{{ubiquityData.prevArticle.description}}
{{ubiquityData.nextArticle.description}}
Séamus Power became just the sixth Irish player to win on the PGA Tour when he captured the recent Barbasol Championship in Kentucky after a six-hole play-off with JT Poston.
The other five are all major champions – Darren Clarke, Pádraig Harrington, Rory McIlroy, Graeme McDowell and Shane Lowry – but Power’s story is equally fascinating and no less impressive.
His win was the culmination of 10 years of toil that took him from modest West Waterford Golf Club in rural Co. Waterford to East Tennessee State University, then to the eGolf mini-tour and Korn Ferry Tour on the way to the PGA Tour in the kind of rags-to-riches story everyone loves.
While it would be tempting to believe 34-year-old Power had spent more a decade underachieving, his recent triumph only highlights the huge talent of his peers McIlroy (32) and Lowry (34) and the slim difference between being perceived as a superstar and a “failing” journeyman.
Comparison, as they say, is the thief of joy. Power himself put things in perspective following a triumph that ended his grim battle to get back into the top 125 in the FedEx Cup standings. He is now one of those fortunate players who can pick and choose where they play. He’s also coming to terms with being a PGA Tour winner with an exemption until the end of the 2022-23 season.
“I felt like I’ve always been able to win on every level I’ve been on. So, I felt like I could and that belief definitely never left me. Thankfully, I have been able to come through now.”
Séamus Power
“It’s all perspective,” said Power, who admits his decision to spend two days with sports psychologist Dr Bob Rotella when he was recovering from elbow surgery last winter was key to his success in that play-off on the outskirts of Lexington, Kentucky. “I view myself as extremely lucky. I’m 34 and I’ve yet to work a day in my life. So, every time I get to play a tournament, or play an extra year on tour, to me it’s a massive bonus.
“It’s easy sometimes to get into that comparing mode, compare yourself to other guys who have won tournaments and this and that. You’ve just got to be happy for people who have put in the work and it’s paid off and, thankfully this week it was me.”
Yes, it took a decade to win, but Power’s belief never wavered.
“My thought process always with golf is that if at any point I didn’t think I was good enough to win or compete at the highest level, I would have stopped playing,” he said. “I would have done something else.
While McIlroy won his European Tour card after just a handful of starts and Lowry was exempt immediately after winning the 2009 Irish Open as an amateur, Power’s long journey to the top was similar to those followed by a host of leading Irish players. He is very much a product, not just of the Golfing Union of Ireland (now Golf Ireland) setup, but of Irish club life and its strong sense of community.
The Irish Youths’ Championship no longer exists but it was the blue-riband event for Under-21s in Ireland from 1969 until just a few years ago. Its roll of honour is a who’s-who of Irish amateur golf.
From six-time championship winner Declan Branigan, Mark Gannon, Tom Corridan, Ronan Rafferty and John McHenry to Paul McGinley, future PGA Tour players Richie Coughlan and Keith Nolan, McDowell and McIlroy, it produced a series of brilliant winners.
Power captured the title in 2005, finished runner-up in 2006 and then won at his home club West Waterford in 2007 before winning the title for a third time in 2008.
It was a sensational run of form for the man from Tooraneena, a rural area not far from Dungarvan in Co Waterford, where his father, Ned, was left to raise three small boys following the tragic death of Séamus’s mother, Philomena, when he was just 8 years old and his brothers, twins Willie and Jack, were only 10.
A small farmer, Power Snr took a second job working nights laser-welding defibrillators. He used much of the extra income to support Séamus’s travel to junior events across Ireland.
When he was working or travelling, he asked close friend and colleague John Walsh and his late wife, Celia, to look after his boys from time to time.
“Ned arrived unexpectedly one day and asked would Celia look after the lad,” John explained last week. “ ‘Well now Séamus,’ she said to him, ‘I am playing golf this afternoon and you are carrying my bag.’ And that’s how it started.”
Equally unexpected was the manner in which he arrived at East Tennessee. It was only when McIlroy, who had signed a letter of intent to play there, decided to play amateur golf at home, that Power got a chance to take up the scholarship instead
He remains the only golf scholar whom coach Fred Warren saw graduate with a degree in accounting – magna cum laude – in more than 30 years at the university.
Power decided to settle in Charlotte, North Carolina, but he never forgot West Waterford, the course designed by that secular saint Eddie Hackett 28 years ago, but now in the hands of the receiver and up for sale in an online auction on 29 July.
The members are keen to buy it and save it from being turned back into farmland and Power himself is right behind them, acutely aware of the role it played in his formation as a player.
“I mean, without West Waterford Golf Club, I definitely wouldn’t be here,” he said. “It was pretty much my second home.”
Club stalwart Pat Murphy, a long-standing official in the Munster Branch of what was then the GUI, remembers taking Power 100 miles to Munster panel coaching in Limerick 20 years ago.
“He was smaller and rounder then and he had physical training with John Glynn and Fred Twomey and they were put through their paces all day,” recalled Murphy. “He fell asleep somewhere just outside Limerick but he obviously sensed the Tooraneena air because as we got close to home, he came to and said, ‘Pat, I’ll get off at Beary’s Cross.’
“ ‘You will like hell,’ I said. ‘I’ll drive you home to the door.’ But pointing beyond the hedge, he said, ‘No, Dad left the tractor there for me.’ And with that he hopped out, said, ‘Thanks very much,’ threw the clubs into the front loader and off he went.”
He’s been doing things his own way ever since, but never lost his sense of identity or his unshakeable self-belief.
Top: Seamus Power beamed after claiming his maiden PGA Tour victory.
E-Mail BRIAN