Quiet Please . . . A California cathedral. To the right, the dinky white registration tent and a 60-yard cliff face of condos. The sun plays on all the rich folks' balconies.
To the left a chic golf shop and a slew of daunting green pines throwing tall shadows. The fairway is narrow like an alley, broadening to an avenue before it doglegs to the right, maybe 250 yards up.
Richie Coughlan takes an iron . . .
Go on Ping, make my day. Dirty Harry has the sweetest swing. No hitches, just a lovely arcing swoosh through the ocean air. The little Titleist disappears into the grey clouds above the Monterey peninsula.
"Nice shootin' there Clint," says a rubbernecker at the railings. "Some real nice shootin' pardner."
Clint's back is turned. You know he's just rolled his eyes though.
Bill Murray has a lifetime's worth of material. Every year he is the star of the show. They should call it the Murray Pro-am. He waltzes with the dames, he falls in the bunker, he sasses the stewards, he puts golf balls in his mouth. The pied piper of Pebble Beach.
"Hey, I'll do the funny stuff, Mr Big Shot," says Bill. "Okay mister," says the six-year-old.
From the corner of the polo field practice area another round of delirious laughter is offered up to the clouds. This is the best kiddies' golf clinic in town. Bill Murray. Jeez, is that really Bill Murray with the kid. Tiger Woods has a car so long that it would take a good nine iron to clear it from front to back. Sweeps into the players' car park.
Sweeps out. Tiger. Tiger. Tiger.
"Hey Tiger, how ya doin'?"
"Real good, real good."
"Hittin' them well Tiger?
But he's gone. Ask Tiger two questions and you're talking to his skinny back. Sweeping on with minders making a path through the people. Tiger. Tiger. Tiger.
All golf life is here. Here on the Monterey Peninsula, starting the California swing, starting the season, no better place to lay the plans of mice and men.
Bing Crosby conceived of this tournament as an annual clambake for him and his friends. The PGA muscled in somewhere and now the AT&T Pro-Am is all hard glitz and all hard golf. Not the place, maybe, for a rookie to make his maiden round but all human life is here and so is the Irish rookie Forgive us our stereotypes, but you can pick him out from the line-up on the practice range. You could pick him out on Judgment Day.
Richie Coughlan has a head of red hair and stocky countryman's shoulders. His caddie, Mike Hardcop, has a shock of red curly hair and a jumper.
On the Polo ground practice field they keep their backs to the whole circus and their eyes on the ground. Clint Eastwood is swinging those lazy swings two yards behind them. Richie doesn't bestow a glance upon him.
"He's there. You know he's there," says Richie. "You've got to be selfish and do what you came to do, though."
Down the hill the blue Pacific is throwing its spray up at those condominiums, the ones you shouldn't look at unless you have $5 million for change. Down the hill the great, the good and the sickeningly rich are sipping Italian sodas and slapping tanned backs. Pebble Beach, the most famous golf course on the west coast, stretches out like a necklace on the Pacific shoreline.
Deep Breath. It started just by chance one summer when the boredom beat down with the sunshine. He went out with one of his friends when he was, oh, 10 years old, out with John Dwyer to the course a mile and a half or so outside Birr.
Liked it. Didn't like it. You know he can remember breaking clubs and kicking flags and tearing hair. Once he quit after four holes and rode home in a temper.
Schoolboy summers have a dusty and oppressive repetitiveness, though. He ended up going out the next summer, scorching out the road on a pushbike with three borrowed clubs in one hand and a grip of the handlebar in the other. He came to like the solitary challenges. The more he liked it the better he got. Maybe it was the other way round. hard to remember.
"I played hurling and football and all that stuff but the golf got in on my mind. I found myself getting knocks in the knees and arms and fingers and worrying about the golf so I gave up the hurling, which didn't go down well, and started playing golf seriously. I got better and got more interested."
He liked the variety of skills required and the constant struggle for mental equilibrium. From Birr on a bike right to Pebble Beach the battle to accentuate the positive has gone on in his head. Even at Tour School down in Florida, he spent the early part of the week wondering the same thoughts.
"I suppose it didn't matter much at the start if I was good or bad. Just getting better and better fascinated me. And how you get better. I wasn't interested in anything else after that. I was playing off scratch by the time I was fifteen and a half or 16, playing on the senior team by the time I was 17. "It came fairly quickly. I liked the internal part of it."
He tells it all in the players' carpark at Pebble Beach but he could be in a GAA dressing-room with grazed knuckles and cold feet on a muddy winter's afternoon in Birr so determinedly phlegmatic is he.
Tom Watson passes. TOM WATSON. Even atheists know who Tom Watson is.
"Big Tom," says Richie half to himself not letting his eyes trail after Watson. "Still figuring out the Ryder Cup."
The ocean air knocks him out like a dose of pills. He's just played 18 holes alone on Spyglass Hill, hit balls for an hour in Dirty Harry's shadow.
And he gets into his hired jeep and heads for dinner and bed. Sixteen hours till he begins life as a pro.
A pro. Halfway through his scholarship in Clemson, South Carolina he decided if his game was good enough he'd give it a go as a professional. Easy decision. His game was good enough.
He played with Tiger Woods a couple of times through college.
Makes you wonder, makes you wonder.
Here he is on the practice range again two hours before his first round as a pro. He's practising next to Tiger, right next to Tiger. Richie's caddie Mike is chatting with Tiger's caddie Fluff. He can hear the happy banter and he makes the white balls disappear.
Tiger doesn't say hello, just keeps hitting them into the Californian yonder.
Richie Coughlan doesn't say hello. Just keeps hitting them to the same place.
Clemson improved his game. Gave him discipline, taught him the routine of just hitting balls and hitting more. Playing on certain days and certain times, travelling every weekend, practising the right amount and doing the right things. Clemson improved his game and introduced him to fine courses and good players. Made him ready.
Suddenly time telescopes. One minute he's swinging beside Tiger, the next he's sitting on a little wall beside the first tee chatting with his aunt and uncle who are down from Vancouver.
They are chatting about his small cousin whom he hasn't seen in how long and then the announcer comes over with a query. The announcer is half embarrassed.
He hasn't even time to get nervous. Yet he is ready. Here on his rookie round he pars the first without blinking.
He smiles broadly coming off his first green. In 10 years' time though, when he looks back on this day, he'll remember the second at Pebble Beach more vividly.
He is playing in the last group of the day, with John Daly's emaciated brother Joe and a couple of tanned and wealthy amateurs. The course is carrying a lot of water. Overnight rain has caused the first round to be delayed two hours and chopped in half making this a nine-hole day.
On the second, a par five, Coughlan steps up, whips his driver and plugs the ball dead in semi-rough 285 yards away. His second sings through the air, through 219 yards of air and stops eight feet from the pin. He drains it. Eagle.
"Hey," says an old lady. "Hey Annie, that guy just got an eagle."
"Must be a birdie."
This is a huge jump. Huge. Jesus, but Mark O'Meara had a 10 on the first today. O'Meara was six over coming off the second. Coughlan's head still wants to swivel and his jaw still wants to drop when he sees O'Meara.
This is a huge jump but his game his humming and Mike the caddie is keeping him laid back and, hey, the picture postcard backdrops of the pines and the Pacific give his first round a dreamlike quality.
"I'm still surprised to be here so quickly," he says. "Just trying to stay here. Winning one tournament this year would be more than I could ask for. I can at least keep my card if I can play as well as I can. I'm surprised at how good these fellas are day-in and day-out. Very professional in their approach, everything they do. I do a decent job at trying to practise. I just have to play as well as I can."
He plays that way today. Misses just one green, the par-three seventh.
"I'm thinking `okay take the four and get out of here' . . . but then again."
Then again. So he gets up and gets down to save his par.
The greens are slow and uncut and the fairways are heavy and mean with the bounces yet he is robbed of birdies by a vicious break on the third and a cruel lip on the fourth. Yet he has the rhythm. All afternoon he hits his irons sweet and his woods long and his putts without doubts attached.
He is in the last group and as they complete each hole the stewards switch off the electronic scoreboards behind them. When they come to switch off the last scoreboard of the day Richie Coughlan's name is on it. Two off the lead. Richie Coughlan's name and those of a bunch of people who are his colleagues and rivals now.
"You stop and think sometimes. My first round as a pro. In this place of all places. With all these people. But you just keep trying to do the things you do. Talk to Mike. Think you are good enough. I could have stopped this morning and looked at how far Tiger was hitting them. I just kept hitting them myself. Hitting them right."
Long journey ahead and it's not the size of the first step that matters. It's the direction.
A CALIFORNIA cathedral. To the right the little white registration tent and a 60yard cliff face of condos. The sun plays on all the rich folks' balconies.
To the left a chic golf shop and a slew of daunting green pines throwing tall shadows. The fairway is narrow like an alley, broadening to an avenue before it doglegs to the right, maybe 250 yards up.
The announcer has a clipboard and a query. In the California sun he is half-embarrassed to ask the question.
"Is your name Roger - Roger Coughlan?"
"No. It's Richie."
"And you are from South Carolina?"
"No. I'm from Birr. Birr, Ireland."
"How's that then, B-U-R-R?"
"In January it's more like Brrrr."
"Righty. Richie Coughlan from Brrrrr, Ireland."
He steps onto the mound.
"Quiet please. First up, Richie Coughlan from Birr, Ireland."
Richie Coughlan takes an iron. Steps up and plants it where the dogleg breaks.
