Open returns to Northern Ireland, but only after ‘The Troubles’ subside
Portrush, Northern Ireland — Darren Clarke was a teenager working at a bar in his hometown of Dungannon when the call came in.
The message was simple: Get out or get killed.
It was a few days before Christmas in 1986 and Northern Ireland was at war with itself — and by proxy, the government in London. "The Troubles," as they are euphemistically known here, were raging and no one knew who the next target would be.
Clarke and his fellow workers took heed and got out.
"The bomb scare at 8:30, everybody out, bomb went off at 9:00," Clarke said, "and the place was flattened."
Clarke recalled the close escape this week amid preparations for a home British Open he thought he would never see. The Open is back in Northern Ireland for the first time in 68 years, and Clarke will step up to the first tee early Thursday morning and hit the first shot.
As with anyone who grew up around here during the time, though, The Troubles are never far from his mind.
"That was life in Northern Ireland. Bombs were going off quite frequently," Clarke said. "And a lot of people, unfortunately, paid a heavy penalty for being in the wrong place at the wrong time."
The Troubles that killed more than 3,700 people have largely ended, thanks to the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998. Still, tensions between unionists, mostly Protestant, and Roman Catholic supporters of a united Ireland still simmer beneath the surface and there are occasional incidents like the shooting death earlier the then-deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, said when the tournament was announced five years ago. "Those are the positives from a Northern Ireland point of view."
The golf, at least at Royal Portrush, could be as spectacular as the views. This is a British Open with a little of everything for golf fans, from Tiger Woods trying for another major to McIlroy, McDowell or even the 50-year-old Clarke winning on home soil.
Quite a change from 1951 when an Englishman named Max Faulkner, who spent one winter milking cows to strengthen his golfing hands, won an Open that only two Americans bothered to enter. But one thing that hasn't changed all that much is a golf course as pleasing to see as it is to play.
"The thing about Royal Portrush, it's a fair golf course," Clarke said. "If you play well around Portrush you should have the opportunity to score well. If you're missing too many shots you're not going to get around Portrush, and that's the way it is."
Still, to a newcomer there seems to be an increased police presence outside the course than there has been at other Opens.
There are signs posted that warn plainclothes officers are around, too, should anyone contemplate anything nefarious.
But to Clarke things seem far different from when he was growing up playing rugby and soccer nearby. The course he played most in Dungannon, he said, was probably the most bombed clubhouse in Northern Ireland for a time.
"I had friends and relatives who were murdered, all sorts of bits and pieces," Clark told the Daily Mail last week. "It just happened."