• Latest
  • All
  • News
  • Business
  • Politics
  • Science
  • World
  • Health & Lifestyle
  • Tech
A man, some golf clubs and the journey of a lifetime

A man, some golf clubs and the journey of a lifetime

February 12, 2021
George Floyd: A third-degree murder charge has been brought against the former police officer charged in George Floyd’s death

George Floyd: A third-degree murder charge has been brought against the former police officer charged in George Floyd’s death

March 11, 2021
Mobile Health and Fitness Sensor Market to Register Unwavering Growth During 2021-2027 – NY Market Reports

Mobile Health and Fitness Sensor Market to Register Unwavering Growth During 2021-2027 – NY Market Reports

February 25, 2021
Detroit-style square pizza is on the rise nationally

Detroit-style square pizza is on the rise nationally

February 25, 2021
Studies highlight outbreaks in India and Philippines

Studies highlight outbreaks in India and Philippines

February 25, 2021
Harlem’s Fashion Row Poised to Host 3rd Annual Digital Fashion Summit in February.

AP Top Travel News at 5:38 a.m. EST

February 25, 2021
It’s All About Trump: CPAC Seems Poised To Ignore Republican Identity Crisis

It’s All About Trump: CPAC Seems Poised To Ignore Republican Identity Crisis

February 25, 2021
Barack Obama Recalls Breaking His Childhood Friend’s Nose After Being Called a Racial Slur

Barack Obama Recalls Breaking His Childhood Friend’s Nose After Being Called a Racial Slur

February 25, 2021
2020 college racial and gender report card shows ‘insignificant progress’

2020 college racial and gender report card shows ‘insignificant progress’

February 25, 2021
Fury over plan to exhume US nun buried in England

Fury over plan to exhume US nun buried in England

February 25, 2021
BLM Launches Survival Fund Amid Federal COVID-19 Relief Wait | Health News

BLM Launches Survival Fund Amid Federal COVID-19 Relief Wait | Health News

February 25, 2021
Some Seattle business owners are at their breaking point over crime

Some Seattle business owners are at their breaking point over crime

February 25, 2021
L&T Technology Services Selected by Airbus for Skywise Partner Programme

L&T Technology Services Selected by Airbus for Skywise Partner Programme

February 25, 2021
ADVERTISEMENT
News Daily America
  • Home
  • News
    • All
    • Business
    • Politics
    • Science
    • World
    George Floyd: A third-degree murder charge has been brought against the former police officer charged in George Floyd’s death

    George Floyd: A third-degree murder charge has been brought against the former police officer charged in George Floyd’s death

    It’s All About Trump: CPAC Seems Poised To Ignore Republican Identity Crisis

    It’s All About Trump: CPAC Seems Poised To Ignore Republican Identity Crisis

    Barack Obama Recalls Breaking His Childhood Friend’s Nose After Being Called a Racial Slur

    Barack Obama Recalls Breaking His Childhood Friend’s Nose After Being Called a Racial Slur

    Fury over plan to exhume US nun buried in England

    Fury over plan to exhume US nun buried in England

    BLM Launches Survival Fund Amid Federal COVID-19 Relief Wait | Health News

    BLM Launches Survival Fund Amid Federal COVID-19 Relief Wait | Health News

    Some Seattle business owners are at their breaking point over crime

    Some Seattle business owners are at their breaking point over crime

    Olympic Football Tournaments 2020 – Women – News – USA retain crown as trio hone for Tokyo

    Olympic Football Tournaments 2020 – Women – News – USA retain crown as trio hone for Tokyo

    United States Pancreatic Cancer Market Report 2021-2026 Features Market Forecasts and Competitive Landscape – ResearchAndMarkets.com

    Insights on the Sharps Containers Global Market to 2027 – Featuring Bemis Manufacturing, Bondtech & Daniels Health USA Among Others – ResearchAndMarkets.com

    GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger called out Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for hanging a sign declaring binary gender across the hall from a lawmaker with a trans daughter

    GOP Rep. Adam Kinzinger called out Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene for hanging a sign declaring binary gender across the hall from a lawmaker with a trans daughter

    India’s Health Workers Balk at Taking Homegrown COVID-19 Vaccine | World News

    India’s Health Workers Balk at Taking Homegrown COVID-19 Vaccine | World News

    Trending Tags

    • Donald Trump
    • Future of News
    • Climate Change
    • Market Stories
    • Election Results
    • Flat Earth
  • Tech
    • All
    • Apps
    • Gear
    • Mobile
    • Startup
    L&T Technology Services Selected by Airbus for Skywise Partner Programme

    L&T Technology Services Selected by Airbus for Skywise Partner Programme

    Xiaomi Mi Watch Revolve: Your affordable health buddy 24/7

    Chinese Fintech Apps & rise of global surveillance state

    Biden nominates 3 to postal board as delays persist

    Flamengo and Internacional gear up for a big finish in Brasileirão title race | Football

    Mars Food commits to delivering 5.5 BILLION healthy meals to families around the world by 2025

    The Companies To Watch As Green Tech Booms in 2021

    Tasty by Carmen Electra Coming to Your Favorite Food Apps Other OTC:CORG

    Tasty by Carmen Electra Coming to Your Favorite Food Apps Other OTC:CORG

    Motorcycle Gear Market to Rise with Impressive CAGR | Players –  Schuberth, Shoei, AlpineStar, Dainese, HJC, Shark, Arai – KSU

    Motorcycle Gear Market to Rise with Impressive CAGR | Players –  Schuberth, Shoei, AlpineStar, Dainese, HJC, Shark, Arai – KSU

    Local florists gear up for Valentine’s Day – Valley Times-News

    Local florists gear up for Valentine’s Day – Valley Times-News

    Election tech firms file lawsuits over conspiracy coverage. Is One America News next?

    Election tech firms file lawsuits over conspiracy coverage. Is One America News next?

    9to5Mac Happy Hour 316: iOS 14.5 Maps, Apple Glasses rumors, first TV+ AR app

    9to5Mac Happy Hour 316: iOS 14.5 Maps, Apple Glasses rumors, first TV+ AR app

    Trending Tags

    • Flat Earth
    • Sillicon Valley
    • Mr. Robot
    • MotoGP 2017
    • Golden Globes
    • Future of News
  • Health & Lifestyle
    • All
    • Fashion
    • Food
    • Health
    • Travel
    Mobile Health and Fitness Sensor Market to Register Unwavering Growth During 2021-2027 – NY Market Reports

    Mobile Health and Fitness Sensor Market to Register Unwavering Growth During 2021-2027 – NY Market Reports

    Detroit-style square pizza is on the rise nationally

    Detroit-style square pizza is on the rise nationally

    Studies highlight outbreaks in India and Philippines

    Studies highlight outbreaks in India and Philippines

    Harlem’s Fashion Row Poised to Host 3rd Annual Digital Fashion Summit in February.

    AP Top Travel News at 5:38 a.m. EST

    Kellogg returns to balanced financial growth | 2021-02-12

    Kellogg returns to balanced financial growth | 2021-02-12

    ‘If you’re willing to go further, it’s available:’ Texans travel hours for COVID-19 vaccine

    ‘If you’re willing to go further, it’s available:’ Texans travel hours for COVID-19 vaccine

    Three Tips for Making New Fitness Goals

    Three Tips for Making New Fitness Goals

    M&S clothing sets new sustainability standards for denim

    M&S clothing sets new sustainability standards for denim

    Good news Thursday: Avid biker helps exchange books for food, 11-year-old fundraises through soccer

    Good news Thursday: Avid biker helps exchange books for food, 11-year-old fundraises through soccer

    COVID update: Travel fines, breastfeeding, mask updates

    COVID update: Travel fines, breastfeeding, mask updates

    Trending Tags

    • Golden Globes
    • Mr. Robot
    • MotoGP 2017
    • Climate Change
    • Flat Earth
  • Sports
    • Football
    • Golf
    • Horsing Racing
    • Equestrian
    • MotorSport
    • Skiing
  • Login
  • Register
  • About
  • Contact us
  • Advertise With Us
Friday, April 9, 2021
No Result
View All Result
News Daily America
No Result
View All Result
ADVERTISEMENT
Home Sports Golf

A man, some golf clubs and the journey of a lifetime

in Golf, Sports, Sports
A man, some golf clubs and the journey of a lifetime
745
SHARES
12.4k
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

At first it was a crazy idea. A trip from the United States to Ireland to play every links course on the island – with a few parkland along the way – and, to top it all off, doing it all on foot.

And no, not just the golf on foot. All of it on foot. The full coastline of the island on just two legs.

Such an idea would be beyond the realms of possibility for anyone in Ireland, not least a married man living in Philadelphia without even the appropriate shoes to so much as consider walking over 3,000 kilometres along roads, beaches, bogs and fields.

So, fast forward a few months to May 2007 and Tom Coyne is standing on the first tee at Kilkee Golf Club in Co Clare with his clubs and a few other slightly less important possessions in the bag on his back – a four-month long adventure and a 990-hole, 1,967,680-yard, Par 3,895 golf course ahead of him.

The idea, put simply, was to walk the entire coastline of the island of Ireland and play every golf hole along the way, making up what would eventually become A Course Called Ireland.
 

In the bag on his back was a binder which included maps, 103 room reservations and over 40 tee times. By the end of the trip he had hit 4,531 shots, lost 129 balls, visited 196 pubs and had the makings of a New York Times bestseller which, 14 years later, is still selling and has become something of a bible for American golfers planning trips to Ireland.

“Thinking back on it it’s hard to believe that was me,” says Coyne. “I see the pictures and there’s video to prove that I did it and there’s a book here on my bookshelf but it feels like an entirely different life.

“Now I have two daughters, I’m a professor at university, I’ve gone on to do other golf adventures and other big ambitious golf trips but doing it that way, doing it on foot and doing those miles . . . I can’t imagine someone saying today you should go and do this and me saying ‘yeah, that sounds like a good idea’.

“At that point in my life I didn’t take into account the physical difficulty. I’m a little older so I’d say could my body actually do that? But I didn’t take into account, either, the danger factor of walking, say, what’s supposed to be a two-lane road in Donegal but it’s about half of a lane with my whole life on my back and going around a tight turn on the edge of the road with no shoulder . . . that’s pretty crazy. But at that point of my life it was fun. It was this great adventure.

“Coming up with this idea I was looking at a golf map of Ireland trying to plan a trip just with my friends and I was thinking where should we go – should we try the southwest? Should we go up to Donegal? Should we try the North? But the island is just ringed with these golf courses and started to look like one big golf course in a silly way on this map on the wall and I thought ‘well what if you just played them all?’

“And I thought to ask a publisher to let me do that is just sort of self-indulgent. What’s the hook? And the hook was that in Ireland you walk, you don’t really take buggies – maybe more people do now but back then nobody would – so I’m going to literally walk the entirety of the ‘golf course’.

“So that idea was something of a gag or a gimmick to make the book different and to help sell it to a publisher but it really became such an essential part of the story – not just because it lent that danger or drama of whether I could actually walk around the country on foot – but because it made me take in Ireland at a different pace.”

Not only was the walk physically demanding but it could be quite dangerous at times as well. Photo: Tom Coyne
Not only was the walk physically demanding but it could be quite dangerous at times as well. Photo: Tom Coyne

There’s nothing like a visitor’s perspective to make you take a step back and evaluate what you have on your doorstep and that’s what Coyne’s book does for an Irish reader. It’s always easy to forget just how unique links golf is and how Ireland is, for many Americans, towards the very top of the bucket list.

What’s more, because Coyne walks the entire coastline, he stops in plenty of off-the-beaten-track towns which the American tour buses wouldn’t visit. Places that aren’t crammed with gift shops and hotels and pubs that are filled with actual real-life locals.

“I go to a place like Carne, in Belmullet, and I feel, like, just total happiness and peace and a lot of it is to do with the people I know I’m going to see – they’re friends and not a cross word is going to be shared at all for the time I’m in Ireland and that feels pretty good because there’s a lot of cross words going on over here, if you haven’t noticed, and there’s plenty of grudges in Ireland for sure too but I’m not part of them so it’s just a really peaceful place.

“I love the people, I love the pace of life, I love the sense of humour and I love the snacks and the candy bars too.”

Although the novelty of the full Irish breakfast wore off after a while when it was on offer every single morning in the B&Bs along the way, the hospitality and the friendly welcomes in the 196 pubs Coyne visits around the island is a constant throughout the book. It’s a familiar lament among Irish people abroad that other countries just don’t do pubs like we do at home and, as much as it sounds like a worn-out cliché, reading the tales from A Course Called Ireland (coupled with a pining for a stool in any pub at the moment) makes you realise that it’s a cliché which rings true.

The Beach Bar at Aughris Head, the Stores Pub in Portsalon and the Old Commercial Bar in Ardglass get Coyne’s top billing in the pub stakes but there are plenty of others which warrant some inches on the pages of the book including a conversation in Matt Molloy’s of Westport where a Meathman by the name of Séamus listed all of the reasons why he thought golf was, essentially, about the worst thing on the planet. Needless to say, that was never going to be a lasting friendship.

Coyne’s Irish roots are very similar to those of US president Joe Biden in that his great-grandparents left Co Mayo and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania and, after first visiting the country as a child and then again with his father on a golf trip at the age of 19, Coyne says he immediately felt like he fit into the Irish way of life while the rugged linksland which contrasts so acutely with the manicured lush parkland courses in much of America was the icing on the cake.

The other main contrast, of course, is that even the very best courses on this island are accessible to visitors. In the States the odds of walking on the moon wouldn’t be too dissimilar to the odds of even stepping through the gates at the likes of Augusta National, Pine Valley, Oakmont, Merion, Medinah or countless other private clubs but get on the phone to Ballybunion, Lahinch, Portrush or the Old Head and you’ll get a tee time no problem. Particularly this year when the chances of any international golf visitors landing in Ireland are looking slimmer and slimmer by the day.

It’s this contrast which makes golf on this side of the Atlantic so appealing to Coyne and to lots of Americans.

In the end Coyne played 990 holes. Photo: Tom Coyne
In the end Coyne played 990 holes. Photo: Tom Coyne

“In Ireland, talk about the welcome you’re going to feel, that’s tremendously appealing and it’s a drum that I continue to bang over here is to say ‘look how they do it’. There’s things you take when you travel, you look at any culture or country and you say ‘they would be better if they did it like we did’ or ‘we’d be better off doing it like they do’. I think, golf-wise, the idea to have a visitor green fee or have visitor tee times at private clubs means yeah, the club can be exclusive but, for the course itself, there’s no reason to put a lock and chain on it.

“That’s fine if Ballybunion or Lahinch want it, that to be a member it’s a certain thing or in Scotland to be a member of the Royal and Ancient is a certain thing but I can still play the (St Andrews) Old Course and I can still go play Lahinch and Ballybunion and that’s just wonderful – why not share the golf course and let the club and course be separate things?

“I just think that makes sense, it’s good for the game, it helps members by underwriting your dues by bringing money into clubs.”

Before A Course Called Ireland, Coyne had written a golf novel called A Gentleman’s Game as well as Paper Tiger which saw him dedicate 546 days to playing golf in a bid to make it from a handicap of 14 to the professional game. A Course Called Ireland was different. As he says himself, “it sold circles around both of the other books,” and has become a mainstay for the thousands of American golfers who land in Ireland every year looking for the same buzz of playing links golf, the same pints of Guinness and the same feeling Coyne felt on his journey.

With a publishing deal already in the bag before he arrived in Ireland, there was extra motivation there for Coyne to complete his trip but still, he says, there were moments when the thoughts of jumping on a bus or just stopping altogether did come into his head.

“Felt like it? Yeah. Fantasised about it on the road? Probably. There were moments where I entertained the fantasy but I was all in, I was fully committed not just even as a walker or a golfer or a tourist, but I was also committed as an author. I’d taken the advance from my publisher – I had to finish the book.

“If I didn’t have that motivation and it was something I was just doing for the craic, as they say, or just to tell my friends about it then no, I wouldn’t have made it a week but I’d made this commitment to a publisher and to my family because we planned out our whole life around this, although we didn’t have kids then. But there were all these other reasons to keep doing it and, at the end of the day, those kept me going. You’re talking about your career and you want to write this book so that’ll keep you going.”

Tom Coyne followed A Course Called Ireland with A Course Called Scotland and A Course Called America. Photograph: Inpho
Tom Coyne followed A Course Called Ireland with A Course Called Scotland and A Course Called America. Photograph: Inpho

A Course Called Scotland would follow in 2018 and A Course Called America – in which Coyne plays in all 50 states and manages to find his way onto some of the most exclusive courses in the world – comes out in May of this year but he says that 2007 trip to Ireland, as wet, windy and painful as it was at times, was the springboard.

“I had a small audience in golf before A Course Called Ireland. It surprised everyone with how it sold and how it continues to sell and it allowed me do these other books and it really gave me a career that I never really anticipated. I’m so grateful not just to the book but to golf in Ireland and the people for giving me these stories because I just collected them. The stories were there, I just had to find them.”

— to www.irishtimes.com

Share298Tweet186Share75
ADVERTISEMENT
News Daily America

Copyright © 2021 News Daily America.

Navigate Site

  • About
  • Contact us
  • Advertise With Us

Follow Us

No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • News
    • Politics
    • Business
    • World
    • Science
  • Tech
    • Apps
    • Gear
    • Mobile
    • Startup
  • Health & Lifestyle
    • Food
    • Fashion
    • Health
    • Travel
  • Sports
    • Football
    • Golf
    • Horsing Racing
    • Equestrian
    • MotorSport
    • Skiing

Copyright © 2021 News Daily America.

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password? Sign Up

Create New Account!

Fill the forms bellow to register

All fields are required. Log In

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In

Add New Playlist