Golf thoughts...

from Padraig Harrington and Dublin Taxi Drivers....

Author

Sean Melia
February 02, 2024

Friday, January 26

Table of Contents

Golf thoughts from Padraig Harrington and Dublin Taxi Drivers

Hop in a Dublin taxi, and you’re sure to learn something.

St. Valentine is buried in Dublin.

Learned that from a cabbie.

At the suggestion of a Dublin taxi driver, I used the poem “Dig” by Seamus Heaney in an opening school meeting to set the tone for the entire school year.

Listen to Padraig Harrington speak about the state of the game, and you’ll learn something, too.

He’s spoken about how to get kids interested in golf (note: it’s not about players signing $500 million contracts and holding tournaments with music playing.).

And sometimes, Harrington and those Dublin drivers have a shared message.

In the video below, Harrington says, “Yes, you have to be rich in Ireland to play golf. Rich in time. The people that play golf in Ireland are people who have time - taxi drivers, policemen, anybody on shift work.”

While we were visiting Ireland last summer for my brother’s wedding, I lugged my clubs with me to play a few rounds. As we stuffed the golf bag into each tiny trunk, the local taxi drivers would start talking about golf.

They all played golf. They all had a local course they’d play in their free time. One driver even said that a bunch of taxi drivers would get together and play during the long summer evenings before the sunset around 10 pm.

In my journey around Massachusetts playing a bunch of different courses, I have come across shift workers who carve out time to play golf. My partners at Ridder Farm were fresh off the graveyard shift, getting 18 holes in before heading home for a nap (and then to see off a daughter to her prom).

I’ve played with school custodians at Franklin Park who told stories about broken wax machines and over-flowing toilets.

However, it feels more like the exception rather than the rule.

Golf in the United States is different than in Ireland or Scotland. While we were in Scotland, I made a tee time online at a private course. I arrived at Elie Golf House early, and they let me play alone an hour before my tee time when members didn’t fill the tee sheet, Tiff was able to walk with me, too.

I didn’t need to call in a favor. I just had to show up and pay the green fee to play the 33rd-ranked course in Scotland according to Top 100 courses.

I just needed time.

It doesn’t always feel like you just need time to play on this side of the Atlantic. Often times you need money, especially if you’d like to play the best courses. For those, you need connections, too.

The access points for golf are different here. That’s not a shocking statement. But if you watch Harrington deliver his line about being rich in time, he knows it’s a differentiating factor from golf in the United States.

How many people do you know who stopped playing golf after college because they ran out of time? Rounds take a long time, sometimes all day between the travel and the 5.5 hours at a public course.

I’ve heard a lot of people on my quest swear off weekend public golf. It just takes too long and isn’t worth the trouble, especially if they have a family.

We don’t value nine-hole rounds, par-3 courses, or pitch-and-putt. So many people think they need a full-blown golf experience (often from the wrong tees).

Instead, we need to think like runners who enjoy 5k, 10k, half marathons, marathons, and everything in between.

The hope is that the long tail of golf’s explosion in the pandemic is we start to see more small golf that takes less time and makes us feel rich in the most valued unrenewable resource.

News and Notes

  • PGA Tour Enterprises was unveiled on Wednesday. In short, a bunch of rich guys calling themselves Strategic Sports Groups, the likes Arthur Blank (Atlanta Falcons owner), John Henry (Red Sox, Penguins, and Liverpool owner), Wyc Grousbeck (Celtics owner), Steve Cohen (Mets owner), and others have invested upwards of $3 billion (more like $1.5 bill) into the PGA Tour. Players will get equity, and the valuation of the PGA Tour was placed at $12 billion. To put that valuation into perspective, the Washington Commanders just sold for $6.05 billion. I’m not entirely sure what all this means because I’m not a finance guy (duh). The Saudis are not involved in this yet, which means LIV Golf is going to continue to live in its own universe and steal players away from the PGA Tour and college golf.

  • On the heels of the PGA Tour SSG agreement, LIV Golf announced a partnership with Google. They are promising the ability to watch every shot by every player in their tournaments, which is only done by one entity in golf - The Masters. We’ll see how it all shakes out and if it works. But it was just another reminder of the incredible wealth the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund has at their disposal and how eager major companies are to hoover any of it up.

  • Rory McIlroy continued to move farther from his initial comments about LIV. He’s gone from “LIV is dead in the water” to “People make choices, and we can’t punish them” this week. I think some of this stems from more of McIlroy’s friends heading to LIV, mainly Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton. At this point, McIlroy seems pretty beat up having been involved in this battle for two years.

  • On Tuesday and Wednesday, No Laying Up did two three-hour sessions on the driving range at the ATT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am. It’s something like this that golf fans want more of. I watched/listened to some of it live and then caught the rest of it after it finished. They had players drop in to chat on their way to and from practice sessions.

Help Desk

Would love your help with two things…

  1. You can help support me in my quest to play every course in the Bay State by purchasing Bay State Golf swag. Check it all out here.

  2. You can share this email with a friend and encourage them to subscribe.

When I’m not golfing…

I’m reading…

  • I’m just about to finish All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.

  • It’s rare that I pre-order a book, but Tana French’s new novel, The Hunter, drops in March. If you like crime novels, her Dublin Murder Squad books are incredible. So are her stand-alone novels The Searcher and Witch Elm.

I’m listening to…

I’m eating…

  • My NYTimes gift articles have reset… so here are a few recipes from the week that I enjoyed…

I’m drinking…  

  • Abita Root Beer slaps.

I’m watching…

  • With three Cs games at home this week, not much evening TV viewing. We’re on the True Detective train. Enjoying the weekly episode drops, gives us something to look forward to.

PLUGS

New stuff:

  1. This week I went solo for my first crack at a Bay State Course Spotlight. Wachusett CC was the topic. I did a few posts on Instagram about Wachusett CC, too. Listen to the Bay State Golf Podcast. (Spotify and Apple Podcasts)

  2. The USGA Director of Player Relations, Scott Langley, joined me on the Amateur Golf podcast to talk about becoming the first ever First Tee graduate to make the PGA Tour and his work with the USGA. (Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Old stuff:

I'm (shamelessly) plugging...

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