By Tom Mackin
A new driver. That’s why John Gallagher stopped at Carne Golf Links in Belmullet, Co. Mayo, Ireland, on a sunny Wednesday last October. He needed the club for a golf trip to Spain the following month. But upon arrival, Carne’s Gerry Maguire had other news for him. Alan Maloney, a force of nature and proprietor of Mt. Falcon Estate, an elegant base for golf trips and vacations an hour east in Ballina, was playing the unforgettable Wild Atlantic Dunes layout with two American writers: myself and David DeSmith. Gallagher, owner of the Teach John Joe pub on the Belmullet Peninsula and Carne’s treasurer, jumped into a cart with two fresh pints of Guinness to repay some past kindness shown to him by Maloney. He met our group on the par-3 14th tee and introductions were made.“Your last name is Gallagher?” I asked him. “It is,” he said.
“Which parish?” he asked me. “No idea,” I told him, regretting not having done the proper ancestral research, even after my first trip to Carne last May.“Well, let me ask around,” he replied.
After Gallagher departed, Maloney handed me one of the pints and said with a twinkle in his eye, “Just wait and see what he finds out for you.” We finished our round and returned to the clubhouse. Upstairs in the Lir Bar & Restaurant, Maguire handed me his cell phone. “It’s a call for you, Tom,” he said. Uh-oh. An emergency at home? No. It was Gallagher. “I’ll pick you up at the clubhouse in 10 minutes. We found your grandmother’s house.” Wait. What?Now, when I first landed an associate editor’s job at GOLF magazine in 2000, I started collecting logo balls as tokens of my very fortunate travels. I envisioned them in neat rows lined up in a case on my office wall, each containing a singular memory. The reality? A pile of balls that gathered dust in a bowl tucked away in a corner. So I changed my focus. I started collecting people instead. A lifelong habit actually, given my only-child status. These were people who often advanced from utterly random playing partners to friends. Good friends, in many cases. The ones you host for golf when they come through town, even on short notice. The ones you know will return the favor when you visit them, no matter how far away they live. We spoke the common language of golf travel, discussing the must plays, the should stays, the post-round meals and drinks that needed to be tried. And much more. I still have far too many shirts, hats, and bag tags from my travels. But it’s the friends I treasure above all. And after this particular day in Belmullet, that group includes Alan Maloney, Gerry Maguire, and John Gallagher. There’s also John McLaughlin, a proud Mayo man himself who knows all too well about the spiderweb-like connection of friends golf has created in his native country. He’s run North & West Coast Golf Links, a Galway-based tour company (which hosted my visit last October) since 2000. Many of his itineraries for visiting Americans include matches with members at local courses. “Those are great fun and people make great friends,” he said. “There will be golf then a dinner afterwards where the visitors pay for the locals. You get the camaraderie and fun going. You can see the interactions in the bar that evening, too. Golf is great like that.”
Indeed. I jumped in John Gallagher’s white van that day and spent the next few minutes bouncing along roads my grandmother may have walked more than a century ago. Turns out that after leaving us at Carne earlier, he made four phone calls that uncovered the exact location of her house. “I have a man who will meet us at the turn right near it,” he said. Sure enough, we soon saw a local named JP MacAndrew waiting to guide us a few steps more. We strolled down a tiny road, through a farm gate, and behind an existing house. And there it was: a small stone structure that was my great grandparent’s house, or at least the remains of it, where their daughter was born in December 1899. To be honest, my mind did briefly harbor a tiny doubt about the authenticity of this discovery. Too good to be true and all that. But the names and dates being discussed matched up with what little I did know, and when Gallagher himself laughed at this unlikely find (“I lived around here all my life Tom and never knew this building was here!”), well, that was enough confirmation for me. Plus, he kindly followed up later with my grandmother’s birth certificate and even more family details. I touched the exterior walls of the home, which appeared to hold disheveled farming equipment. Looked at the surrounding fields bathed in the late afternoon sun. Saw the massive dunes of Carne rising high a few miles to the south. My grandmother never returned to this house, or Ireland at all, after leaving in the very early 20th century, enroute first to Scotland and then to New Jersey, where she met and married a Donegal man and lived out her life before passing in 1987. Yet there I was at the very place her life started. In Gortbrack, just east of the Eagle Island Lighthouse and a few miles north of Belmullet town, unexpectedly emotional and then laughing at the improbability of the moment. All caused by one man’s need for a new driver. Golf karma strikes again in the most surreal, serendipitous manner. Proof that there can be magic during a golf trip. You just never know when it will happen. Or who will help you find it.
Based in Scottsdale, Ariz., Tom Mackin is a proud Bayonne, N.J., native who has been writing about golf travel for 25 years. You can usually find him in 21D on a United flight.