Journey of discovery which goes beyond the little white ball

GOLF BOOK CLUB: Ancestral LinksBy John Garrity

EVERY SO often, a truly beautiful book comes along. This is one of them. Who knows if John Garrity – a six-foot seven-inch giant of a man with a graceful walk and an easy smile – would ever have discovered the links at Carne, in Co Mayo, if he’d not gone in search of his ancestry? Let’s be thankful that he did, for this journey of discovery often goes beyond simple golf.

It’s not about hitting shots in the wind, it’s about a man finding himself.

In finding out about the Geraghty clan who all those years ago were forced to seek a new life across the Atlantic, this “blow-in”, as Garrity (as the name became once it hit American shores) describes himself, assimilated himself into the essence of living on the western seaboard. He joined the club, played his shots, lost dozens of golf balls and was given a handicap of 15.

As Garrity recalls of that moment, he had had “survived Q-School.”

Throughout the story, John Garrity’s search is accompanied by a number of different strands. A central one belongs to his older brother Tommy, a star amateur who became a professional; and, by association, Tommy’s dream to play the par-four 17th hole at Carne over and over, three balls at a time, until he has an 18-hole score becomes part of the younger brother’s own quest. The pair had played the links a number of years before Tommy was stricken by cancer, a battle he lost.

Carne, his paternal ancestral home, is the heart of this story; but it also involves links to the Garrity family in Kansas City – where the author grew up, a place where Tom Watson was the king of golf but only “the fourth franchise” in a land where baseball and basketball and American football rule sporting life – and also to Scotland, his maternal ancestral home, and all strands are seamlessly blended to make for a very enjoyable and readable story for golf fanatic and those who couldn’t care less about a little white ball.

Garrity is a sportswriter of some repute in the USA – writing for Sports Illustrated– but took himself to Belmullet for "a sabbatical – looking into old records, chasing down distant cousins, playing golf" – to research his lineage and become enthralled with the links schemed up by local farmers and designed by Eddie Hackett, the famed Irish course designer's last creation.

As one character in the book relates to Garrity of Hackett – “he wouldn’t talk about money (when designing the course). I believe the total we paid him over seven years was less than £10,000. We had to beg him to send the bill for travel expenses”.

While another recounts how Hackett responded to the possibility that he could prove too expensive. “Mr Captain, if that’s all that’s bothering you, let’s do the work first and we’ll talk about money afterward,” Hackett told the would-be course co-op.

This is a part of the story that really deserves to be told, for the course transformed and revitalised an area where an estimated 30 per cent of houses in the area lay empty because of the lack of employment.

There are large sections of the book which recount conversations between the author and long lost distant cousins who he manages to unearth . . . and what could be a sentimental odyssey in fact becomes an absorbing one which Garrity succeeds in keeping the readers’ interest from early on right to the 19th hole.

In his acknowledgements, Garrity tidily describes the book’s topics: “Golf in Ireland, my golf-mad dad, sand-greens golf in Wisconsin, my tour player brother, Irish folktales, my life as a range rat, the Carne Golf Links, my six pro-am holes with Tiger Woods, and golf ghosts.”

It is all this, and more.

Questions for readers

• What do you make of Garrity's quest to shoot an 18-hole total on the 17th hole at Carne in memory of his dead brother?
• Is there any part of the book that you found to be self-indulgent? If so, can you make allowances for such language?
• Does it surprise you that a sportswriter of Garrity's stature, growing up in the same city as Tom Watson, never got to meet or cover the six-time major champion in his heyday?
• At one point, Garrity writes of a trip to an Irish cemetery, "Like a lazy golfer in a bunker, I smoothed the gravel with my foot." Do the use of analogies work in a golf book?
• How do you rate this book out of a possible top mark of 10?