Christy O’Connor took hands-on approach to course design

Tributes to the late Christy O’Connor Jnr have gushed from the great and the good in the wake of his untimely death on Wednesday.

But few are as revealing about his genial personality than that from the Irish developer and his business partner who commissioned O’Connor to design a golf course bearing his name at the Amendoeira Golf Resort in the Algarve.

Golfers can be guilty of putting their name and little else into a course development. Not so Christy O’Connor Jnr, as Drogheda man, Gerry Fagan — the co-founder of Oceanico Developments in Portugal with partner Simon Burgess — revealed yesterday.