Sometimes, less is more

THIS is the week of which European Tour chief executive George O’Grady dare not dream, even as recently as two months ago.

Sitting in the boardroom of his Tour’s headquarters at Wentworth as the first round of the BMW PGA Championship got under way back in May, O’Grady predicted another successful Irish Open but he refused to consider the possibility that his members would still be in possession of all four major titles, let alone that two of them would be Irish.

“I think the Irish Open is going to be terrific,” said O’Grady. “Because who knows who is going to the US Open and The Open.

“We’re probably not going to go into the Irish Open owning the last four major titles but you never know.

“Someone else might win the US Open and someone else might win The Open, and we’ve got a pretty good chance. You daren’t think it, but you can hope it.”

Now those hopes have become a remarkable reality, with Rory McIlroy set to appear at Killarney Golf & Fishing Club with his US Open trophy and Darren Clarke in possession of the Claret Jug having followed European Tour colleagues Martin Kaymer’s success at Whistling Straits last August in the PGA Championship and Charl Schwartzel’s Masters’ victory in April.

Understandably it was O’Grady who led the tributes to Clarke the day after his Open Championship win, saying: “Darren’s victory was a masterclass of links golf and will be celebrated by all of us at the European Tour.

“His impressive victory at Royal St George’s continues a marvellous spell for Irish golf and for the European Tour.”

To have four home-grown major champions in Killarney this week underlines even further O’Grady’s comments that having the Irish contingent of Clarke, McIlroy, Graeme McDowell and Pádraig Harrington in the field is a considerable achievement.

“Last year wasn’t a bad field. People always go on about who’s not there but I didn’t see a line in the Irish papers that Justin Rose was there and he’d just won twice in the United States. And everybody else in the world is fighting to get McIlroy to come and play in their tournament, and Harrington and McDowell and they’re all going to be in Killarney, not anywhere else.”

Even pre-Clarke and McIlroy’s heroics, the strength of European Tour was on proud display at Wentworth with the annual Tour dinner highlighting the efforts of the Ryder Cup winning team, its captain and his assistants, with Schwartzel present in his Masters green jacket and Kaymer’s Wanamaker Trophy as well as the Claret Jug and US Open trophy in the proud ownership of its 2010 custodian Oosthuizen and McDowell.

“Some would say we were boasting but I don’t think so. If we’ve got them....,” O’Grady said. “I stand on the first tee in Dubai for the first round and we had those trophies there and I’d speak to all the players and ask them which one they would win next year and the great feeling is, it could be any one of them.

“I’ve never known people have the determination and belief of those guys. If you go back 25 or 30 years, I don’t think a lot of people believed they could win. Seve was the inspiration by winning the Masters and when Jacklin became the Ryder Cup captain and demanded the five-star treatment; scrapped the fee but treated everybody really well and got Seve as the general, the on-course leader and off they went.

“He developed that passion and he loved to rail against somebody, the Americans, or the European Tour, it was always somebody or something.”

This time around, it is Harrington, by general consensus that provided the spur for this generation and the next to believe they could win the biggest prizes in the game.

“Without question. He won three majors, so Seve was the inspiration but Padraig has been the catalyst, winning at Carnoustie in 2007 and then Birkdale. In his early days he had a lot of seconds and then look at him. Kaymer attributes a lot of his success to Harrington. At the Tour dinner, he said you’ve got to be talented but if you want success you’ve got to work at it really hard.

“Kaymer showed some of those Harrington qualities at Whistling Straits. He stood over that putt with a chance to win and said to himself, I’ve worked this hard, this is going in. That’s his speech, not mine.”

O’Grady is quick to acknowledge the similarly hard work, both locally, at Fáilte Ireland and within European Tour headquarters, it has taken to keep the Irish Open on track after a difficult few months following the withdrawal of last year’s title sponsor 3.

“We’re rock solid at Killarney,” he said. “How long it stays at Killarney, I don’t know. We may have to move, we may have to go to Dublin, we have to move it around the country. But Killarney was a great success in 2010. The town got behind it, there was a wonderful atmosphere, big crowds and 3 promoted it well in the local area. It showcased the local area too because all the hotels were hugely improved and quite frankly the Irish Tourist Board, Failte Ireland, realised the pictures of the area showcased Ireland very well. We will break even this year, it’s a determination. I don’t do egos now. I don’t have to have a big prize money fund, it will be what the tournament can afford.”

As much as the Irish Open is one of the premier events on the Tour, O’Grady advanced the theory that golf fans can have too much of a good thing.

“My predecessor, Ken Schofield, really believed in the title but there was too much golf in Ireland at the time, when Ireland was boomtown. You bring in the Ryder Cup and two World Golf Championship events, which bring in the Tigers and everyone, plus the JP McManus Pro-Am, where you can see the absolute best players in the world. That can breed a lack of appreciation of how good the rest are. You can’t have these guys playing all the time and if people will only go and watch golf if Woods is playing they’re going to be unhappy.”

So Irish golf had become just a little spoiled during the boom years of the last decade?

“Well it was, wasn’t it?,” he said. “When the Ballesteros family took the deal of the Seve Trophy going there (to The Heritage resort in 2007), well it could almost make you weep because it was the wrong way round. The Seve trophy should be before a Ryder Cup and be seen to building up to it.

“But after a Ryder Cup – there was a PGA Seniors event at Palmerstown, which was a beautifully staged tournament but, of course, it was close to where the Ryder Cup was and people had been spoiled with the emotion of that Ryder Cup.

“Now look at the crowds at Killarney, the only event in Ireland, at a holiday venue in a holiday period and people enjoyed it.”

Less, it seems, is more, particularly in these straitened times.

“I think Ireland could stand two tournaments, preferably one in the north and one in the south, or one in the regions and one in Dublin but saying that, there’s only one European Tour event in England, Wentworth.”

So as a Tour, you want more events in England – the Midlands, the North but if you’re just the promoter of this golf tournament, you benefit from being the only place you can go and watch golf.

“It’s a two-way thing. We take the risk and promote this tournament. People think BMW do because they’re the main sponsor but we underwrite it and we have lost money occasionally and we’ve made money, but it’s not riches beyond dreams. It’s enough year to balance out the fallow years.

“And when the time improves we will come back with other tournaments, a British Masters or English Open or European Open. You can cry about not having tournaments here or there but we’ve adapted to places where (the likes of Morocco or different places in Spain) tourist boards understand the value of it. Even in Ireland, where Fáilte Ireland are our partners and they have to market Ireland, where tourism is very important and they have to work out ways of doing that.

“The golf tournament does all the stuff around it that tells the world Ireland is open for business in a golfing sense. Wales wasn’t really a golfing destination until the Ryder Cup but it is now and they copied the Irish model.”