A selection of media reviews…
Lovely review from Peter finch
Golf Digest – World’s 100 Greatest 24/25 #10. Ballybunion Golf Club (Old)
Ballybunion has always been great, but it wasn’t until they relocated the clubhouse in 1971 to the southern end that it became thrilling. Tom Watson’s effusive praise for the course after his first visit in 1981 also helped put the relatively unknown Ballybunion on everyone’s mind. The clubhouse move turned the old finish of anticlimactic back-to-back par 5s into the fourth and fifth holes and shifted the new closing holes to ones in spectacular dunes just north of the intersection of the Shannon River and the Atlantic Ocean. By then an honorary member, Watson suggested modest design changes in the 1990s, and later Martin Hawtree added new tees atop dunes on several holes.
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/worlds-100-greatest-golf-courses-2024-2025
BALLYBUNION OLD COURSE: A SLICE OF GOLFING HEAVEN
By BENJAMIN SMITH, thewanderinggolfers.com, 21/09/2021
“Ballybunion Old Course is a truly extraordinary layout. A place where Mother Nature, with all her mercurial magic, has conjured up as ruggedly beautiful a course as exists anywhere in the world. And in our view it should always be in the conversation when the discussion turns to the world’s greatest golf course. It sits at the top table. While a professional, James McKenna, laid out the original Ballybunion course and Tom Simpson supervised the extension of it, there is a sense that with this golf course Mother Nature herself did the hard work. And could not be surpassed. That’s the essence of this place. Golf beside the ocean, among the dunes and battling the elements. Pure. Simple. Life changing.” read more
Old Course at Ballybunion Everything It’s Cracked up to Be – And More
By Steve Habel, Cyber Golf, 14/2/2012
“Last Summer, during a glorious stretch of warm, relatively calm days, I was able to cross a round at Ballybunion’s Old Course off my bucket list. I can verify that the experience was all it’s cracked up to be – and more. I have played more than 600 golf courses in the past five years – and likely more than a thousand since my golf infatuation began in 1986 – and the round at Ballybunion was my all-time favourite.”
Interview with Bill Clinton By Thomas L. Friedman, February 2012
When you go to heaven if there are three courses….Which three?
“I’d like it to be the Old Course at St Andrews. I’d like it to be the Old Course at Ballybunion. And I’d like it to be one of half a dozen great Hawaiian courses because I feel better on the golf course in Hawaii than any other place on earth.”
Travelin’ Joe’s No. 1s
By Joe Passov, Senior Editor (Course/Rankings), 9th September, 2010
No. 1 Favourite Course: “… My choice is the Old Course at Ballybunion Golf Club in Ireland. I’m with Tom Watson on this one. I’m totally smitten with the wild contouring, ocean views, towering dunes and remarkable variety – no matter what the weather.”
Whistling Straits: It’s a links course, with American features
By Jerry Potter, USA Today, 10th August, 2010
KOHLER, Wis. – When Herb Kohler brought controversial golf course architect Pete Dye here for his first look at an old military base overlooking Lake Michigan, he gave Dye short instructions on what he wanted in a golf course.
“He said, ‘Make it look like Ballybunion,’ and walked away,” Dye says. Ballybunion is a fabled links course on the northwest coast of Ireland overlooking the Atlantic Ocean..”
“The Road to Ballybunion” by John DeGarmo
“In golf there are certain places that send emotional charges through the bodies of avid golfers … St Andrews, Augusta, Winged Foot, Muirfield. Yet even among the select, few courses boast the romance and awesome power of Ballybunion.
Carved out of towering dunes along the Atlantic Ocean by God and the elements, it is considered by many to be the greatest course in the world.”
Links, Jack Whitaker, March 1995
“If you want perfect fairways, no rough, flat greens and calm balmy days, Ballybunion is not for you nor you for Ballybunion. But if you are one of life’s seekers, a Ulysses with three pitching wedges, seeking what lies beyond the western star, go at once to Ballybunion.”
Golf Escapes, 2007
“Updated by Tom Watson in 1995, he called it, “one of the best and most beautiful tests of links golf anywhere in the world”.
Golfing, Daniel Walton, April 2008
“What trip to the west would be complete without playing the Old Course at Ballybunion. It deserves its reputation as one of the finest golf courses in the world. Since Herbert Warren Wind wrote in the early 1970s that it was among the ten best courses in the world, visitors have flocked to Ballybunion”.
Golfing, Daniel Walton, April 2008
“The Cashen Course is a roller-coaster ride through towering dunes stretched between the Cashen River and the ocean. As a golf course it is probably more spectacular than the Old Course. In truth, both courses at Ballybunion deserve to be on the list of the world’s greatest courses”.
“What can be said about Ballybunion that hasn’t been said already? This is links golf at its very best: innumerable rolling dunes perched on the edge of the cliffs and bays of Kerry that offer scant protection for the naturally contoured greens from the wilds of the Atlantic”. (Daniel Walton, Golfing – The Clubhouse Leader, February 2009)
Golf World, November, 2008
“No greater authority on links golf than Tom Watson has heaped praise on many courses over the years, but never with the reverence he reserves for the place where he warmed up before each of his five Open wins. “Ballybunion is a course on which many golf architects should live and play before they build courses,” says Watson of Tom Simpson’s venerable design. It might have a statue of Bill Clinton, but this awesome links is a true monument of golf”. (Golf World, November 2008)
– See more at: http://www.ballybuniongolfclub.ie/faqs-reviews/#sthash.8BxQIE20.dpuf
