Outhalf's conversion on target

A round with Paul Dean: Greg Allen begins a new series of playing a round of golf with sports stars who excel at the game, starting with former Ireland rugby international Paul Dean

The idea seemed simple enough. Find a sports star whose chosen discipline is, or was, not golf but who somehow manages to play the small-ball game exceptionally well. "Could only be a handful of candidates," the editor fired back unpromisingly. "Well that's where you're wrong," I replied. "There's DJ Carey and eh . . . DJ Carey and

. . ." "So let me guess," he interrupted. "You want to take your fragile little game and take on these battle-hardened types and then write about it," he added with an inflection that signalled a touch of interest.

"Well, yeah," I replied. And that's when the sniggering, which turned into a deep, resonant horse laugh, began. "So, who've you got in mind then?" he eventually offered.

And that's how I got to be standing on the first tee in Druid's Glen on a breezy but clear April Tuesday with the former Ireland and Lions outhalf Paul Dean, capped 32 times for his country and now playing out of Blainroe off his lowest ever handicap of one.

Paul is one of those "good-at-sport" types, a thorough all-rounder. A winner of the Victor Ludorum award at St Mary's College and a star outhalf on their Leinster Schools' Senior Cup team, he played for Ireland at senior level for the first time in 1980 and was part of the Triple Crown-winning sides of 1982 and 1985.

The list of sports he has tried his hand at and played well is long and varied. He's even had three 180s in darts and a break of 62 in snooker.

He came relatively late to golf and was 23 when he joined Blainroe in 1983 having bought a caravan nearby. "I just hadn't any washing facilities and I thought I'd use the golf club," he says only half jokingly.

If golf was initially a summertime distraction from representing Ireland on the rugby pitch, he quickly adapted his natural hand-eye co-ordination to his new sport and was soon playing off single figures.

It was only after his premature retirement from all levels of rugby in 1989 due to injury that golf became a priority and thus began the process that has seen him become club champion, golfer of the year and a fixture on the Blainroe senior cup team.

And so, in theory, in terms of our match, I should have been in for a hiding but he was in unusually generous mood. Firstly, he virtually threw the first hole at me with a lost ball off the tee and somehow after a birdie on the downwind par-five fifth, I was two ahead but already bracing myself for the backlash. It came swiftly.

Those who know Dean the golfer will testify to the quality of his short game, which is bordering on professional-tour standard.

This he demonstrated on the uphill 456-yard, par-four sixth hole, which played straight into a stiff breeze off the white medal markers. Two flat-out strikes of a drive and a three-wood left him pin high in greenside rough but he managed to bump a chip out of a difficult lie into a slope which helped the ball check up before resting five feet from the pin.

That Seve Ballesteros-like moment was duly converted for a winning par and after he reduced the 396-yard, par-four seventh to a drive, sand wedge and easy two-putt, he was back to all square. He completed the transformation in the match by holing a 40-footer down the green for birdie on the ninth to go one up at the turn.

Paul's prowess with the putter is probably the ultimate strength of his game. He has an unflinching capacity to hole out under pressure, which I presumed was at least partly attributable to his years bearing the responsibility of wearing the number 10 jersey on the Irish team.

But he begged to differ.

"The pressure in team sport does not compare to the pressure in an individual sport," he pointed out as we walked to the 10th tee. "People would say to me that you've played in front of 60,000 people for your first international cap at 20 years of age and that's pressure, but I can tell you when I really felt it. A few years ago, I was playing senior cup for Blainroe and was having a great old match against Niall Goulding and there was a gallery of around 200 following us. I'll always remember the way my body felt as we came to the closing holes and in particular the way the feel just began to drain from my hands.

"To me, that was pressure because whenever I got the ball on a rugby pitch, I knew there was always someone to pass it on to, someone else to help out. But when you are playing as an individual and you just have to make a four-foot putt, that pressure can be immense depending on the circumstances."

However, there is at least one philosophical lesson from his years playing rugby that Paul applies to his golf game.

"When you have been kicked from one end of the Parc des Princes to another for a number of years, ending up on the receiving end of all sorts of hidings in front of the TV cameras, the media and thousands of people, you get used to humiliation big time. So in the larger scheme of things, missing a little putt is not the end of the world."

His senior international career in rugby lasted nine years until an anterior cruciate ligament injury, which still bothers him, forced him into premature retirement. While he has fond memories of both Triple Crown campaigns, he recalls the 1985 success with far more warmth.

"I played in the '82 team but felt I made absolutely no significant contribution. I was a mediocre middle-of-the-road average centre, I thought," he recalls.

As uncomfortable as he was in an unsuitable role, the inevitable happened. He was dropped in 1984 and so he promptly went back to his club and pleaded with them to give him the number 10 jersey in which he had carved out such a reputation for himself as a teenager. His request did not fall on deaf ears and he immediately began to impress in a St Mary's back line that ran and ran the ball.

Soon, Mick Doyle picked up on the rejuvenated form of the 25-year-old outhalf and brought him back into the international fold, where the Irish coach gave Dean freedom to play the expansive game he loved. It helped greatly that his natural running ability suited the talent that existed in the Irish back line of the time. Outside him were true speedster centres, Michael Kiernan and Brendan Mullin. Keith Crossan and Trevor Ringland were the prolific-scoring wings, while full back Hugo McNeill needed no invitation to join the line going forward.

In terms of style, the 1985 team was poles apart from the 10-man rugby-orientated 1982 side and for Dean, his second Triple Crown-winning contribution marked the pinnacle of his career.

He realises now that the game he played two decades ago has changed to the point that a 12-stone outhalf, as he was, would be virtually lost on the pitch in that position today. "If I was involved now, I would have to be at least 13½ stone" he insists.

His admiration for the current Irish back line, which creates, excites and executes so consistently well, is clear and he singles out one of the lesser-sung heroes for particular mention.

"I rate Peter Stringer very highly. I notice that other people say that he doesn't threaten enough to be influential, but his service is quicker than anyone else I've seen and he's so decisive. If you think about it, one second is equivalent to eight yards on a rugby pitch and Stringer gets the ball away so quickly that it results in a swifter service down the line to O'Driscoll and D'Arcy, and those guys are world beaters."

His obvious enjoyment at watching such a competitive Irish team does not, however, translate into any feelings of lost opportunity to be part of the modern professional game.

"When I played, I worked from eight to six, five days a week and we were true amateurs, training as often as our jobs allowed. Nowadays, the players train twice a day. They have tactical appreciation through video sessions and coaching and it's all very clinical and a little too intense for my liking."

The work ethic of his 20s and his profile as a prominent international player has helped him to build up a sports apparel and equipment business and he enjoys a comfortable lifestyle as managing director of Umbro Ireland.

But even though he lives 25 miles away, he remains committed to the club he joined when he took up the game of golf more than 20 years ago. Blainroe was barely five years old back then, but he has since seen it mature into a challenging parkland course hard by the Irish Sea on the Wicklow coast.

He would love to play in championships but recognises that with an exact handicap of 1.2, he is still struggling in the margins of acceptability into most of the amateur majors.

His short-term ambition is to become a scratch player and beyond that, between now and his 50th birthday, in 2010, he feels there is time and scope for further improvement and so he is toying with the notion of perhaps trying for a seniors' tour card.

"I have another four years, I think, to try and become as good a golfer as I can be and in a few years I will have a look at it. The fact I might be able to compete at that level really spurs me. But I would have to drop at least another two shots and have a plus-one handicap before I think I could try it."

As we drove off the par-four 10th hole, having just watched that 40-foot putt go to ground on the previous green, I felt a heavy hand of impending doom descend on me. However, I quickly sensed that against a player of Paul's calibre, I really had little to lose. On nine days out of 10, he would be the better player but such is the mercurial nature of the game that every golfer has his day. This would be mine.

He was still one up as we headed to the now famous 13th tee, set on an elevation overlooking one of the truly great par-four vistas in the country. The hole winds its way more than a quarter of a mile through a gorge with a stream and a green-front lake to negotiate. The spectacle below looked stunning in the spring sunshine and appeared both enticing and terrifying.

"Isn't this the most beautiful golf course," Paul remarked before striking his drive as close to the right-hand cliff face as he dared before watching the ball arc back in a gentle draw before landing on the neatly-striped fairway 290 yards away. Just a perfect drive.

From 30 yards behind where his tee shot landed, I hit a four-wood towards the narrow target green compared to Paul's smooth six-iron approach shot, which came to rest behind the flag. His two-putt par against my chip-and-putt four left us both joking about the rarity of walking off the 13th green without any blood spilt.

The settling effect of scrounging that half helped me snatch the next with a rare accurate wedge shot to a foot for birdie and when Paul found bunker trouble with what appeared like a near-perfect drive on the 15th, I found myself rather shockingly one ahead.

Paul responded with two magnificent strikes into the wind which just failed to get up on the par-five 16th and our half gave me the opportunity to make a winning two-putt par on the short 17th.

It was a victory I could hardly have expected and one unlikely to be repeated.

But most importantly, and with apologies to Mark Twain, it was a good walk on a beautiful golf course, most certainly not spoiled.