Farewell Fred-a giant in shadow of Ben Bulben
Irish golf mourns the passing of a selfless servant to the game. By Brian Keogh
IRISH golf is replete with wonderful volunteers who ensure the show stays on the road.
But as the Golfing Union of Ireland and the ILGU prepares to create a new body for the game on this island, the only certainty is that there will never be another servant to match the late Fred Perry, who passed away unexpectedly last Saturday.
President of the GUI in 1982, he was on his way to Rosses Point, not for a pow-pow for the forthcoming West of Ireland Championship (an event he loved so much he served on the Championship Committee for 42 consecutive years) but for a Saturday morning coffee with his golfing friends.
Originally from Bunclody in Co Wexford, he moved west in 1953 and settled in Boyle, Co Roscommon.
As colleague Dermot Gilleece so aptly said on hearing the sad news, he was “the most selfless blazer in the history of Irish golf.”
While he was a “Union” man to the core with what colleagues say was an innate sense of what was right for the GUI, his gruff exterior was only a front for his passion for the fun of the game itself and his love of the players.
County Louth’s Barry Reddan, West of Ireland champion in 1978 and a competitor right up until 2009, quickly came to love him despite suffering the occasional tongue-lashing for slow play.
“He was giving me abuse for 40 years,” Reddan recalled affectionately this week. “He’d get on to me about being slow and I’d protest, ‘It’s not me, Fred, it’s the other lads!’
“Then in recent years, I’d say, ‘Fred, you were getting onto me for taking three-and-a-half-hours back in the day and now they are taking five-and-a-halfhours!’ And he said, ‘You know what, you are dead right!’
“You knew exactly where you stood with Fred. There was no winking and nodding stuff. If he had to say something, he said it straight out. There was no malice in him whatsoever. Fred was straight down the line.”
Speaking at his funeral service the Church of Ireland in his adopted Boyle on Tuesday, his daughter Heather delivered a wonderful eulogy that captured the unique character of a man who wasn’t just a sterling servant for golf but a much loved husband, father, grandfather, friend and neighbour.
“Dad’s favourite saying on that subject [politics], and any other subject up for discussion, was ‘I might be wrong, but I know I’m not’,” she recounted, filling the church with warm laughter.
No-one who came across him at Rosses Point over the past five decades was left in any doubt about his desire to get things done “the right way.”
“If you hadn’t had a row with Fred, you didn’t really know him,” said Enda Lonergan, general secretary of the Connacht Branch and a man who regarded Perry as a “father figure” not just for his help in the “West” but for his advice on all things in golf.
“It wasn’ t a row where you would end up bearing a grudge, he had an opinion and he wouldn’t leave it until he had you thinking the same way.
“He looked forbidding to people who did not know him. I remember he was calling for [former GUI president] Tommy Basquille to take him to a meeting somewhere and Tommy’s daughter ran inside, crying, ‘There’s a man with a very cross face at the door looking for you daddy’.”
Inside was a heart of gold, but he never lost that love of provoking a stunned reaction.
When Swedish golfers Stephen Jeppesen and Joel Sjöholm, future European Tour players, came to play in the “West” some years ago, one of them asked on the first tee if the pin positions on the sheet were in yards or metres.
Standing up to his full height, eyes widening, Fred declared: “They’re paces!”
End of discussion.
There is no discussion either about his contribution to Irish amateur golf.
“He had a fantastic brain,” said Sean Hosty, echoing the feeling of fellow Connacht Branch man and lifelong friend, Tom Greally.
“He knew the history of the Union better than anyone and could remember exactly why certain decisions were taken. He was a one-off. A huge loss.”
For all his sterling work on committees – in his 85th year he was appointed Convenor of the GUI’s Constitution Review Committee and was due to chair a meeting just yesterday – no job was too small, no detail insignificant.
“I’d open up the championship office in the dark and I wouldn’t have it open two minutes, but Fred would be in the car park,” Lonergan said of his 16 years running the West of Ireland with Fred as the most active of all volunteers.
“It was so important to him that everything was right before a player stepped on the golf course. He did 16-17 hours days at 80-odd years of age, doing everything from raking bunkers to putting up and taking down scoreboards.”
Dressed sometimes in oilskins as he voyaged out onto the links in horrific weather to oversee play in the “West”, he was a Captain Ahab figure for some, fighting his annual Moby Dick in the shadow of great Ben Bulben.
He was piped on his final journey by current GUI President John Moloughney, the strains of ‘The Battle is O’er’ and ‘Going Home’ wafting down towards Lough Key, marking the end of a remarkable journey and leaving behind a remarkable legacy.