If I was leading, I’d think, I don’t deserve to be up here. Now our young guys believe they are entitled to be up there
1. How did you get started in the game?
I’m from a working-class family in Belfast and nobody played golf. I was looking to go to university to do architecture but when I was 15 or 16 my father took me to Scotland on holiday and a friend of his, who was a keen golfer, took me out to play at a course called Windy Hills in Glasgow. So I got into Shandon Park, which was nearby, had a few lessons with Harry Middleton and that was it. I fell in love with the game.
2. How soon after that did you decide you wanted to be a professional?
It was quite soon after that – 1966 – and my parents, quite sensibly, told me to finish my A-levels so I could always take up the place I’d been offered doing architecture at Queens, if it didn’t work out.
3. Ironically, you ended up at Oxford, but not at the university.
Yes, I got a job as an assistant pro at Oxford and eventually started on the tour in 1969, pre-qualifying. I got a battered, blue Bedford door-mobile, a £50 bricklayer’s van to be honest, and away I went.
4. You had great fun in those days. What was it like?
It was a bit of an adventure. I remember Dessie Smyth, Jimmy Heggarty, myself and Eddie Polland driving everywhere in the 70s. Whoever missed the cut travelled on with the others who missed the cut and whoever made it, travelled with the guys who made it. There was no money in it, mind.
5. How bad did it get?
Well, I remember one year winning around £900. So when I got married in 1975, just wasn’t good enough to stay on the tour and raise a family.
So I took the club job in Bangor, which put me on my feet financially. And I was able to go back on tour in 1981, not totally dependent on holing every five-footer.
I was third in the Irish Open at Portmarnock, finished 40th in the money list and had six or seven good years, travelling in a bit of style with a full-time caddie. Those were good years.
6. Who was the biggest influence on your career? I
My boss in Oxford, Nick Underwood. He was only 28 when I arrived at 18 and he’d tried the tour so he could see where I was coming from.
He made me a player. I wrote him a letter last winter just to thank him and for making this life possible. 7. Who did you most admire as a player? I was a great Jack Nicklaus fan. Maybe it was my architectural background, but I liked his meticulous approach, working it all out. Christy O’Connor was a hero to every Irish player but Nicklaus was the man I modelled my attitude on, not my swing.
Of all the great stars, he was the only one I never got to play with. I was on the same score as Nicklaus three times in The Open after two rounds and was never paired with him.
8. Name your dream fourball?
I’d still put Arnold Palmer in there before Nicklaus. I played with him in the Spanish Open at La Manga in 1975 when I was leading. I was quaking in my shoes with a little Spanish kid pulling my trolley, and I had a bit of a disaster.
Arnie won. But he came up to me afterwards and gave me such encouragement. I was so down in the dumps but he spent 15 minutes with me, saying, ‘I know this is a hard pill to swallow but keep plugging away.’ Anytime I saw him, right up until the end he always remembered me and came over to shake hands. A real gentleman.
9. Who else makes the fourball?
Greg Norman. One of the all-time greats. And perhaps Alex Lambert, the man who started me off at Windy Hills in Glasgow way back when. He’d have loved to play with Palmer and Norman.
10. What about Tom Watson?
I played with Watson in the
Irish Open at Woodbrook when he was Open champion. He came around the corner and said,
‘Hi, I’m Tom Watson’, as if you wouldn’t know him, and added, ‘Do you mind if I play a few holes with you?’ So we played nine and were drawn together in the tournament. A wonderful golfer.
11. What about a mulligan in your career?
I often wonder should I have given up in ’75 and taken the club job. A lot of my contemporaries tried to talk me out of it. So I look back on that and wonder if that was the right decision.
12. But you’d have missed out on family life.
That’s true. Maybe my life would have been poorer had I stuck with it. You just couldn’t take your family with you because travelling was tough. Now, there are creches, courtesy cars and a lot more money.
13. Is there a course you’d love to play before you die? Don’t say Augusta!
Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania. I have a standing invitation to play Augusta and several good friends who are members, but I have never taken it up. I’d love to play it, but it is not on my bucket list.
There are dozens in Ireland alone you could spend your twilight years playing.
14. What’s your most treasured possession?
My Kenya Open trophy from 1989. It’s a Kikuyu fertility carving – part bat, part human, part fish. I was into that sort of thing, and when the presentation was on, I saw this cut glass rose bowl on the table. And I hate cut glass. So I was thinking, how am I going to get this damned thing back to Ireland.
Fortunately, it was for the leading amateur. And I was presented with this carving. I told the man who presented it I was probably the only player in the field who would have appreciated it.
15. Driver or putter?
The putter every time. I was a bad driver of the ball. I drive it better now.
16. What’s your idea of perfect happiness?
A glass of wine, good music and a nice meal with friends or my wife, or both.
17. Is there something you’d change about yourself?
I’d like to have been more confident and had more belief in myself. I was brought up in a traditional Irish family – be seen, not heard. If I was leading, I’d think, I don’t deserve to be up here. This is for the Faldos, the Langers. It’s changed now.
Our young guys now believe they are entitled to be up there – the Rorys, the Graeme McDowells. Ken Schofield gave Europeans the chance to be exposed to that level of golf.
18. How do you think Keith Pelley is doing? You’re on the European Tour board.
He’s shaken things up and he’s got a wonderful relationship with the top players.
The ex-players on the board realised that if we did nothing, we were going to get gobbled up by the PGA Tour.
It’s about mopping up territory and the European Tour has huge interests in Europe, Asia, Australia and South Africa now. So Pelley has put the European Tour in a position where it is being treated very seriously. It is respected.
If we can keep the players interested and loyal, it is going to be fascinating.
Known far and wide as “Longfellow”, Bangor’s David Jones has watched the European Tour grow in stature since his early days driving a battered bricklayer’s van from one event to the next.
Now 70, and a respected course architect, he reflects on his beginnings and the future of the European Tour.