Interview - Pat Ruddy: 'There were people who made approaches to buy, and they will recognise themselves, who flattered me by thinking that I was weak and impoverished and would be glad of a million or two. . . I'm glad I withstood all of that.' John O'Sullivan talks to the golf-writer-turned- architect who took the golf world by storm

Pat Ruddy is a devotee of the board game ludo, but this simple statement doesn't quite elaborate sufficiently on the passion it engenders. A more thorough explanation would reveal he once ran the All-Ireland Ludo Championship, complete with big, eight-man boards, at the CIE Club in Marlborough Street.

He describes the game as cerebral, a pursuit for strategists, entailing primeval excitement of the kill-or-be-killed variety, his fervour latent in every phrase.

So to describe Patrick John Andrew Ruddy as the owner of The European Club, golf-course designer, former golf journalist and magazine publisher, as someone with a long-term involvement in the golf industry fails to encapsulate his magnificent obsession with the sport.

Ruddy has been infatuated with golf since childhood and little has changed.

The middle child of five siblings he was born in Ballina but reared in the south Sligo town of Ballymote, where his father, Martin, a keen golfer, was postmaster. The latter was to impart his love of the sport in both a practical and educational manner to a willing young acolyte.

"It seemed to me that playing ball of any kind was so much more interesting than Greek or Latin, especially on a summer's day," Ruddy recalls.

"If the golf course wasn't available then you used to play on the football field. You had to score goals because the only place that you'd find your golf balls on a GAA pitch in those days was in the worn areas of the goalmouths. It taught you the rudimentary elements of the short game.

"Another hook was discovering golf literature. My dad was good at writing and an avid reader. He always took the Sunday Times to ready Henry Longhurst, 800 words every Sunday. Some people read the bible but we read Longhurst. At the time there wasn't television so reading about this man going to the most marvellously exotic-sounding places around the world was an inspiration.

"Then out of the library I got a book, Henry Cotton's Golfing Album, which had the most amazing photograph: Henry teeing up a golf ball at the Temple Golf club and a bucket of balls beside him. At the time you couldn't get a golf ball.

"His hair was glistening in the sun, the cashmere sweater, his trousers replete with a razor-sharp crease, and shoes that glistened, provided a striking symbol for a youngster. That image always stuck with me. I can open it on any page - it's essentially a book of pictures with some short essays - and go away into dreamland."

It also explains why among the wonderful collection of golfing memorabilia, Ruddy boasts a library of over 3,000 books on golf, including dozens of first editions that date to the 19th century.

His golfing education wasn't always so erudite.

His father's regular Wednesday fourball at Rosses Point would occasionally be one participant shy, a scenario young Patrick coveted while imprisoned in the classroom and looking longingly at the blue sky. He awaited a glimpse of white hair, just visible as it bobbed past the raised classroom window.

Father would liberate son, fleeing to the fairways of Rosses Point.

One day a teacher objected, a perspective not shared by Martin Ruddy. He transferred his son to a private school in Ballina, run by an aunt. Ruddy explained: "The deal there was very good. I lived over the school and was permitted to go golfing when the sun was shining. If I missed class then my aunt would (make me) catch up in the evenings."

Shell's Wonderful World of Golf simply copperfastened the golfing tyro's burgeoning love affair. Harry Horan, who owned a chemist shop, possessed one of only two televisions in Ballymote, and it was there aficionados would gather, grabbing every vantage point.

"There he was, Slammin' Sammy Snead from Palm Beach. Gene Sarazen. Bob Crosby. I remember one exchange going along the lines of, 'Seems to me he's in trouble, Mr Bob. He's in jail,' to which the response was, 'It's duck-or-no-dinner time.'

"I used to take every opportunity to play or watch golf, even setting up a gravel putting green in the back yard. One employee was down £10,000, although unfortunately that didn't mean I was up by that amount. It was serious stuff.

"At the time clubs were formed by renting fields from the local farmer.

"Negotiations would take place on how much grass could be cut. They agreed they'd cut the fairways X width and leave the jungle. When they started to lose these precious golf balls, they'd cheat and cut a bit more grass only be to evicted for compromising the farmer's fodder arrangements.

"Three times in my teens the local golf club went into operation and had to move site. You learn the principles of golf-course design that way because they threw all the fence posts that had to be around the green to keep the cattle and sheep off into the back of a truck. Put in the lawnmowers (horse drawn), hole liners, flags, etc, and move off to the next location.

"The general arrangement was that three fellas would share a green, look after its maintenance. You'd know whose green was whose after a while, because some were cut and some weren't, just like fellas' lawns at home. For the luxury experience, the day at the opera, you went to Rosses Point. We eventually became family members."

A young Ruddy played in the boys' championships without success but did play junior golf for Connacht. His immediate future would lie on the other side of the ropes. "I had a huge fascination with the golf writer. They were gods bringing the world to me. So I set out to be one, saving up to buy a typewriter. I got three guineas for my first column in the Evening Herald."

Prior to that he operated as a freelance, working for magazines around the world. "South African Golf, or more accurately its editor RG Fall, an old Scotsman, used to send me 50 rand for writing 100 pages. If you went to the bank today, they'd keep it all as charges but I didn't care as I was famous in South Africa, you see, in the early 60s.

"When Gary Player won at Carnoustie, I wrote 16 pages for the magazine even though I wasn't there. I wrote to all the papers at the time but they all told me to get lost. I didn't understand that when you were going in looking for a job, the guy you were talking to, it was his job you were looking for. It was years later that penny dropped.

"I was staffed around 1968 in the Evening Herald but after five years I couldn't imagine me being a 40-year servant and branched out, starting the Golfer's Companion magazine in 1973."

He would suffer a short, sharp induction into the world of golf publishing. In those days the demarcation between writing and taking photographs was less stringent.

Ruddy recalls: "I had always had an interest in photography. I started with a little brownie and one of my first golfing experiences was on the 14th green at Rosses Point. When you're quite small you could crawl with impunity between the legs of both genders to get a front-row seat.

"I landed in at worm's eye view, with my brownie pointed up at this godlike figure, Joe Carr, who was halfway down the shaft of a six-iron and about to play a little chip and run.

"I remember the tassels on his cap. He just looked into my eyes, didn't say a word and chipped it to six inches. I still have that picture.

"My first big tournament was the Hospitals Trust in Woodbrook. I went up by train, taxi along the Merrion Road past the Tara Towers hotel. I never saw a divided road before.

"The first major was the (British) Open Championship in 1964. I was one of the first to go to the US Masters from this side of the Atlantic. I'd pay for myself whereas most newspaper editors wouldn't for their correspondents.

"I started going to the Masters in the mid 70s and was made very welcome. No Irish journalist attended at that time.

"One of my early objectives was to make more money each week as a golf writer than the winner of the tournament was making in the PGA region, as it was at that time. I never saw the correlation between golf writing and poverty.

"I love the smell of new-mown hay, the sound of the ball being struck, the way people dress, walk and talk, the way they fail miserably - physically and mentally - while others are glorious in success, and the amazing drama.

"That's never changed from seeing an early hero like Cecil Ewing, heavy of build, narrow stance, short swing, take on Joe Carr; my childhood days spent waiting for this battle at the West. Carr, tall and slim, arriving from Dublin in a Jaguar car. In those days Rosslare was the far end of the world.

"My first wish to own a golf course of my own came from 1957 on reading that Jack Burke senior and Jimmy Demaret were setting up a golf course of their own in Houston, called the Champions Club. It never left me. Back in 1969-1970 I started looking for jobs, to see would someone let you design a golf course. I had failure after failure because I had no qualification. I played every golf course in Ireland. One of them, Castlecomer in Kilkenny, phoned me out of the blue.

"I laid out nine holes that turned out very well. I was away. Once you have one job, something else happens. There weren't many courses being built in the 70s. I was very proud of that one. I built it for nothing. In 2000 Castlecomer decided to extend to 18 holes and I was proud they came to me. They didn't forget and neither did I.

"We spoke about price and I said I'd do it for the same price as before. Nothing.

"It was nice that the beginning and very close to the end happened in the same place. They named a hole after me, the fifth. On the opening day I managed to hit it out of bounds over the trees. So much for the Ruddy hole.

"As the 80s arrived I was getting closer to doing something myself and other jobs were coming along: St Margaret's, Druid's Glen, Ballyliffin, Portsalon, Rosapenna, Donegal and over to Canada.

"Now you're coming into a new age where with environmentalists, builders, developers, accountants are doing golf courses. It's all becoming dreadfully scientific, spreadsheety and formulaic. I don't know if enough people are fighting for the 'artistic freedom' to try for something that digs into the golfer's soul: challenge him, enthuse him, brace him with the fear of failure.

"It's like going to a dance in the old days where you had to go and ask a lady to dance. You'd pick out an attractive one and she'd tell you to get lost. Golf is like that. PGA Tours sanitise the game a bit, push tees forward and widen fairways so that when you get to the majors you tend to get the old blood sport back in the game, the coliseum effect. Given that autonomy these places don't always get it right but it's closer to what the game should be about at that level.

"I had tried to do a golf course in a place called Gortsheen. I bought this bit of land. I parked a caravan on top of a hill and the next morning found myself in the middle of a lake. That introduced me to the concept of drainage. I withdrew from there."

In publishing the yearbook Ruddy would happen upon the chance to fulfil a lifelong dream, to own a golf course that he had nurtured. It started when he took a helicopter ride at his own expense to take shots of Ballybunion and two weeks later a chopper tour of the coastline. In 1986 a site at Brittas Bay came on the market.

"When I opened in 1992 it was a slow process. I didn't realise the game had got swanky and commercial around me. I was just going golfing. When I opened it was quite raw but I was delighted because I had a golf course better than Ballymote. I didn't fully understand the trouble of losing a golf ball or five on a hole.

"I didn't advertise but put a notice in the golf notices that the European Club was opening on St Stephen's Day and a round would cost £10. I went down at 7.45am and there were 50 cars at the gate. I had no clubhouse, no shed and there was a risk of us all sinking inside the gate. I drove in, rolled down the window of my Nissan Bluebird and starting taking tenners: we never closed.

"I came home to Bernie and gave her £750. She said, 'Where did that come from?' I told her that people had played golf today. It was the first time in six years that the place had returned a penny. It had been just draining us every inch of the way. People kept coming and suddenly there was an income.

"Instead of going the high-finance road and borrowing, we worked off incomes from it, golf-course design, journalism, etc. The old-fashioned way, grown organically. You don't know your bank manager because you don't need to know him. If you have a quiet day you don't worry about it.

"Golf is best played in an uncrowded way. (There are) protracted periods of time when you can play golf in peace, look at the landscape and even sit down on a dune and eat a sandwich, suck a zube or smoke a cigar and go on again. You're not swamped by a herd of golfers traipsing past. You cannot do that if your motivation is money."

Ruddy has been inundated with offers to buy him out, several derisory in the early years, some of more recent vintage very flattering and genuine. Membership has been closed since 1999 as he so beautifully captures the essence of the small membership and reluctance to grasp the euro: "I don't want to be a servant in my own place.

"There were people who made approaches to buy, and they will recognise themselves, who flattered me by thinking that I was weak and impoverished and would be glad of a million or two. . . . I'm glad I withstood all of that. They thought they were in it for money, turn a quick buck, but I'm in it for different reasons.

"This doesn't relate to recent visitors who have talked serious money and shown considerable respect.

"I spent from 1958 to 1988 thinking of doing a golf place of my own, from 1988 to the present trying to make it one of the best and loveliest golf courses in the world, and having achieved one's dream it is difficult to contemplate walking away and impossible to think of a very good reason why one should.

"Having reached where you are going, having the amazing privilege of playing golf the way you want, and having endless prospects forward to continue to hone and polish the links, a surfeit of loose cash isn't paramount to the plan of life.

"I feel that The European Club links will be there for centuries to come and it is a great challenge and source of satisfaction to work at directing it towards such lasting prominence in the plan of golf and of landscaping, as this is one very important garden in what is known as The Garden of Ireland."

Passionate and eloquent to the end, a golfer's golfer.