I would pay good money to see how my late granny, a former Portrush bed and breakfast landlady, would react to the idea of paying up to £50,000 (€58,000) to stay for a week in her beloved Co Antrim seaside town.
When the Open first casually rolled into Portrush in 1951, many of the top players found lodgings in boarding houses around the town. More than seven decades later the difference in the price of accommodation, prize money, spectator numbers and media coverage is inconceivable.
In 1951, the total purse amounted to £1,700 (€1,970) with the winner receiving £300 (€350). Royal Portrush Golf club proudly announced the installation of 16 new telephones for the use of the press covering the event and the post office installed a mobile facility so that, over the three days of the tournament, the 7,000 spectators could send postcards from the course.
They say home favourite, 1947 Open champion Fred Daly, slung his clubs over his shoulder and strolled each day from the family home on Causeway Street the short distance to the first tee on the Dunluce course.
RM Block
As a 16-year-old, my father Maurice, now 89, gladly accepted a lift with a commercial traveller who was a guest in his mother’s B&B in one of the few cars to be seen in the town in the early 1950s. They drove nonchalantly straight through the entrance gates and had their pick of parking spaces. Many years later, he confessed that on another day he and his friends sneaked in under the ropes without a ticket between them.
This year, as in 2019 when the Open last came to Portrush, we are taking no chances, and, much to his amusement, our tickets have been secured via the QR code on the app on my phone. I suspect that he also thinks that, as one of the few people who will have been to all three Opens held in Portrush, he shouldn’t really need a ticket at all.
In his debut professional tournament that summer of 1951 in Portrush, the late, great Peter Alliss recalled dancing at Barry’s ballroom and swaying, not only to the music, but to the gentle swells of the Atlantic Ocean, merely a hop, skip and a twirl away.
In 1951, Portrush was a bustling, fashionable holiday destination, which could already boast a long and successful relationship with the game of golf. More than five decades earlier, on a summer’s evening in 1899, unsuspecting visitors to the popular resort would have noticed the centre of the town was unusually busy.
Hundreds of people had gathered around the railway station to give a rapturous welcome to a teenage golfing sensation. As 17-year-old May Hezlett and her mother made their way towards the jubilant crowds, the sky above the resort’s West Strand beach dazzled in a blaze of colour and the air was filled with the loud, crackling sound of fireworks, a celebration befitting the champion golfer that young Hezlett had, unassailably, just become. In back-to-back triumphs, she won the British Ladies Open Championship just two weeks after winning the Irish Ladies Open Championship. Both prestigious tournaments were played at the links course at Royal County Down.
“Miss May”, as she was known, was the most accomplished of the four talented golfing Hezlett sisters. She was introduced to the game at the age of nine by her mother, also a skilled exponent of the relatively new sport. At just 11 years of age, she won her first competition using only a cleek, mashie and putter.
Hezlett became the inaugural president of Royal Portrush Ladies in 1922, having been lady captain in 1905. She remained president until the Open was held for the first time at Royal Portrush in 1951. A portrait of her by artist Harry Douglas, commissioned by the club to celebrate her success, still hangs in the Portrush Ladies clubhouse.
She died in the winter of 1978 at the age of 95. Little could she have known when she arrived on the platform of Portrush train station eight decades earlier that she would go on to carve her name in the annals of golfing history.
As the Open returns for the third time to Royal Portrush, it’s entirely fitting that the club recently unveiled an Ulster History Circle Blue Plaque in her honour, cementing her illustrious place in the history of the women’s game.
And how she would have relished the oldest and most prestigious golf tournament in the world returning to the scene of so many of her victories. She watched the Open when it was first played in Royal Portrush 74 years ago and, no doubt, in 2025 as in 2019, her spirit will be felt keenly by Royal Portrush Ladies watching proudly as the world’s best golfers try to tame this mighty links.
More than a century ago, behind many great golfing men, there was at least one even greater golfing woman.
And so, it will be with a great sense of pride that I, along with my father, the three-time Portrush Open champion spectator, will find a place near the first tee on the first day of the 153rd Open on Thursday to cheer on the finest 21st century exponents of the game.
As in 2019, there will be a collective hope among locals that a home-grown hero might just do it again. That smiling Shane Lowry, who has his own mural in Portrush now, might regain the claret jug and thrill the crowds as he did so magnificently six years ago on that rain-sodden Sunday when nothing could dampen his sprits or conquer his sheer talent.
Or could it be written in the stars that his great friend Rory McIlroy will see his name carved in silver for a second time and banish the ghosts of the missed cut in 2019?
Darren Clarke is also sure of a euphoric reception as he strides down Hughie’s 420-yard first fairway. Always popular with the crowd, he became the oldest Open champion since 1967 when he won by three shots at Royal St George’s at the age of 42 in 2011.
Absent from the field will be pride of the parish Graeme McDowell. With a total of 11 tournament victories on the European Tour, and four on the PGA Tour, including one Major championship, the 2010 US Open at Pebble Beach, the affection in which he is held in his hometown is undiminished .
These days there’s nothing casual about how the Open arrives at any venue. Preparations begin months in advance, the attendant infrastructure is vast and the impact on and off the course is felt long before and after the event.
No matter the outcome, no matter the weather, for golfers and non-golfers, the fervent hope is that Open will once again triumph and for at least four days in July all amateurs will feel a bit triumphant as a result.
Just don’t take any chances on a car parking space.
Anne Marie McAleese is a former BBC Radio Ulster presenter of Your Place And Mine and a keen golfer
