King of the Links

"Jack Nicklaus wouldn't do this, would he?" shouts the dean of Irish golf architects, as he lays flat on his back and begins to squirm his way under the dangerous-looking wire. There is a gleam in his eye and just a hint of mischief in his lilting Irish voice. "Maybe he would design the course from an aer-o-plane."

Frankly, at that moment the inside of an airplane sounded pretty good to me. So did a hot whiskey in front of a blazing fire. I didn't fancy rolling under that fence. Or three others like it. I didn't feel like wading through a creek, or stomping through heaps of seaweed. I have never been so wet, or so cold. But it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see the greatest links designer of our generation in action.

Don't be embarrassed if you've never heard of Eddie Hackett. Almost nobody has outside his native Ireland. And you could be forgiven for finding it hard to believe that he has never even seen a course designed by an American architect, except on television. Or that his fee for creating some of the best seaside courses in the world was 200 pounds. Or that he goes to Mass every day and reads the Imitation of Christ every night. Or that he's still going strong at the age of eighty-five. But it is, if I may say so, no blarney.

"I find that nature is the best architect!" shouts Hackett as he trudges through knee-high grass, pacing the width of a fairway that at this point exists only in his mind. "I just try to dress up what the Good Lord provides. Of course He gave us a lot in this place."

On this most miserable of mornings, Hackett is designing an additional nine holes for the Connemara Golf Club. He laid out the original course in 1970 for a local community group that thought a golf course might spur economic development in a region devastated by unemployment and emigration. The golf course weaves through a stark landscape of exposed slabs of rock, and on a fair day it is hauntingly beautiful, swallowed up by the natural elements.

"They had no money, you know," Hackett continues. "I told them if you're that keen on golf, I'll go down and I'll put a stone in for a tee and a pin in for a green, and you can pay me when you can."

Connemara is only one of a string of magnificent seaside courses along Ireland's rugged western coastline that have earned Hackett a permanent and unique place in golf history. They are not only beautiful and challenging tests of golf, they will be among the last links courses ever built.

There is, alas, no linksland to speak of in the United States, though courses such as Shinnecock Hills and Pebble Beach imitate some of the features of links golf. It is the famous links of Scotland -- St. Andrews, Muirfield, Troon and Turnberry -- that are best known to golfers (and even non-golfers) in North America, thanks in large part to the television exposure of the British Open.

But the fantastic linksland found in Ireland is in a class of its own. It is not only the historic and world-famous links of Ballybunion, Lahinch, Portmarnock, Royal County Down and Royal Portrush that sets the Emerald Isle apart. It is that Ireland also has new links. Until recently, the west coast of Ireland was the last place on earth with large stretches of undeveloped linksland. Much of this potentially priceless golfing ground was found on commonages -- grazing land owned jointly by local farmers. While better known designers jetted around the world, producing luxury resorts from Morocco to Bali, Eddie Hackett worked patiently with communities which wanted to turn these largely unproductive lands into golf courses.

"Eddie is the unsung hero of Irish golf," says Pat Ruddy, Ireland's leading golf journalist and an architect himself. "At a time when there was no money, Eddie Hackett travelled the highways and byways of Ireland. Half the people playing golf in Ireland are doing so because of Eddie Hackett. And I don't know anyone who has said the slightest bad word about him."

Father Peter Waldron, an avid golfer who spearheaded the development of Connemara, goes further. "Oh Eddie Hackett is a saint, you know. He is totally self-effacing, and he has more integrity than almost anybody I have ever come across. And he works for pennies."

Hackett's best-known creation is probably Waterville, a severe but breathtaking test of golf on the picturesque Ring of Kerry that is now ranked (by Golf World magazine) as the best golf course built in Britain and Ireland in the last fifty years.

But if you travel north up the thinly populated coast from Waterville, you will encounter a string of hauntingly beautiful links with lyrical names that are every bit as memorable. All were designed by Eddie Hackett, often on shoestring budgets, and all are accessible and inexpensive for the visiting golfer.

The first stop is Ceann Sibeal -- an undiscovered gem thrust out on the farthest extremities of the Dingle Peninsula. Connemara is next, followed by Carne, a new course built as a non-profit community project on the remote and economically depressed Belmullet Peninsula. Whereas Connemara is relatively flat, Carne is a breathtaking ride through some of golf's most imposing sand dunes, a kind of Ballybunion on steroids.

Although tamer and less exposed to the Atlantic winds, Enniscrone, in County Sligo, is one of the most popular links among Irish golfers, with thrilling elevated tees, superb par 3s, and a series of exquisite short par 4s through wonderfully contorted terrain. Further up the coast Nick Faldo warms up for the British Open at Donegal, a sweeping, stately layout that many consider Hackett's finest achievement. Finally, at the northern tip of Ireland, you can put your feet up at the historic Rosapenna Hotel, where Hackett has expanded the existing course by Old Tom Morris and Harry Vardon.

Hackett's graceful and natural designs are the perfect complement to the much older west-coast links of Ballybunion, Lahinch and County Sligo. Together they make up what is arguably the most stunning stretch of seaside golf in the world.

So why is Eddie Hackett not better known? The remoteness of his best courses has certainly played a part, as has the fact that Hackett has stayed so close to home. In the last thirty years he has designed or remodelled all or part of eighty-five courses -- a remarkable total for a man with no partner and no employees -- but every last one of them has been in Ireland (Robert Trent Jones, in contrast, has built courses in at least twenty-three countries.)

But the main reason for Hackett's relative obscurity is surely his striking reluctance to blow his own horn. I asked him about it when I met him again in the relative calm of his cluttered Dublin house (a widower, he lives alone, though his children live nearby).

"We Irish had a terrible inferiority complex, with the English occupation and the way we were terrorized and savaged," he explained. "It's only starting to go with the new generation."

Hackett's gentlemanly manners were very much in evidence during my visit. A teetotaller, he kept lifting himself out of his ancient easy chair to fill up my glass of Jameson's. He wore a cardigan over a shirt and tie, and as he told his life story, with the aid of yellow newspaper clippings and faded photographs, it struck me that Hackett is one of golf's most important connections to an earlier, golden age. He must surely be the last man alive who can say that he had lunch with James Braid, Harry Vardon, and J. H. Taylor -- the Great Triumvirate that dominated golf at the turn of century. It happened at the British Open at Hoylake in 1936 and is one of Hackett's most cherished memories.

Born in a Dublin pub in 1910, twelve years before Irish independence, Hackett survived a Dickensian childhood of periodic penury and grave illness (he spent long stretches in hospital with tuberculosis). One of the brighter moments of his youth came the day his father announced proudly that he had become one of the first Catholic tradesman to be allowed into a golf club in Ireland. Young Eddie took to the game too, the one sport his doctors would allow him to play.

His father went bankrupt while Eddie was still a teenager, so Hackett was thankful to get a job as a clubmaker at the Royal Dublin Golf Club. He worked on his game, became an assistant professional, and in 1939 landed the job as the head professional at the exclusive Portmarnock links for the princely sum of 10 pounds a week.

"As the professional I was never allowed into the clubhouse," Hackett remembers."I'm an honorary member now, and I still don't go into the clubhouse. It's just the way I am."

Hackett left Portmarnock in 1950 to take part in an ill-advised business venture. The next few years turned out to be the worst of his life, and he spent another nine months in bed in a near-fatal battle with meningitis. Hackett returned to golf almost by chance in the early 1960s when the Golfing Union of Ireland asked him to give teaching clinics across the country. One of the clubs was looking for someone to design a golf course (one of the first full-length courses to be built in thirty years) and Hackett's name was recommended. He stumbled his way through the job and suddenly he was an expert. For all intents and purposes he was Ireland's only golf architect.

"In those years, there was no one else to go to," says Hackett, "unless you went to an English architect, but they were expensive. All my life I've been charging too little, but at that time, you see, I wouldn't have the confidence in my abilities."

On occasion, Hackett even tried to convince clubs not to hire him.

"I told them that if I was in your position, and I wanted to make some money, I wouldn't use Hackett, I'd use a Nicklaus or a Palmer or a Trent Jones."

In two notable cases, clubs followed his advice, and hired Arnold Palmer (Tralee) and Robert Trent Jones (Ballybunion New). Both are worthy efforts, built on spectacular terrain, but they have a theatricality out of sync with the great Irish and British links. The consensus in Ireland is that they don't rank with Hackett's best, which have an air of maturity and grace rare in young courses of any kind.

Hackett's courses tend to be long from the back tees, with clearly visible landing areas, large greens and spectacular elevated tees. Despite his great love for the classic links of Ireland and Scotland (which he played as a young professional), Hackett eschews one of their most common features -- blind tee shots and hidden hazards -- and prefers to make a hole's challenges clearly visible in the modern style. Every one of his links courses is enormously enjoyable, even thrilling to play, with at least a half-dozen holes that will stop you dead in your tracks in admiration.

The admiration is always as much for Mother Nature as for the architect, however. Hackett never draws attention to himself. There are no bizarre sandtraps, ostentatious ledges, artificial mounds or strangely shaped greens so common in modern design. One of his most beautiful holes in Ireland is the eleventh at Waterville, which tumbles entirely naturally through a long channel of majestic dunes. The very next hole, called the Mass, plays over a valley that sheltered Catholics as they worshipped in secret during periods of religious repression at the hands of the English.

"When I made that hole the contractors, local men, came to me and they said, 'Eddie, we're not going to dig up or touch this ground for you. Because Mass was celebrated in the hollow.' I said 'You needn't be worried.'

"And we never touched it. It's a plateau green, it's natural. And there's not a bunker on it either. It doesn't need one and that's the best tribute you can pay a hole."

Because Hackett's layouts are so sensitive to the natural terrain, there is always a consistent style and rhythm to his links that takes its theme from the specific natural surroundings. Nothing seems artificial or imposed. Hackett would be horrified to think his courses looked like one another -- he doesn't want to leave his signature about. He doesn't talk so much about designing golf holes as finding them, and he is proudest when he can point to a hole and say "it's just as nature."

"I could never break up the earth the way they tell me Jack [Nicklaus] and Arnold [Palmer] do," he says. "You disrupt the soil profile and anyway, it's unnatural. I use what's there within reason. You're only as good as what the Lord gives you in features. And you can never do with trees what you can do with sand dunes."

Hackett has also made a virtue of necessity. Many of his clients couldn't afford bulldozers. But in the process he has touched the lives of ordinary people in a way that few architects have.

"Looking back it was a growing and achievement point, and a self-believing point for the community," says Father Peter Waldron of the original golf development at Connemara in 1970. "And economically it turned the key to a whole new area of opportunities."

Built for perhaps 50,000 pounds with huge amounts of volunteer labor ("we never had to move a rock," Hackett says proudly), the golf course is now responsible for pumping more than 1 million pounds a year into the local community from overseas and Irish visitors.

Waldron, who is still on the board of Connemara, told me that Hackett was seriously ill before embarking on the expansion. It's not something that Hackett raises during my visit with him, but near the end of my talk I ask him about his faith. Religion can be a delicate subject in Ireland, and at first Hackett seems reluctant to talk about it, as if he could be misinterpreted.

"You could say I would be religious, yes, but that doesn't mean I can't be friendly with others," he replies. "I'm not narrow.

"But my own faith is very strong. There's one prayer from the Imitation of Christ that I read every night: 'Dear Lord, give me grace to be meek and humble of heart, to be glad when people think little of me.' "I've been very lucky in my life. Most people never get to design a links. I've done ten. When I'm out [on the course] I pray to the Lord to give me the light to do what's right."