Portmarnock a test for the best

THE GREAT Tom Watson once said a links without a wind is like a woman unclothed no challenge!

Well, if yesterday's pro-am conditions are anything to go by, the competitors in the Nissan Irish Open beginning at Portmarnock this morning need have no worries. For the great North Dublin links, hosting the event for the first time since 1990, was swept by a 30 mile per hour south westerly that made conditions verging on the impossible for many amateurs and stretched the professionals to make the carries at the 2nd and 5th holes, to name but two.

The forecast for the tournament itself is a little more encouraging but the reality is that anybody who believes modern technology has rendered courses like Portmarnock redundant will most assuredly have to think again. It's is in terrific condition, the greens are putting beautifully and the rough by and large is relatively wispy but at 7,365 yards and protected as always by is strategically placed bunkers and swales, it remains a formidable test.

"It was always a great links course and it will remain a great links", said Jose-Maria Olazabal, the champion when the Irish Open was last at Portmarnock in 1990.

Padraig Harrington, who contested an Irish Amateur Close final here in 1995 which he lost at the 20th to David Higgins, described it as "the fairest links course there is, one of the best in the world.

Harrington added: "People were claiming today its teeth had been filed down by the recent rain. It certainly is a little softer than it was two weeks ago, very much like it was when we played the Walker Cup here in 1991, you could say it is perfect for scoring and playing into our hands. But with a wind like we had today, level par could win here on Sunday evening. Anybody dipping into red figures has usually gone close in the past although the pin positions will also have a big role to play."

The other major home hope is Darren Clarke, another who remembers Portmarnock well from his amateur days. He's coming off a bitterly disappointing and disheartening Open Championship. After a couple of days chilling out on a fishing expedition on the River Test in Hampshire on Monday (he caught a 14 lb trout) and a stroll around Dublin on Tuesday, he is very hopeful of a much better few days this weekend and is encouraged Portmarnock is the venue.

"It's one of the best courses in Ireland," he declared. "It's a very, very fair test. If you drive it on the fairway, it invariably stays on the fairway. You can have a go at the course from there."

In the course of a remarkably candid and fascinating press conference, the Open "nearly man" Thomas Bjorn deviated from what was otherwise a discussion dealing exclusively with his failure to finish off the deal at Royal St Georges, to lavish further praise on Portmarnock.

"It was never really a doubt in my mind that I would come and play here, I have to prepare myself so that I can become stronger, so to come over and play one of the best courses we ever play on this tour was not an issue," Bjorn said.

So the stars are agreed on one thing. They could not have a better stage on which to display their craft. Coming up with a winner to succeed golfing aristocrats like Colin Montgomerie, Sergio Garcia, Bernhard Langer, Nick Faldo, Olazabal, Ian Woosnam and Seve Ballesteros, to name but a few, is a lot less certain. The bookmakers rarely act out of sentimentality but you wonder whether they might have succumbed on this occasion given their rating of Harrington and Clarke as first and second favourites at roughly 7 and 9-1. Neither exactly set Royal St Georges alight and current form would certainly suggest that Bjorn at 14-1 and even Phillip Price at 16-1 represent much better value.

Australian Peter Lonard could be worth a flutter at 20-1, especially in bad weather. The Irish Open was synonymous with big name winners but this has been dissipated in more recent times when David Carter (1999), Patrik Sjoland (2000) and Soren Hansen (2001) won.

This may suggest the Irish Open doesn't carry the cachet of past years. Perhaps it has. It is pointless and perhaps even hopeless to claim the championship hasn't fallen from its lofty perch in more recent years with the inability of sponsors to maintain the massive appearance fees that attracted Ben Crenshaw, Hubert Green, Greg Norman and John Daly, to name but a handful, to our shores, or indeed to keep up with the big boys like Volvo, Deutsche Bank, Dunhill and others where prize funds were concerned.

Indeed, the departure of Murphys, who revived the event in 1975, nearly precipitated the demise of the championship until Gerard O'Toole of Nissan Ireland saved the day when all seemed lost. The date changed to the week after The Open, offering the hope that some top Americans would be tempted to take in Portmarnock before going home. None came. Fred Funk opted out, so, too, did Colin Montgomerie and Justin Rose. Langer, Ballesteros, Faldo didn't enter.

Their absence, allied to the dwindling strength of the European Tour as a whole, means the field isn't as good as one would have liked. There are also doubts as to how the Dublin and Irish public, accustomed to driving up virtually to the front door and dumping their cars, will cope with the park and ride system that comes into play in this country for the first time.

This is a new-look Irish Open in many ways. Its success or otherwise may determine how long it will continue at Portmarnock with Nissan Ireland as sponsors. Several players here this week would make good winners Bjorn, Price, Lonard, Olazabal, Lee Westwood and Luke Donald, the young Englishman who plies his trade in the United States among them, but for the sake of the tournament, you couldn't look beyond Irishmen of the calibre of Harrington, Clarke and Paul McGinley with others, like Gary Murphy and Peter Lawrie, all adding to the mix.