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As a study in balance of trade, it's pathetically uneven. The Emerald Isle gets one planeload after another of vacationing American duffers losing $4 golf balls in the dunes of Ballybunion in the south, overpaying caddies at Royal County Down in the north and bellying up at Fodor's-approved pubs each night to joyfully relive their windblown misery.
Then the other side of the ledger: Irish golfers coming to the U.S., prospecting for American gold. David Feherty, born in Bangor, in Northern Ireland, growing prosperous off the generous teat of CBS Sports, a satirist (except while on the hallowed grounds of Augusta National) masquerading as a golf commentator, retreating between tournaments to his big Dallas life and his gorgeous American family. Padraig Harrington of Dublin, having already built a vacation home for his family in the mountains of North Carolina, now trying to win his third consecutive major with clubs manufactured by Wilson (Bryn Mawr Avenue, Chicago!). And, to complete this trinity of Irish golfers, the boy wonder himself, Rory McIlroy, from Holywood, 20 minutes by commuter train from downtown Belfast, about to play his first Masters.
He's 19, with a young face and an old head, and his Masters debut comes in the middle of a three-week stretch: Houston, Augusta, Hilton Head. He could make more in three weeks than a dozen union welders in the dying Belfast shipyards will earn in their lifetimes combined. Easily. What a country.
"Ah-mare-EE-ka," McIlroy says, in the Gaelic singsong that makes Irish English so easy on the ear. His brogue is muted by his worldliness — you hear the lilt much more in his parents — but still it's there. He never refers to the United States or the U.S. or the States. It's always America, a name from a dream in which you could ladle water straight from the river and drink it. Opposites, as ever, attract: America is as young as McIlroy's isle is old, as sprawling as his island is narrow, as open to reinvention as Ireland, Northern and otherwise, is bound by tradition.
The kid — almost freakishly mature, but still a kid — sees nothing but birdie holes and opportunity. It's good to be 19, ubertalented, brimming with life and so damn nice you can hardly believe it. He cheerfully answers questions on his website and signs off with a variety of valedictions. Cheers. Good luck. All the best. Regards. Kind regards. To the Irish, like the Japanese, the small gesture still matters. Kind regards? Do you know a single American teenager who would end an e-mail with those words? OMG, nfw.
Here's the shortest possible version of Rory McIlroy's golfing life: He made the cut in the 2007 British Open as an 18-year-old amateur; he won a European tour event in Dubai in February as a 19-year-old professional; he came to America for his PGA Tour baptism. His first stop, on a gleaming Southern California morning in February, was for a tune-up at the ultrasecure Titleist Performance Institute in Carlsbad, about eight miles off I-5 in San Diego County and a million miles from the gray Belfast winter. Two or three company men monitored McIlroy as he experimented with different balls and grinds and lofts and shafts.
He hit one ball after another, never taking a divot, with about the most dynamic swing you could imagine, a flurry of moving parts that, you have to say it, brings to mind Ben Hogan. The flat, handsy money-game action. The ramrod-straight left arm. The explosive rotation of the hips.
A computer model of his swing at the Titleist facility — in which his body appeared as a stick-figure X-ray, his joints marked with lighted dots — revealed something that astonished the company's swing doctors. At the start of McIlroy's downswing, his left hip spins violently counterclockwise, as it does for every elite, long-hitting player. But then, and only with the driver, McIlroy makes a funky move you could not teach. A moment before impact his left hip suddenly changes direction and jerks back, clockwise, and then rotates again, this time even more powerfully than the first. It's like some mad fusion golf experiment, and McIlroy, wise man, pays it little mind. But that extra thrust explains why McIlroy — 5' 11" in cleats and 160 pounds — is one of the longest hitters in the game.
Lunch at the TPI came out of paper bags, and Rory drank Mountain Dew from a can. (He is prone to fainting, and the sugar in the drink is like preventive medicine for him.) His father, Gerry, sat near Stuart Cage, a former European tour player who now works for ISM Sports, the English agency that represents McIlroy. Rory's caddie, J.P. Fitzgerald of Dublin, who has worked for Ernie Els and Darren Clarke and Paul McGinley, was at the table, along with some Titleist people.
