Waterville Golf Links

Golf reached this corner of Kerry with the cable men. The first working transatlantic cable was landed from Valentia Island, up this coast, in 1866, and a station opened at Waterville in 1884. The men who ran it formed the Waterville Athletic Club in 1889 and played nine holes on company ground. Newer technology made the cables redundant in the 1950s, and the course lay dormant through the 1960s. John A. Mulcahy rebuilt it with Eddie Hackett and Claude Harmon, the 1948 Masters champion, and it reopened in 1973. Irish Americans bought the links in 1987. Payne Stewart accepted the honorary captaincy at a ceremony during the 1999 Ryder Cup at Brookline, a month before he died.

What the card offers is a choice. Five sets of tees run from 7,347 yards down to 5,370, and at the shortest the total plays to par 73 rather than 72 — close to two thousand yards between the ends, so much of the difficulty here is picked on the first tee rather than handed out. The hole mix behind those numbers is ordinary: four par threes, ten par fours, four par fives. Tom Fazio was brought in later to work over Hackett's holes and to lay out a practice ground. The links itself runs through high dunes above the Atlantic, at the far end of the Ring of Kerry.