Tom Power, Waterford Crystal, and the making of the Irish Open trophy
MAKING THE CUT: Tom Power, master craftsman at Waterford Crystal. The Waterford Crystal Irish Open trophy was last re-designed in 2012, with a new version manufactured every year and engraved with the name of the latest winner.
Making the cut doesn’t carry any sense of achievement. It’s a base camp for the majority of golfers looking to climb up the leaderboard at this week’s Dubai Duty Free Irish Open. A halfway house through which the likes of Rory McIlroy should pass without blinking.
For Tom Power, making the cut carries very different connotations. A master craftsman with Waterford Crystal, the trophy raised high by this week’s winner in Mount Juliet will be the product of his, and a wider team’s, endeavours.
Irish Open champions have been presented with the company’s trademark products for 46 years now. There have been four re-designs, the last in 2012, with a new version manufactured every year and engraved with the name of the latest winner.
All told, it takes six weeks to blow, cut and sculpt.
It’s a job that requires precision to surpass the attention to detail found in Augusta’s azaleas. There are no Mulligans here. No ‘next shot’ mantra, no next tee, just a trek back to the first. These guys have to shoot in the 60s every day.
“Very true,” says Power. “There is so much concentration on a piece. Like, the Irish Open piece is a ball and you are looking through it, through the four sides, when you are cutting it.
“Then it’s not shiny, it’s kind of dull and grey. You have water on the wheel and you are trying to focus your eye to see through the other side. It’s all down to the pressure you put onto the wheel. If you put too much pressure the ball is too big, not enough and the ball is too small and it won’t look right.”
Power has worked on hundreds of trophies and other one-off pieces in his 52 years on the job, among them the Time Square ball, the Gibson Guitar, the Viking Longboat and the Irish Harp. There’s not much they can’t do with, as he puts it, just “two eyes and two hands”.
The changeover from Carborundum wheels and sandstone wheels to diamond wheels in the 1980s has made all this stuff so much more, not so much easier as much as more doable, allowing craftspeople to go into the sort of detail that can fashion teeny-tiny mirrors on a Harley Davidson piece.
So, what has been his toughest challenge of them all?
“That’s a hard one after doing it all my life. Actually, what is difficult to do, and it was another trophy, was the one for the Solheim Cup. The actual circle on that had to be exactly right for the engraving to fit in the middle and that’s fairly difficult.
“You’re using a small wheel and you’re turning a large piece on the wheel, maybe a two-inch wheel, and you are actually physically turning and holding it and making sure that the cut is even on both sides. That would be difficult.”
Power and his colleagues go about their refined and refining art just two or three feet removed from visitors at those times when factory tours are doable. Some fancy their chances of fashioning something worthwhile but confidence is rarely matched by the end result.
He was a student in the local tech when a Waterford Crystal representative visited the school looking for students to recruit, and just 15 when he first walked into the factory 200 yards up the road from his house in Johnstown back in September of 1969.
The opening came thanks to an artistic bent that manifested itself in a love of straight lines rather than still life paintings and it helped him to ace the aptitude test by cutting an eight-point star and getting the centre more or less right with it.
Eight years of an apprenticeship later and he was a master cutter and the process of cutting unique designs from a blank piece of crystal is one that still gives him an enormous sense of pleasure. Not least when he sees the fruits of his labours beyond the factory floor.
“There’s great satisfaction in it. I do one-off pieces as well but when you see the trophies on TV and the golfers lifting them up it’s great satisfaction for me, even if a lot of people wouldn’t know who done them. I see the ads for the Irish Open on TV and I think, ‘I did that’.”
His work has taken him on promotional tours to the USA where the appetite for their wares remains so great. He’s met everyone from Justin Timberlake to John Hume and Nick Faldo and it’s a labour of love from which there seems to be no escape as it seeps into other areas of his life.
Power’s home is awash with bespoke pieces, most of which he fashioned himself but he has added others to the collection through different means. A keen golfer himself, it’s probably inevitable that he found himself presented with some wine glasses at one point.
His own creations?
“No, probably not,” he laughed, “but I still have them.”
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