Darren Clarke has an assignment on Friday for which his management company would normally charge a "high, five-figure sum". But there will be no charge when he returns to his spiritual golfing home.
Twenty years ago, as a slim lad of 11, Clarke played his first, tentative golf strokes at Dungannon GC. Now he is to officially open the club's new, £700,000 clubhouse, which is some way removed from the modest old building he knew so well.
"The timing couldn't be better, with Darren retaining the English Open last Sunday," said the secretary/manager Frank MacNamee yesterday. "There's great excitement around here. Everybody's delighted at the prospect of welcoming Darren back."
Clarke, who is an honorary life member of the club, is set to play a seven-hole exhibition and then give a clinic before doing the official honours. "When they asked me, I was pleased to be able to do it, though I'm set for a fairly busy weekend," he said yesterday.
From Dungannon, he will go on to his home in Portrush. Then on Saturday morning he sets off for next week's US Open at Pebble Beach. And a measure of the sophistication of modern travel is that after leaving Portrush at 7.0 a.m., he expects to be hitting balls on the practice ground at Pebble Beach at lunchtime - on Saturday, that is.
"That's the arrangement I have with Butch Harmon," he said of the coach he shares with world number one Tiger Woods. "After giving me instructions over the phone during the English Open last weekend, he can now see for himself if I'm still doing what he told me."
It is Clarke's first visit to the Monterey Peninsula, where fellow Ulsterman Ronan Rafferty and Dubliner Philip Walton played in the Walker Cup team at Cypress Point in 1981. And the Dungannon man has a business day for his South African sponsors, Dimension Data, at Spyglass Hill on Sunday.
"Names like Pebble Beach, Spyglass Hill, Cypress Point and Poppy Hills have a magic ring about them," Clarke said. "But they're familiar to me only through seeing the AT and T Tournament and the US Open on television, so I'm excited about experiencing them for the first time."
Meanwhile, Clarke will take tremendous confidence from a stunning final round of 65 at the Forest of Arden last Sunday, when fellow professional Des Smyth described his performance as "awesome". Said the Tyroneman: "For a change, things went my way in that after I had set the target, neither Michael Campbell nor Jesse (Mark James) managed to match it."
He went on: "It was great to retain the title, but I still feel it's no more than I deserve after the sort of golf I've been playing in recent years." Then he said, pointedly: "Now I know there's a major in me."
Though he was tied eighth in the 1998 US Masters and gained an equally creditable share of 10th place behind Payne Stewart in the US Open at Pinehurst last year, Clarke has always maintained that there's a world of difference between making the top-10 and actually challenging for a major victory. "When I beat David Duval and Tiger to win the Andersen Consulting at La Costa, I knew I had crossed that line," he said.
Though he has obviously heard a lot about Pebble Beach and retains vivid images of the US Open there in 1992 when his great European rival Colin Montgomerie looked like capturing a title which Tom Kite eventually won, Clarke has an open mind as to the nature of the course which he will play for the first time next Monday. "I realise it is essentially parkland by the sea, not pure links like Royal Portrush, and Butch (Harmon) has told me that the rough is really punishing," he said. "But the thing that will really be familiar to me is the wind. I'm looking forward to that."
Clarke could hardly wish for a better build-up to a championship which would appear to suit his game admirably. And as a bonus, he can be certain of taking with him the good wishes of all his old friends and former golfing colleagues at Dungannon.
