It's just after six o'clock in the morning and you suddenly realise why the early birds, those feathered creatures responsible for the dawn chorus, are so full of the joys of life. On the radio, the jock from 98FM is warbling on about employees who set out for work before 6.30 a.m. being more productive than those who linger on in bed - an American study don't you know? - and, outside the smugness of the car, a security guard is double-jobbing by pulling discarded trolley carts across the near-empty car park to their proper places.
Half-a-dozen cars occupy the pebbled spaces, temporarily abandoned by owners from the previous day's society outing who still had enough sense to know when to drive, when to call a taxi or when to cadge lifts from more sober persons.
At this most godly of hours, Druids Glen is a stress-free zone, a place of genuine peace and quiet. The eastern slopes of the Sugarloaf are shimmering in the light of the not-long-risen sun, and the birds are chirping away as if their nests were La Scala itself and the morning's tranquility demanded a Bel Canto performance. Paradise.
Around this time, day in, day out, Jimmy Harte's red van crosses the road that traverses the first fairway, glides between the wooden security hut and the magnificent Woodstock House and breaks the magical spell of the songsters. The van speeds around the walled perimeter of the course and, with the preliminary inspection over (a broken water pump can cost up to £2,500 to replace), the driver steers towards the maintenance sheds near the old orchard area where machinery with John Deere, Toro and Jacobsen badges are housed.
The giant, dark green walls are sturdy and have the added protection of metal security deterrents affixed some 12 feet up. Nothing is going anywhere it isn't meant to go, and even David Copperfield would find it tough to disprove that theory.
It's an impressive home for the most-modern agronomy equipment available. The open yard area measures some 1,500 sq ft, the covered area is 8,500 sq ft, and there is a place for everything: the sand from Darcy's quarry in Wexford to the core harvester and the top dressing machines.
Jimmy Harte hails from Crossmaglen and, for a man who has spent most of his working life many miles further afield in African deserts, Canadian icefields and other such diverse places, he still retains a sharp, south Armagh accent. Growing up, football was his first love, and that the call of Croke Park has beckoned to him more regularly in recent times, for club and county matters, hasn't been a hardship at all.
Yet, here, Jimmy is one of the unsung heroes, but one whose job is absolutely vital to the success of the Murphy's Irish Open. The countdown is on, only nine weeks to the time when Montgomerie and Olazabal and Big John Daly will be drilling five-irons onto the greens, and the course manager and his lieutenants are working like beavers to ensure the course retains its reputation with the PGA European Tour as one of the best-prepared on the circuit.
The programme of care has been drafted with all the diligence of a military operation (in consultation with the tour's field staff), and the only unstable factor, as ever, is the weather.
It's a little after 6.30 a.m., and most of the 14 green-keeping staff are at their stations. The night before, Harte had sauntered up to a large bulletin board in the canteen and written out instructions in black and red markers. Now, men are peering at the board, absorbing their tasks for the day, and something the man on the radio had said earlier about productivity rings true. With the minimum of fuss, and within minutes, each man goes about his work.
The smell of diesel fuel wafts through the air and the sound of mowers and machines drowns out the birds to signal the start of the day's work. Greens to be cut. Collars and fairways manicured. Semi-rough clipped to the desired height. By the time the Irish Open arrives, the rough will be three inches in places.
The machines wind their way out of the maintenance sheds likes ants on a mission. During the Open, this type of work will start before five o'clock and be finished by half past seven and the crew will perform their duties with military-like precision. And then repeat it all again when the play finishes.
Even now, there is that sort of feel about the place and, not long after the first sniff of diesel has hit the air, the sheds have cleared and the staff start the process of working their way around the course from the first to the 18th. The first golfer on the day's time-sheet is probably just thinking of escaping the bed.
Jimmy Harte moves his way up the first fairway in a buggy and stops to inspect the first green. Looking back towards the tee-box, the definition has improved immensely since the course played host to its first Open in 1996. That year, the greens on what was still a baby of a course spiked up, and brought to mind the comment of the famous American architect Charles Blair Macdonald, who declared: "Putting greens are to golf courses what faces are to portraits." Greens are what people remember most.
Out of his pocket, Jimmy extracts what looks like an Arabian hunting knife. Every one of the green staff has one. He bends down to repair a pitch mark, the bane of any green-keeper's existence.
"Every golfer should look to repair their own pitch mark and one other every time they walk onto a green," he says. "Within another month or so, if a pitch mark isn't repaired within a few minutes then it will cause trouble." Indeed, every evening, the course ranger follows the last group around and, with a squeeze bottle of water in one hand and a pitch repairer in the other, will seek to assist the green-staff.
Last year, the greens for the Irish Open measured 10 1/2 on the Stimpmeter - but more important even than the speed is to achieve consistency. The weather can be friend and foe in reaching that desired consistency. Three weeks ago, when the greens were hollow-cored - a necessary evil, even if golfers prefer never to putt on such surfaces - the temperatures were 17 degrees. The following week, they dropped to below zero when three inches of snow fell on the course. How do you legislate for that? Then, last week, the temperatures tipped 20 degrees. A Godsend.
"We'd a little set-back with the hollow-coring," admits Harte, "but every day brings its own problems." Every green was hollow-cored over four days at the start of April, but the frost and snow slowed down the healing process. But there is nothing to worry about unduly, and each of the holes, which measured 3/4 in diameter when first cored, should have filled in again by last weekend. Once, in Dubai, Jimmy saw 63 people working on the maintenance of a golf course. In Druids Glen, there is a steady crew of 14 - including a gardener and a mechanic - and a number of others drafted in for the Irish Open week. Many, like assistant head green-keeper Adrian Boylan, a Corkman, have been to college to study their craft. Others have learnt their trade from years of experience. The package is an impressive one, with Englishman Steve Taylor, the head green-keeper, providing solid backup to Harte.
Everywhere, from tee to green, is looked after like flesh and blood. An average of 70 tonne of sand is machine-sprinkled onto each and every green over a 12-month period, while every green will also get up to 23,000 gallons of water, some from the skies or, as Harte describes it, "God's irrigation system".
There are 33 pieces of equipment alone for cutting grass in Druids Glen. "We need all of them," insists Harte. "They'll all be used at some point along the line." Then, up on the wall, and some strewn along the ground, are the more basic instruments of green-keeping: the witches brooms, and the shovels, and the hole-cutter guide. Each morning, one of the tasks handed out is for one of the green-keepers, armed with the hole-cutter, to start on the first green and put in a new pin placement, as well as check for pitch marks (something which is drilled into everyone of them). With him, also, he'll have divot mixer and the responsibility of emptying bins too.
"From the fitting shop to the green, it is a team effort all the way through. There is not a thing I wouldn't ask any of them to do that I wouldn't, and have, done myself. I'd do any job," he says, an obvious pride in his work.
Indeed, Jimmy Harte was there from day one when the first sod was turned by the architects Pat Ruddy and the late Tom Craddock in transforming the Woodstock Estate into a premier golf course. There are hundreds of miles of underground drains as part of the elaborate irrigation system, and Harte claims he doesn't need a map to know where each pipe is. You believe him.
The green-staff here have a rigid programme which they adhere to, set out by Harte and backed-up by the expertise of David Probyn from the European Tour. The greens are fed fertiliser each month during the grass growing season, and there is a four-month slow release fertiliser programme for the outfields. "If the conditions are not right, we'd spoon-feed the greens over the growing season," adds Harte, emphasising the mount of care and attention that is needed to keep the creeping bent greens up to the desired standard.
So, the sort of greens, with speed and consistency, that the likes of Monty will enjoy in the first week of July don't just happen overnight. A stringent programme of preparation has to be adhered to. Not just for the greens either. The tee-boxes and fairways, even the flower beds with the green dwarf hebes and the yellow spirea down by the 12th tee, are given as much attention as the greens that will frustrate and please in equal measure. It all means that, for Jimmy Harte and his green-staff, the day that starts with the dawn chorus doesn't finish until after all those birds are safely nestled away.
