GOLF:The Clontarf pro has three jobs – primarily being a good golfer, then a good businessman and a good teacher as well
THE NICE lady approaching the desk in the pro shop has a request. It’s a small request but it’s an important one nonetheless. She has a fourball booked for 11am and she wonders if it would be very much beyond the beyonds if she were to change it to 11.15. Eamonn Brady has a fair idea what’s behind the delay but he wants to get her to say it out loud.
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” he smiles. “Everything okay?”
“You’re going to laugh at us now,” says the nice lady. “But we want to see the dress.”
“What dress?”
“Ah here. You know well what dress. The wedding dress.”
It’s a cobalt-skied Friday morning at Clontarf Golf and Bowling Club and while the rest of the known world is jostling for position to see the royal wedding, Brady is tipping along in his newly-minted pro shop just behind the first tee. These are fresh digs for him, an upgrade on the broom closet that passed for the old pro shop up until just a month ago. He wishes Wills and Kate a very long and happy life together but just at the minute he’d rather they had picked a Saturday for their wedding because he can’t get a single supplier in Britain on the end of a phone.
He’s been the head pro at Clontarf for the past two years, having done three as assistant before that. The shop opens at eight each morning and he won’t turn the key until well into the evening. In between times, he gets people out on to the first tee, signs them in for competitions, takes green fees, fixes trolleys, puts crests on T-shirts, tries to sell some merchandise, regrips old clubs . . . and on and on and ever on.
“It’s an unusual job,” he admits. “You basically have three streams of income – you have your lessons, you have the golf you play and you have the shop. That’s really three different jobs, in effect it’s three different professions with one common thread. And to do well, you have to be good at all of them. You have to be a good golfer first and foremost, then a good businessman and a good teacher as well.
“The business side of it is where a lot of the guys fall down. If you set out to be a golf professional, it’s generally because you want to become a sportsman rather than a businessman. You get training from the PGA alright, but some guys can’t get the hang of it. I was lucky enough – I went to college and got a degree in economics and finance so I had a bit of an idea of what was involved.”
Giving lessons is a tougher proposition than running the shop in some ways. Because Clontarf is a city club, shoe-horned into 79 acres on the town side of Parnell Park, every last available square yard is used for the course. Which means there is no driving range. Which means lessons have to be given either first thing in the morning on the 17th and 18th or last thing at night down the first. If he had the facilities, he could do plenty more with the good young talent at the club. At the very least, they’d see him banging balls with every spare minute and would take the hint.
Like he says, Brady really has three jobs. But like every club pro, he only ever set out to have one. He was a highly-promising schoolboy golfer who represented Ireland at all levels on the way up. He won a couple of West of Irelands as an amateur and went to the University of East Tennessee to play college golf. He turned pro in 2001 and went to Q School but missed out on the final stage in a play-off. The following year, he was cruising through qualifying when he missed a tee-time by five minutes and got disqualified. He had to go sit in a dark room for a couple of days to get over that one.
He scrabbled around for a few years then, trying his hand on the Asian Tour and the Europro tour. He won a tournament in Canada early on and pocketed $24,000 (€16,500) but that was about as good as it got. It wasn’t that he wasn’t good enough, it was more his mindset was wrong and he never felt like he belonged. The pro game was like a knot in his shoelace – the harder he pulled at it, the less likely it seemed he would ever fix it.
“There is no distance at all in terms of ability between players on the main tour and players on the Challenge Tour and Europro tour. The only difference is that the guys on the main tour have more belief and a more reliable short game when it matters. But belief is the big thing. It matters more than the technical differences.
“I found it when I moved from amateur to pro. It wasn’t that I found myself facing players who were out of my league. It wasn’t that at all. It was that I wasn’t playing at the level I had been as an amateur. I just didn’t play to my abilities. And that is purely a problem of belief. You try harder. You tell yourself these guys must be better than me so I need to be doing something different to get to be as good as them. And by changing, you end up under-performing. You doubt yourself then, you decide you aren’t good enough.”
Eventually, life dragged him by the ear and told him he had to start making a living instead of chasing a dream he wasn’t going to catch. He signed up with the PGA and trained to be a club pro. Beyond giving lessons and moving merchandise, that’s the third rail of the 36-year-old’s day-to-day existence. The PGA season started last month and goes on until late September. Brady is one of the better players on the circuit and his order of merit ranking from last year will get him into the Irish Open in Killarney in late July. He swears he will be better set for it now than in the past.
“I went to Adare Manor for the Irish Open in 2008 and shot 85. I don’t shoot 85 ever, I just don’t. And I was hard work shooting that 85. I bust a gut for it. That’s just madness. But you see it every year, lads from the PGA regions playing in the Irish Open and shooting those kind of scores. And these are fellas who are shooting three-under, four-under every week in the regional competitions. All it is is the pressure of going up a level. You try to do things differently instead of just letting it happen.
“It’s a fascinating game like that. I’m older and wiser now and I’m able to see that if you don’t give yourself the credit for what you’re able to do, you won’t improve. It’s really only now that I’m teaching young lads who have a bit of talent that I’m able to verbalise that and understand it better myself.”
As lunchtime slips into afternoon and one of Brady’s two assistant pros comes in to help him, the first-tee traffic gets heavier. There’s a society booked in for two o’clock and then a nine-and-dine competition for members in the evening. Clontarf reduced its joining fees last year and got an influx of new members, with the overall total now around 1,000. On days like this, it can feel like they all want to get out for a few holes. Or if they don’t, they have a trolley they can’t get to work properly. Or their putter needs a new grip. Or they need to change a lesson time. Brady does his best to keep the plates spinning.
“You have to be mega-organised and I am the worst in the world when it comes to that. I fumble through as best I can but time-management is just a shambles with me. I have to get better at it. My problem is that I hate to let people down so I get myself all in a tizzy over things I should never have agreed to do in the first place. I’m a human and I have a life of my own away from here and if I tried to make everybody happy, I’d be absolutely miserable.”
Happy the man who’s found the comfort of his own skin.
Eamonn Brady's day
DAY IN A LIFE
8am – Opens the pro shop. The first tee is booked for a junior competition between 8 and 10 since they're all off for the school holidays. By 8.30, the take-up is slow. "Sure you know how it is with kids," says Brady. "There'll be a big rush of them around a quarter to 10."
10am-noon – Attends to the list of dozens of odd jobs that need doing around the place, odd being the operative word. "I had a chap come in to me and tell me his friends were laughing at him because he couldn't get the battery working on his trolley. It worked fine but he wouldn't accept that it did. In some ways, we're probably enablers. Some of them would be lost if we left them to their own devices."
Afternoon – The nine-and-dine competition is hugely popular. Members come and play the front nine and go for food in the clubhouse afterwards. Other players come looking for a game and Brady tries to get as many as he can out on the back nine. He and his assistant Paul Henry are on their feet non-stop.
7.30pm – Gives a lesson on the first hole. Some evenings when he doesn't have lessons booked, he'll go and practice his own game. Says he's hitting it better than ever, just needs to sharpen up his short game. By the end of next month, the club's new putting green will be right outside his front door. Says he will knuckle down when it's open for business.
