Have a swing at the original Irish game

The World Pitch and Putt Championships take place in Meath this weekend, a good enough reason to grab a couple of clubs and go for a masterclass in the modest game that was invented in Cork

‘I SAW A blind person playing at a pitch and putt course recently,” says Damien Fleming, the fourth ranked pitch and putt player in Ireland and an enthusiastic evangelist for the sport. “He had a cane and everything. He was playing quite well. He just needed assistance to put the ball down. He was playing by feel.”

Fleming is explaining how accessible the game of pitch and putt is in comparison to golf. It’s a sport, he says, which people can play from childhood into old age. Furthermore, the barriers to entry are low. All you need are meagre membership fees, a ball and two clubs.

Fleming, a voluble Killarney social worker working in Cork, is driving me to Tralee Pitch and Putt Club, where he and his quieter friend Jonathon Goodall are going to give me a lesson. Although not playing in this weekend’s World Cup Teams Competition in Meath, Goodall is the top-ranked player in the country.

“You get points for winning major competitions,” Goodall explains. “I won the Munster Stroke Play and you get 80 points for winning that. Then I won the National Stroke Play and you get 200 points for winning that. You accumulate points and whoever has the most is top.”

“The fecker,” says Fleming with a mock grimace. “We played together in the National Stroke and whichever of us won was going to be the number one in the country. He beat me by one shot. But we Kerry guys stick together and he deserves it.” He laughs. “Now if it was a Cork man it might be a different story.” He later concedes that the best player in the country is Cork’s Ray Murphy, who is playing with the three-man Irish team this weekend.

This is quite fitting, because pitch and putt was invented in Cork. It was developed in the holiday town of Fountainstown, which back in the 1930s had a small putting green to occupy children. This evolved into a nine-hole pitch and putt course – the world’s first.

“So it’s an Irish phenomenon,” says Padraig O’Shea, public relations officer with the Pitch and Putt Union of Ireland. “It spread abroad over the years, largely because you can build a pitch and putt course in places you could never build a golf course.” The world version of the game, incidentally, uses three clubs.

Damien Fleming, who also plays golf, maintains that in many ways pitch and putt requires more skill than golf.

“In golf, you have to have a lot of length, but in pitch and putt you have to be a lot more accurate,” he says. “Recently Shane Lowry played an exhibition match up in Offaly against a pitch and putt player on a pitch and putt course and he was beaten. I’d love if professional golfers were willing to take on a selection of Irish pitch and putt players. I think it would be very interesting.”

Traditionally there’s also been some class politics dividing the game from its snootier cousin. “Many people join a golf club because of the prestige of joining a golf club,” says Fleming. “They might never hit a golf ball but would pay €1,000 a year anyway. It’s very different with pitch and putt. People in pitch and putt clubs love to play pitch and putt.”

Who plays it nowadays? “Well you wouldn’t get many doctors,” says Fleming. “A lot of the boys playing around here are factory workers. The game is ideal for shift work, you see. If you’re working awkward shifts it doesn’t suit a long game of golf which can take up a whole day. A game of pitch and putt only takes an hour. And you can walk on to a pitch and putt course in a tracksuit and a hoodie and there’d be no problem. That might not be too welcome at a golf course. So a lot of people would be a bit more comfortable playing pitch and putt.”

That said, Fleming feels that at the top level there should be some sort of dress code.

“The union is trying to bring one in,” he says. “I suppose the one drawback to having a laidback attitude is that people might see it as a kind of mediocre game. We want to attract people to the sport. There were more people playing it when I started playing 20 years ago, although it is a sport with one of highest amateur memberships in the country. It’s important that when someone walks in to watch a major competition they’re not looking at 40 fellows in tracksuits and hoodies.”

I breach any potential clothing guidelines straight away. “Doc Martens on the putting green? Well there goes the dress code,” sighs Fleming.

My clothes, however, are the least of our worries. Despite some patient coaching and gentle wisecracking from Fleming and Goodall, I am very bad at this game. Fleming and Goodall’s technique, as far as I can describe it, involves deft pitching followed by effective putting – giving a certain veracity to the name pitch and putt.

My approach is a bit different. If the game was named after my technique, it would be called “swing, miss, swear and occasionally fall over”. When I do manage to make contact with the ball, it powers along the fairway puttering out half way to the hole or towards a different hole entirely or into a clump of trees.

“Are you sure you’re not left handed?” asks Fleming after a while.

After a painful session in which Fleming and Goodall kindly indulge me, and my employer humiliates me by sending a photographer, I rally and manage to hit the ball close to the putting green.

“Am I better than the blind guy?” I ask.

“Take the last shot and we’ll see,” says Fleming.

I hit the ball. It wanders aimlessly past the hole.

“No,” says Fleming sadly. “The blind guy was better. But don’t feel bad, he really was quite good.”