Reconciled with an old friend as Royal Dublin is reborn

Colin Byrne Caddie's Role: I was fortunate to grow up playing golf on a seaside links close to Dublin city. Links golf in Ireland 25 years ago was a very natural experience. The course reflected the climate and local geography.

In summer the whole thing took on a pervasive beige as - in a general absence of irrigation - sunshine parched the fairways.

Afternoon rounds were punctuated by the shrill cries of children on Dollymount Strand. The sea breeze left a taste of salt on your lips.

I remember hearing birds singing in the neighbouring sanctuaries and the hollow sound of golf balls landing on the rock-hard surface that typifies links land in dry seasons.

I played golf in the days when your imagination ran wild after you hit a crooked approach and were presented with a variety of choices as to how to extricate yourself from the bad lie. Should you use a five-iron and run the ball along the fringe and up onto the green? How about flopping it all the way onto the green with a sand wedge? Or maybe bumping it into the fringe with an eight-iron and letting the ball trickle toward the pin?

The choices were part of the unique challenge of links golf.

We all relished the arrival of springtime; it signified the start of the golfing season. It was US Masters time, for most of us the first televised event of the year. The Masters was watched by many who were not necessarily golf enthusiasts. The chemically-induced lushness of the fairways and the dazzling whiteness of the manicured bunkers were for many the first impressions of how a golf course should look.

Special and impeccable as the Augusta National is, it represents a golf experience that cannot be replicated everywhere. Its style is peculiar to inland golf.

I started to notice a marked change in my home links of Royal Dublin back in the 1990s. Even after a rare summer heatwave, the place looked unnaturally verdant. The fairways were lush; the greens were like puddings into which your ball sank and left a deep pitch-mark. The thump of the ball landing on dry, sandy soil was a thing of the past.

Regardless of weather, the only noise I heard in Royal Dublin for roughly a decade was the ball landing as if dropping into a swamp and not on a green. I cursed Augusta National after yet another unsatisfying parkland experience on a classic piece of links-land. I was convinced those in control at my club had a severe dose of the "Augustas". I felt the course that had first fired my imagination and love for the game had been disfigured.

Royal Dublin is a classic old links course, effectively with nine holes going away from the clubhouse and nine coming back. It was founded in 1885 and is steeped in the tradition of links golf. The Celtic Tiger seemed to confuse the club as to what it actually represented. We got caught up in clubhouse renovation and tended to neglect the course. The tradition of the old-fashioned links was being swamped by high-speed modernity. During the 1990s the club lost its identity.

After years of discontent among some members, who recognised the decline in the condition of the course, the lack of quality and the lack of challenge for today's golfer, it was eventually decided to bring the course into the 21st century in terms of design and condition.

There were the sceptics, like myself, who thought it was dangerous to tamper with the handiwork of a renowned designer, Harry Colt.

We felt it was time for a change, but the radical proposals of the commissioned redesigner, Martin Hawtree, seemed tantamount to tampering with a work of art.

The changes were presented, voted on swiftly and approved, amid cries of sacrilege from the traditionalists.

I had not played the new course since it was opened in the spring. Last week I got to play my first round on the redesigned and slightly rerouted links. What a pleasure it was.

A beautiful, warm day; a fourball with friends I had played with when they knew the course at its traditional best in the early 1980s. Striding the links last week was like going back to my golfing roots.

I realise I am painting a picture of the Bull Island in Clontarf as having a balmy micro-climate the rest of the country seldom experiences, but it really was an ideal day to go golfing.

The fawn fescue links grasses framed the parched fairways and swayed in the gentle afternoon breeze. There were the sounds of day-trippers carried on the sea air. And there was that old, familiar thud of the ball landing on a baked green, bringing me back to how the links should really be played.

The challenge was rediscovered in the new design, and the strategic pleasure of the course was even better than I remember it.

I am sure that anyone who has played the redesigned Royal Dublin will agree it has regained its status as a championship links in a prime location six kilometres from the capital, over 100 years from its conception but very much up to date in testing the ability of the modern golfer.