The day Rory McIlroy came to Westport

“This man will be heard of for a long, long time after this.”

The words of Westport Golf Club Captain, Christy O’Malley, to those who’d gathered to watch Rory McIlroy receive the Irish Amateur Close Championship title at Westport Golf Club.

That was back in 2005. The world and its mother now knows about Rory McIlroy. But how many saw him flout his golden gloves before the Holywood hero became a household name?

The few hundred that flocked to Carrowholly in June 2005 got a glimpse of what was to come when they saw McIlroy, at 16 years and 42 days old, become the youngest-ever winner of the biggest prize in Irish amateur golf.

“Five days. One hundred and fifty players. Sixty-two matchplay encounters. One incredible round of 61,” is how one account summed up the competition.

GOLDEN BOY

HIS 3-2 win over Galway’s Eddie McCormack bore some parallels to his recent world-beating Masters title win.

McCormack went one up after five in the final but lost four holes in a row from the seventh and ‘never fully recovered.’

Three up with four to play, McIlroy stumbled when he lost a contact lens on the 15th fairway and knocked his third shot into a deep bunker left of the green.

But a blurry-eyed 16-year-old McIlroy was still good enough to float ‘a gorgeous bunker shot to a couple of inches for a half in five and leave McCormack needing to win the next three holes to force sudden death’.

McCormack failed with a 15-footer for birdie at the 16th, however, and McIlroy rolled a 12-foot effort up stone dead to take the title.

It was his fifth trophy, joining the 2004 Ulster Boys, Irish Boys and Irish Youths Championships as well as the 2005 West of Ireland and Irish Close Championship on a mantle now heaving under the weight of golf’s most coveted chalices.

“You could see the potential in him. I said it in my speech afterwards,” recalls Christy O’Malley in an interview with The Mayo News days after McIlroy achieved immortality on the greens of Augusta.

^{Former Westport Golf Club Captain Christy O’Malley pictured outside his home on Horkan’s Hill, Westport, holding a picture of Rory McIlroy being presented with the Irish Amateur Close Championship title. Pic: The Mayo News}

“He was on our 15th and it was a par four, he used to drive the ball through the green off the back sticks. He was special at the time, he was very special at the time.”

As previously mentioned, it wasn’t all plain sailing.

“He took a divot out of the ninth, and he got chastised for it. He didn’t do it again,” smiles O’Malley. “He was special that time, there’s no doubt.”

The 16-year-old McIlroy was every bit as talented, affable and relatable as the Rory McIlroy of today. Not only a ‘nice lad’ but ‘one of the nicest lads you’d ever meet’.

“He was just like any lad at the time. He is a lovely lad, and he was a lovely lad that time. No bulls**t about him,” says O’Malley.

“Even as a young lad he wasn’t head in the air, he wasn’t cocky. He wasn’t, and he’s not cocky now and you can tell by him. Everyone that ever meets him and or interviews him will tell you. He’s not a cocky fella. He doesn’t believe in that. I’m sure he hasn’t changed much, you are what you are at 15 or 16.”

He became quite popular with the locals. So much so that he even managed to squeeze in a cinema date with a local looker. Her identity has not yet been revealed.

“She might come forward now!” O’Malley chuckles.

HOME TO MAYO

IT wasn’t McIlroy’s last time in Mayo, or, indeed, his first. In 2017, the Down native wed Erica Stoll by the shores of Lough Mask in the world-renowned Ashford Castle. Thirteen years previously, he finished runner-up at the Connacht U-15 Boys Open in Ballinrobe.

O’Malley has ‘no doubt’ he will return to Mayo - Westport, specifically. A member of Westport Golf Club since 1978 and a veteran of virtually every committee in the club, O’Malley unofficially invited McIlroy to Carrowholly many years before his latest major win.

“I invited him to come down when you get famous, ‘which you certainly will, Rory’,” the Horkan’s Hill resident told McIlroy back in 2005, “you’ll surely come back to Westport.”

O’Malley re-floated the idea to his golfing buddies in recent months. There’s certainly hope that McIlroy would take them up on an invitation - if not this year, then at some point in the future.

Westport is a highly sought-after course. With the sea breeze blowing in from Clew Bay under the great shadow of the Reek, it’s certainly one of the country’s most scenic courses.

But still, at a time when the GOAT must be getting invitations from every golf club in Ireland, why Westport?

“It’s a championship golf course, rated very well in Ireland,” O’Malley explains.

They are also due to open two ‘brilliant’ new greens on the third and fourth, which will ‘make the front line so much more difficult and more appealing’.

“When we get another while there will be sand-based greens, because the pros like to play, that’s why they go along the sea, they get them in Portmarnock and all these places, they like to play off sand-based greens,” O’Malley continues.

“All our greens by another year will be all sand-based. I have a funny feeling he will come this year…it would be some coup to get it.”

It’d be like 2005 all over again. With bells on.