An Emerald Champion

The laughing eyes of Ireland
Are sparking blue and green
With hair as black as Guinness Stout
And barely seventeen

“Seven Nights in Ireland”
Reckless Kelly

“It is the greatest sporting accomplishing by an Irishman in history, really.”

Those were the words of Brian Shaw, a former college standout and one of the first Irishmen to try to play in America on a full-time basis. Shaw did reasonably well, making a meager living on the mini-tours before heading home to become the head professional at Doonbeg Golf Club, a thirty-minute drive from Shannon and one of the better links courses on the golf-rich North Atlantic coast.

The accomplishment that had Shaw gushing was the five-week stint his old pal Padraig Harrington just wrapped up. With a gritty win in the PGA Championship at Oakland Hills, Harrington put himself in rarified air.

Winning one major is great, but Paul Lawrie has one major, as did Orville Moody, who passed away last week to the shock of many who thought he’d been dead for years. Winning two majors elevates you into a very small fraternity; Winning three puts on the Hall of Fame ballot, and winning two in a row plants you in the history books.

In Ireland, a working-class country with an upbeat and charming disposition despite a history of famine, persecution, slavery, and being the brunt of a lot of bad jokes, the response to Harrington’s successful defense of his British Open title followed by another major win at the PGA has been…well…let’s just call it celebratory.

“The whole country is still in shock, I think,” Shaw said, a nice way of describing a level of inebriation bordering on scandalous even by Irish standards.

Shaw counts his many Irish members among those who haven’t let the party end since Sunday. “The golfing circles in Ireland are so small that everyone in some way has a connection to him. We all watched him grow up, and just knew that there was something special about him, not so much in the way he swung the club or anything, but in how hard he worked and how determined he was to win.  This was a guy who was never intimidated by anybody, ever. When he was younger he couldn’t wait to play against guys like Darren Clarke and Paul McGinley. Most people would have been intimated, but not him.” 

At Royal Birkdale he wasn’t intimidated by crowd favorite Greg Norman, even though the two had a history. “The last time Padraig played with Norman prior to the Open was at the grand opening here at Doonbeg,” Shaw said. “July 9, 2002. Norman beat Harrington. As Harrington said, ‘Norman knocked his socks off.’”

How times have changed, not just between Norman and Harrington, but with Harrington’s standing in the world, and in his own country.

“The best thing about it is, we’ve got kids lined up bursting at the seams now to get out and play,” Shaw said. “It’s extraordinary, really. They can’t stop talking about it. If anything, I think that’s the best legacy that could come of this.”