Monthly Archives: May 2012

Golf Logos Explained: Narin & Portnoo Golf Club, Ireland

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Narin & Portnoo Golf Club is situated among the dunes on a knock-you-over nub of the Atlantic Ocean called Gweebarra Bay, on the northwest coast of County Donegal. The club’s entrance is not captivating: you reach it by driving into the sort of tawdry-looking trailer park that the Irish and British seem to plant on all their choicest oceanfront real estate. But the course is tremendous. Kevin Markham, who has played every 18-hole course in the country, has described the seventh through eleventh as “maybe the best run of holes in Ireland.” The fifteenth, which measures 530 yards and plays into the prevailing wind between a line of dunes and the sea, is the hole that the ninth and tenth at Pebble Beach are trying to be. And the encampment of caravans—whose occupants, it should be said, sustain both the club and its bar—are invisible after a few holes.

On my first visit to the course, in 2011, I played with Connor Mallon, the club’s pro at the time, and set a new record for conversational tedium by saying “Wow! Great hole!” almost every time I opened my mouth other than to comment on the wind, which was intense. (Usually, when you mention wind on a links course, the natives you’re playing with dismiss whatever’s blowing as a breeze, even if you’re having trouble standing. But Mallon, good man, said he’d never known such a gale.) Later, on my way out the gate, I mentally composed an email to my wife, beginning: “Darling, how would you feel about living in a mobile home 750 miles from the Arctic Circle?”

I returned to N & P last month, with six friends from home. Between rounds, I asked a couple of older members, who were hanging around the golf shop, to explain the meaning of the symbols in the club’s logo, but they couldn’t. Eventually, someone looked it up online, and we discovered that the crest was created in 1982, at the request of the club, by a local art teacher. It is “unusual in not featuring any golfing imagery, focusing instead on the historic roots of the area,” the club’s website says. Here are the elements:

The Stonehenge-y thing at the upper left is the Kilclooney Dolmen, which stands above a 4,000-year-old tomb a few miles south of the course, near the village of Ardara (population 578):

Kilclooney Dolmen, near Ardara, Ireland.

The structure at the upper right is known as the Doon Fort, the Bawan, or O’Boyle’s Fort. It’s a circular defensive stone enclosure, and it stands on a crannóg, or artificial island, in Doon Lough, a lake a couple of miles southwest of the course. It was built in 1500 or so by the O’Boyles, who had troublesome neighbors:

O'Boyle's Fort, Doon Loch, County Donegal, Ireland.

Filling the bottom two panels is the Atlantic Ocean, which is a major presence at Narin & Portnoo. The green peak in the middle is the island of Inishkeel, which in decent weather is visible from parts of the course. The island used to have two churches, one for nuns and one for monks. Both are now ruins:

Ruined church, Inishkeel Island, County Donegal, Ireland.

And the U-shaped object in the center of the logo isn’t a horseshoe, as certain of my friends guessed. It’s the Drumboghill Gold Lunula—a Bronze Age necklace shaped like a crescent moon. It was found in a bog near the course in 1909, and is now in the collection of the National Museum. The club’s website says that its shape “matches the arc of the sixth hole.”

Connor Mallon, my host in 2011, took his life on March 14, 2012, at the age of 35. I’d been looking forward to seeing him again, and to having a rematch. At every stop on our 2012 trip, I met people who had known and loved him. In 2011, I bought a shirt from him exactly like the one he’s wearing in the picture below, because I thought that maybe its color held the secret to his golf swing.

Connor Mallon, Narin & Portnoo, near the ninth tee, May 1, 2011.

 

The Greatest Golf Movie Ever Made

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No, it's not Caddyshack.

I recently watched, for the twentieth or thirtieth time, the greatest golf movie ever made. Not Caddyshack, although I’m a fan. And not Tin Cup, in which Kevin Costner swings like a chicken and tucks his sweater into his pants. And not Follow the Sun, in which Glenn Ford makes you believe that Ernest Borgnine (for example) would have made a better Ben Hogan. And definitely not Bagger Vance, which I’ve seen only scattered fragments of, without sound, while accidentally looking up from the book I was reading on an airplane, but still couldn’t wait for it to be over.

No, the all-time No. 1 golf movie was made in 1942 by Michael Curtiz. It’s set in Morocco, and it stars Humphrey Bogart and Claude Rains. Ingrid Bergman is in it, too. It’s called Casablanca. Have you seen it?

Casablanca isn’t only about golf. There’s a long boring part at the beginning in which the Nazis make a lot of trouble, and various people sing various songs in Bogart’s nightclub, and Bogart apparently has some sort of love affair with Bergman—although you never actually see them doing anything except talking to each other with their faces a quarter-inch apart. This boring stretch lasts for about an hour and a half. I usually let my wife watch it by herself, while I make popcorn or take the dogs for a walk.

The golf part comes near the end. Bogart and Bergman and a wimpy-looking foreign guy, who appears to be wearing lipstick, turn up at a foggy airport one night, and for a moment you think that Bergman is going to dump the lipstick guy and marry Bogart. That’s the suspense. Bergman is good-looking, despite the hat, but you can tell that as soon as the wedding is over she’s going to start demanding lifestyle changes, and the first thing to go will be the nightclub. Then she’ll say, “Oh, Rick, do we really need to live in Africa?” Then they’ll have four kids in a hurry, and that will be that.

But Bogart sees the trap a mile away. He makes Bergman think he’s going along with her scheme, but at the last second he tricks her into getting on the plane. “You’re taking the fall,” Bogart says to the lipstick guy. (I’m paraphrasing now.) Then the plane heads down the runway—whew!—and Bogart and Rains escape into the fog, so that they can spend the rest of the Second World War drinking gin and playing golf. I tell you, that movie makes me cry every time.

4 Things You Need to Know About Golf Hats

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The photo above shows how to “fold” a golf cap, by bringing the rear band underneath and sliding it over the bill. The band preserves the curve of the bill, and  you can easily slip the whole thing into a golf bag or a suitcase. If you own more golf caps than you will conceivably be able to wear out during the years remaining to you, as you probably do, you can fold your excess inventory and store it in gym bags, like this:

You can keep one of these bags in the trunk of your car and store the others in the attic of your house, rotating every season or so. (When you take off your cap upon entering a clubhouse or a grill room, you don’t need to fold it. Just tuck the bill into the back of your pants, the way a waiter does with an order pad. That way, many beers later, you won’t leave your cap lying on the table.)

To keep your favorite golf caps clean, you need one of these:

It’s a plastic frame that lets you wash your caps in the dishwasher, one at a time. You snap the cap inside it and run it through a complete washing cycle, then allow it to air dry. (No heat.) Amazon sells several versions. Here’s what a cap looks like when it’s in the frame:

The frame does a good job of preserving the cap’s shape, and the dishwasher kills cooties.

If you play golf in the rain, as you should, you need a good rain hat. Unfortunately, no golf-equipment company makes a really great one. Fortunately, Outdoor Research does. It’s called a Seattle Sombrero, and although it’s intended mainly for kayakers, hikers, and fishermen it’s perfect for golfers. It comes in real sizes and is adjustable; it has a chinstrap, which is useful in high winds; it has a brim that is broad enough to keep water from spattering your glasses or running down your neck; it has Velcro strips that let you stick the sides of the brim to the crown when you don’t need them. You can also throw it in the washing machine, if you need to. It’s a great hat: