In 1913, a sprightly 63-yearold by the name of T H Ovler, accepted the challenge of playing a decidedly interesting golf hole in fewer than 2,000 strokes. For the purposes of the challenge, the so-called hole ran from Linton Park near Maidstone in Kent, to Littlestone Links, a distance of 26 miles as the crow flies, seven miles further in actual play.
As it happened, Ovler did it in 1,087 strokes, having complied with a condition that the ball would be played where it lay, or lifted under penalty. It took him three days and we are told that he lost 17 balls in rivers, woods and scrub, while 62 balls were lifted out of impossible lies off railway lines and out of backwaters.
But it was a similar event, 13 years earlier, which bore closest resemblance to a golfing spectacular which would form the sporting highlight of this country's three-week An Tostal festival in 1953. That exercise in 1900 involved three members of the Hackensack club in New Jersey, playing for four and a half hours over an extemporised course six miles long.
Cross-country matches have been a feature of golf since the early part of the 19th century. And their fascination, certainly in the early days, lay in the fact that, generally, the number of strokes required to negotiate a particular "course" was greatly overestimated.
By the early years of the last century, however, the more astute observers reasoned that if a player were allowed to tee up for each shot, a simple calculation of allowing at least 150 yards for every shot would provide a fairly accurate estimate of his total. Granted, such calculations could hardly have been applied to the effort of Floyd Rood, who took one year and 114 days to play golf from coast to coast across the United States.
The irrepressible Rood took 114,737 strokes, including 3,511 penalty shots for the 3,397-mile course. But in the main, it was further acknowledged that if the player had to play the ball where it lay, "a sporting element thereupon enters the match, for unusual lies will cause uncertainties in scoring".
On Saturday April 18th 1953, the weekend sports diary in this newspaper carried a decidedly curious item for the following day. Listed under the heading "Golf" was an event called the Curragh Grand National. This became known otherwise as the Golden Ball Tournament and was hailed as the most original event of An Tostal.
Among other details was a spectacular prize of £1 million - about £50 million at today's values - for a hole-in-one. Barring divine intervention, there was absolutely no chance of this jackpot being collected, given that the competition involved 128 players in a cross-country match from the first tee at Cill Dara GC to the 17th green at the Curragh GC - five miles (8,800 yards) away.
Players could use only three clubs of their own choice and outof-bounds was reduced to the minimum, for simplicity sake. Among the hazards to be negotiated were the main DublinCork road and railway-line, furze bushes, trees surrounding the Curragh camp, the Curragh racecourse, hoof prints left by thoroughbred racehorses out exercising from nearby stables, Army tank tracks and about 150 telephone lines.
The trophy, comprising a standard-size golf ball in gold on a black marble pillar beside the silver figure of a golfer on a green base, was designed by Capt Maurice Cogan of the Army GHQ, Dublin. And it was won with the remarkable score of 52 strokes - an average of 169 yards per stroke - by not only the longest hitter, but the most accomplished amateur in Ireland at that time.
April, 1953 was a distinctly productive month for Joe Carr. On Tuesday April 7th, he captured the West of Ireland Championship at Rosses Point, beating Sutton clubmate R M McInnally on the final green. Just over two weeks later, on Wednesday the 22nd, he claimed the best-gross award in the Tostal Open 72-hole tournament at Royal Dublin.
The Golden Ball came in between. "I remember I carried a spoon (three wood), a four iron and a short iron, probably an eight or nine," recalled Carr, 48 years on. "The four iron was specially made for me by the John Letters company and was probably the heaviest of its type, anywhere in the world. I was the longest hitter in the country at the time so I suppose I would have been expected to win."
He went on: "You didn't know what was going to crop up from one shot to another. Looking back on it now, it was probably wide open to cheating and while there were some very tricky lies along the way, I can't remember taking any penalty drops."
In their issue of May 1953, the magazine Irish Golf reported: "The course was five miles but Joe Carr must have covered double that distance because, with the outstanding player's characteristic thoroughness, he insisted on walking every shot over the unfamiliar ground before he took a club in his hand.
"He lost three shots in the spinney behind the Camp but to use his own words, most of the time he was `really burning them up with my spoon'. He must have been - 30 of his 52 strokes were spoon shots!" Indeed Carr didn't have things all his own way insofar as he was three strokes behind with only a quarter of the course remaining.
That was when the leader, in attempting to carry two copses and a road, got caught in the trees and took 15 strokes to get out. For years afterwards, he claimed that a motorcar horn had hooted as he was at the top of his backswing, causing him to snatch the shot. Other players blamed ball-striking errors on the bleating of sheep.
There was also the competitor who spent 15 minutes in a concrete trench over 12 feet deep before eventually extricating the ball at a cost of 30 strokes. Meanwhile, a Minister of State and a prominent local racehorse owner decided to have a private competition between themselves. Their particular course was about two miles shorter than the official one and ended with a putt to a hole made in the lawn of the racehorse owner's house.
We are also informed that a number of competitors did not finish the course. Among these were three who stopped for "refreshments" and never reappeared. And in fading light, two competitors who had started six hours earlier, were seen to hobble disconsolately up to the finish with their golf shoes tied across their shoulders.
"Carr's National" and "Carr best in Curragh Grand National", the newspapers proclaimed the following morning. And he won it again in 1955. His friend and rival, Noel Fogarty was the champion in 1954 and 1956, and when the event was staged for the last time in its original format in 1957, victory went, appropriately, to a four-handicap Army officer, Lieut P J Cotter.
We are told that when Fogarty triumphed in 1954, he sank a 40foot putt with a four-iron on the final green to tie, and then won a play-off. And a year later, a ball lodged in a moving truck whereupon the driver sportingly stopped so as to allow the player climb on board and hit a perfect stroke back onto the course.
As in most things, however, none of the subsequent stagings quite measured up to the first. And with Carr at the heart of the action one tended to expect something special. So it was that while most of his fellow competitors were taking a well-earned rest, the Sutton man, after a 10 a.m. start, set off immediately for Dublin.
His exertions allowed The Irish Times of Monday, April 20th to report on "An entertaining golf exhibition" at Elm Park. On the afternoon of his Curragh triumph, Carr partnered Philomena Garvey against Harry Bradshaw and Kitty McCann before "a very large gallery".
Noting that Carr had come straight from the Curragh, he was reported to have taken "a little time to adjust himself to the narrower confines of the golf course", which would have explained a 2 and 1 defeat for himself and Garvey. At the end of it all, however, he had been centre-stage for one of the most remarkable days in the history of Irish golf.
