A small world is tailor-made for Howth dreamers

Caddie's Role: Back in my youth I used to go to play golf at the Deer Park public course in Howth. With a small carrybag on my back I would make the 20-minute walk through some back fields to the course. It is a beautiful walk, past the Gaelic football pitch which overlooks the old fishing cottages of the village and down over the walls of the harbour. Beyond, the heather and gorse bushes with the faded rhododendron of summer would line the west mountain.

A final hop over a fence and there you were at the 12-hole short course, with the most spectacular vista that I would challenge any public facility to match or better. It overlooks Ireland's Eye and Lambay islands, and on up the coast to the Mountains of Mourne on a clear day. The golf was incidental.

These summer trips were to sow the seeds of an unconventional lifestyle for me as a caddie.

About a decade after me, there was a neighbour who used to make the same trips in his summer holidays. Mark Greaney grew up round the corner from me, and his dad, Vincent, used to drive me into school every other week. A few months ago our paths converged again after the usual absence of time, over which you forget old neighbours and move on with different lives.

When I went to the TaylorMade factory in Carlsbad, California, earlier in the year, I made some inquiries about Mark as I had heard that he had recently got a job with the company. From the hundreds of employees based in Carlsbad, I managed to track Mark down. It was on the west coast of America that we met up about two decades after I made my last school run with his father Vincent.

Naturally, back then we had never talked about golf as it is not the most favoured topic of a five-year-old.

Where my career ended up in golf more by accident than design, Mark's route was more thought out. You see, Mark is a club designer, for which there are limited positions in the world. There are similarities with professional caddying, where there are really not that many of us either, so Deer Park definitely spawned two "specialised" employees in very different spectrums of the golf industry.

We also have a strong connection in my boss, Retief Goosen, who plays TaylorMade equipment which Mark helps to design. It is interesting how these links are made.

Before I found out that Mark was with TaylorMade I had never given much thought to those people who put the state-of-the-art clubs in to the hands of player and caddie.

Mark had always wanted to be an engineer first and then a golfer. He figured out that he was not good enough to make a living from hitting shots, which fuelled his desire to be connected with the game he loves as a club designer. When he was 14, he conducted a science project on the aerodynamics of the golf ball. As he began considering his future, he took it upon himself to write to all the golf manufacturers which he had consulted for his project the previous year, to ask them for advice in how best to prepare himself for a career in club design.

TaylorMade were the ones who suggested that he study mechanical engineering, specialising in materials. Mark went on to study engineering at Magill University in Montreal, Canada, and continued with a Masters in sporting goods in UCG.

His first big break, he thought, was going to be designing equipment for the National Hockey League. He started on a project designing a goalie's mask.This didn't get past the drawing board as the funding ran out early. As it happened, it worked out well for the qualified engineer who had always dreamt of designing golf clubs.

His big break came mid 2003 when he landed the position of product development engineer on the metal wood team at TaylorMade. There are fewer than 250 people in the world doing this job, so Mark considers himself extremely fortunate that he got the position.

On the development side, TaylorMade are divided mainly between metal woods and irons. Mark is part of a dozen or so engineers plotting the future design of what we try to go out and hit the short grass with. TaylorMade are in a very strong position with their metal wood products. Mark arrived at a revolutionary time in metal wood history: the r7 and r5 clubs with their adjustable weight ports are ahead of the curve in modern club design.

Even though these designers are scientists and spend most of their time using computer-aided design programmes, they do take great heed of what their stars, the pros, have to say about their creations.

In fact, just a few weeks back in Texas a large portion of the iron design team were gathered around Retief on the driving range, getting him to hit shots with their test clubs. They were using a machine that was originally designed by the US government in order to track missiles. Now the manufacturers have adapted it to tracking the path a ball takes when it leaves the club-face.

It was interesting to observe the interaction between the test monkey, Retief, and the men in white coats carrying clip-boards. The machine is obviously important, but the hands-on feedback that a top player can give the designers is invaluable.

So two Irish guys who used to ramble around Deer Park public golf course in north Co Dublin have ended up supplying one of the world's top golfers with his equipment. One doing so scientifically, and the other handing over clubs on a seat-of-the-pants basis which, hopefully, the scientists have made caddie-proof.