Ballybunion Golf Club — Old Course

Ballybunion Old Course is the links that makes golfers emotional. The north Kerry dunes were carved by the Atlantic over thousands of years — massive, chaotic, and entirely indifferent to golf — and the routing simply follows what was already there. Tom Simpson, the English architect brought in to prepare the course for the Irish Amateur Championship in 1936, took one look and declared the terrain surpassed Pine Valley for natural beauty. He moved three greens and left. There was nothing to improve.

The course was founded in 1893 but spent most of its first century known only to the Irish. Herbert Warren Wind wrote about it in the New Yorker in the early 1970s — calling it the finest seaside links he had ever played — and created the first trickle of American visitors. Tom Watson arrived in 1981, convinced to make the trip by his friend and former USGA President Sandy Tatum. He stepped off the plane, played eighteen holes, then played another eighteen alone with his caddie. The following year he won The Open at Royal Troon, and told anyone who would listen that Ballybunion was the finest course on earth. The trickle became a flood.

The Old Course does something clever with its routing: it doesn't simply beat you with the sea all day. It retreats inland, then returns, building a rhythm of tactical golf and dramatic exposure that makes you feel you have played several different rounds within one. The climax is the stretch from the seventh tee — perched on the clifftop above the beach — through the extraordinary valley at the 11th and out through the closing holes along the coast. Watson has been Club Captain, has renovated the bunkers, and has a hole named after him. He earned it.

Ballybunion is a proper Irish seaside town, not a resort — families have been coming to the beach here for generations, and the pubs have been there just as long. Listowel, eight kilometres away, is the literary capital of Kerry: John B. Keane wrote at the bar of his own pub on William Street, and the town runs Ireland's longest-standing literary festival every May. The golf is the reason to come. The evening is a reason to stay.