of reach than it actually is until sometimes you just need to make it happen; book it and go.
“To better appreciate the professional game – to better appreciate your own game, the recreational game – you have to understand the fields that it’s played on, right? And golf is unlike anything else in that sense.”
Royal Portrush, which hosts this year’s Open Championship, and Newcastle’s stunning Royal County Down – where the 2024 Irish Open took place – are regularly ranked among the top courses in the world when such subjective lists are pulled together.
What surprised Porath and the rest of the crew, however, was the standard, the care and attention to detail of Irish courses away from the headline acts.
“The landscape is just preposterous, and I mean that in the most positive way.
“For us, we’re so used to these flatter parkland, tree-lined courses, and the landscapes in Ireland and Scotland are this absolute gold standard.
“The United States has incredible landscapes and architecture throughout it, but for most American golfers, that is not their experience. They’re walled off, they’re exclusive clubs, and you don’t get to a lot of those courses.
“In Ireland, the fanciest ones from Portrush to Royal County Down, to just the recreational, is the gold standard. It’s like stepping up from lower league soccer to the Premier League.
“I mean, one of the basic pillars of understanding golf course architecture is what kind of turf do you have? You can have many kinds, but some are certainly better suited for the best kind of golf course architecture – Portrush has that, Newcastle has it.
“It’s this landscape of the firm turf, the sandy soil… you had what we consider the golden age of architecture, the first 20 to 30 years of the 1900s, and thank God you had the right hands on it – mostly Harry Colt in the case of Portrush – who were educated enough to understand what they were doing.
“You can see there was a real understanding of how to build a golf course, as opposed to the older courses in Scotland where there’s just a field, there’s no building going on – we just put the hole in the ground, and that’s the golf course, and we’re lucky to have the land we have.
“Portrush is this incredible mix of lucky to have the land you have, plus a better understanding of how to actually build and route and make an incredible golf course. It’s like stepping up an entirely different level in a different world that is pretty much unattainable in America.”
The challenges that the weather brings, too, is what makes links golf unique. If the forecast is anything to go by, that will definitely be the case at Royal Portrush this week.
“I’m bringing a junior colleague of ours, Joseph – he’s never been, he was asking what to pack, and I told him ‘pack your winter hat, pack sunscreen and everything in between, and obviously a raincoat’.
“It can change quickly, we saw that in 2019, and it blew in hard and fast. There was one day in Newcastle last March where I felt like my hands were going to fall off, and you’re thinking it’s kind of crazy that we’re out here – like, we’re only out here because we travelled all this way.
“But that’s what I love about it because, back at home, you’re not leaving your house to play golf in those conditions. No chance. And then when we’re in Ireland, there’s no chance we don’t play. It’s the total reverse.
“There’s a romanticism about it. That’s what we want, whether we’re watching, and often when we’re playing – within reason, obviously.
“We tune into the Open for a reason, and the weather is part of it.”
These are heady times for the north, with the Open back in Portrush for a second time in six years – Shane Lowry with the fairytale finish in 2019 as he brought the Claret Jug back to Offaly.
And, having studied in-depth all the courses currently on the R&A’s Open rota, Porath feels Portrush currently sits top of the pile – while he also hopes to see Portmarnock added, a move that feels closer after club members overwhelmingly approved changes to the historic links back in April.
“I think we’ve come to the conclusion it is the best golf course on the Open rota, which is a big thing to say, because that rota includes the Old Course [St Andrews], and other golf courses that are among the best in the world. But I think Portrush might nudge ahead by a little bit.
“I would also be a strong advocate for adding Portmarnock to the rota – the R&A has clearly done some due diligence there, the club has done some due diligence. Certainly, it feels like they’re doing a little dance together.
“One thing about the Open is that it doesn’t go to many major metropolitan areas, or urban cities. That it would be going to one of the great cities in the world, that would be an incredible event.
“I think you’re seeing a more adaptable R&A, a more progressive R&A… bringing the Open to Dublin would be an incredible achievement; a celebration.
“You’re not really discarding the Open DNA, the Open look, the Open feel, because it’s one of the great links courses in the world.”
The Fried Egg team arrived in Ireland on Saturday, and pulled up in Portrush on Monday – just as Rory McIlroy was fulfilling media commitments less than 24 hours after narrowly missing out on the Scottish Open title.
Back on home soil for the first time since his momentous Masters victory, all eyes will be on the Holywood man. And, even after some fractious exchanges with US media post-Augusta, the vast majority of American golf fans will still be in his corner.
“He’s absolutely loved. Unequivocally, he is loved.
“I saw it in 2018 when he was in the final group of the Masters with Patrick Reed, an American; the crowd was vociferously on Rory’s side there in that final group.
“The American media loves Rory, the American public absolutely adores Rory, roots him on, wants to push him across the line… they probably want him [to win] at Portrush, too.”
Porath is wary of getting caught up in the emotion that surrounds McIlroy’s return but has a sneaking feeling that, even after missing the cut in 2019, this year could bring Rory’s redemption.
“I said this ahead of the Masters – and it feels almost cliche now, too Disney-movie like – but I’m compelled to pick him at Portrush. Of course there’s some real data and analysis that would corroborate picking Rory as well.
“I talked to [Royal Portrush head professional] Gary McNeill and some of his assistants before I left last March and they talked about how Rory was crying in the pro shop; he teared up the first time he came back to Portrush, with all the infrastructure built up.
“Like, this place I’ve come since I was a teenage boy is now having the Open and the great championships that I’ve been playing in the last decade or so as a pro. He’s a little bit of a romantic, a thoughtful guy, and that probably got to him in 2019.
“But, as he’s gotten older, winning at golf courses of consequence clearly matters much more to him. It wasn’t just an Irish Open last year, it was an Irish Open at Royal County Down – and that mattered more to him.
“This isn’t just an Open, it’s an Open at Royal Portrush. He has gotten a much greater appreciation of the great golf courses in the world, their architecture and the significance of winning at them.”
