Smyth helping drive Slieve Russell to the next level

Interview

Ahead of another seismic development with the link-up with short-game guru Gareth Raflewski which will see significant investment, PAUL FITZPATRICK spoke to Gordon Smyth, head PGA Professional and Golf Manager at the PGA National Slieve Russell.

Q: Can you tell me how were first introduced to the game of golf?

A: I would have grown up in Navan originally, we were members in Headfort (GC, in Kells). That’s where I would have played all my junior golf, played for the youth teams and stuff like that. My parents were members there and still are and that’s how I got into it.

I did my PGA training under Brendan McGovern in Headfort, I qualified in 2000. Basically it’s an apprenticeship. You have a degree out of the University of Birmingham, it’s a golf degree that the PGA use. You qualify through there but you have to serve your time with a pro as well and learn loads of aspects of the job. You’re doing accountancy for the shop, coaching, spots science… They’re all subjects that we do and have to pass them. There are exams at the end of each year, it’s a three-year course.

Then you obviously qualify and you are qualified to get hired by a club and coach. People don’t realise all there is to it.

Even if, say, Rory McIlroy wanted to do it, he’d still have to do the course. Tour pros have come off the tour and had to do the PGA qualifications in order to get a club job.

Q: What age when first started playing and did you immediately have a talent for the game?

A: I played hurling for Navan O’Mahonys. Our neighbour beside us was from Galway and he was a mad hurling man and was involved so I played hurling as opposed to football which is quite weird in Meath.

I started playing golf at eight or nine years of age. It was totally different back then to what it is now, the talent now early on is ridiculous compared to when we were growing up. There was only U18 boys golf, that was the only level when I was growing up.

Now they have U14s in each province, U14, U16 and U18 All-Irelands so they’ve gone much lower down the spectrum to try and pick up players now.

Q: At what point did you begin to think you could make a career in the game?

A: It was late on I suppose. I was living in America and working in a country club in New York and I had no aspirations to ever do anything with regards to turning pro or whatnot. I came home and Brendan was looking for an assistant and I got low enough to turn pro and started with him around that time. It was 2000 and I qualified in 2003 and I stayed with him then up until 2007.

I didn’t have huge aspirations, I kind of fell back into it which was a great thing.

Q: So what is the pathway for a club pro? Presumably you have to be a scratch golfer or a very low handicapper to begin with…

A: Yeah, I was playing off one turning pro. You can go into training I think around handicap of three. You sign over your amateur status and begin training. You have to do playability tests to actually get into the PGA.

When they were doing it with me, it was a one-time test over two rounds. That’s how you get into it basically. There are good players who are club professionals. There are professional golfers and there are golf professionals. I would class myself as a golf professional.

You’re coaching, you have all aspects of running the club. Whereas the likes of touring pros, they’re solely making a living from teeing it up.

Q: When you become a club pro do you step back from playing competitively?

A: Listen, when I turned pro initially it was because I wanted to play golf. I tried on the feeder tours, the EuroPro, and I got funding from Sport Ireland and went that route. I played the pro-am scene and had minor success but you’re not going to make a living from that. You obviously have to find a way to do that and obviously making a living for me was finding a good golf club.

The first interview I ever went for coming off Headfort was the K Club, pre-Ryder Cup, and I got to the last two in interviews just before the Ryder Cup. My path could have been a whole lot different, not that I’d change anything.

When I got this job, I came in as teaching professional initially and built my way up to where I am currently.

Q: Would you have been familiar with the Slieve Russell before you started working there?

A: I would because I was playing at the time and I always came to the pro-ams here, it was the biggest pro-am in the country. It was always a huge treat to come here to be honest with you. It was always the biggest pro-am.

Q: What does an average week entail?

A: Obviously coaching is a huge aspect of it. That was always one of my loves after playing. Then there’s the office side of things, you’re looking after the staff inside, the running inside of the clubhouse. Memberships, food and beverage upstairs, marketing of the place, all those aspects that people don’t think about when they think about what the pro actually does.

All those subjects would have been studied – the marketing aspect, running the shop, accounts, running invoices, ordering stock and pricing and stock takes every month… It’s varied. You’re not behind a desk. This morning I was out for a couple of lessons, then I was back in the office, I repaired a couple of clubs. It’s varied every day, which is great.

Q: Are you responsible for looking after the upkeep of the course itself?

A: Some golf directors would. I would have an input with our guys. We all kind of work together on that aspect of it, as a team – ‘should we consider doing X, Y and Z?’. My sole focus wouldn’t be looking over the guys but I would work in conjunction with the team.

Q: How has the Slieve Russell managed to establish itself as one of the leading golfing academies?

A: Several years ago it became a regional centre here for the Golfing Union of Ireland, which is the amateur body who run the game. The youths come in here from different clubs and if they get into the programme they get free coaching through the GUI. It is a centre for the bottom of Ulster.

There are other ones like in Royal County Down. I kind of look after Monaghan, the bottom of Donegal, Fermanagh. Kids with talent from these areas go through the assessment with the GUI and come into me first. Up from me, they would be on a provincial team and the six best players in a province at U14, U16 and U18 would go to provincial coaching.

And above that again there is national coaching at Carton House for the national panels in those age groups. Young golfers are well looked after, there are strength and conditioning coaches, psychologists, all that stuff at U14 level up. They are well funded and well looked after and that shows in the way we punch above our weight in the world with golfers.

It’s one of the most lucrative sports in the world and we have McIlroy at world number one, Shane Lowry, the list is endless. McGinley, Harrington… we have had loads of top-end players. It’s due to the structures of the game in the country.

Q: You mentioned how the standard of youth players has improved. Has it been a huge leap?

A: Absolutely. With technology, it’s easier to hit the golf ball and with the likes of McIlroy doing well and what Leona will do for the ladies game now. We’ve never had anybody in the female game to look up to and now we have Leona and Stephanie Meadow on the LPGA tour, I can see a lot more girls taking up the game.

The standard is getting better in every sport. We would have never dreamt of doing strength and conditioning growing up but my son Charlie is on the Ulster U14 panel and he’s doing strength and conditioning at 12 years old. Now it’s not weights, it’s all body weight and bands and things like that but they’re looked after really well to make them better players quicker.

Q: Is there a cut-off point for where a player should be at a certain age to make it as a professional? Is it the case like McIlroy that they need to be playing off scratch while barely into their teens?

A: No, no. People progress at different speeds. There are players on tour who have come to the game later and made a living at it. McIlroy was a freak of nature, he won the West of Ireland, a national championship at senior level, at 15 years old, beating the best players in the country.

Harrington was in his early 20s when he was coming out of the amateur game. It’s not set in stone. Look at Woods winning the Masters last year in his early 40s, beating 20-year-olds who are bombing it.

That’s the beauty of the game as well.

Q: Looking at the professional tours, a lot of commentators are suggesting that courses are too long and have become a ‘bomber’s paradise’, favouring only the longer hitters, which has seen some of the craft leave the game. Would you concur with that?

A: The game has changed compared to what it was and technology is a big part of that. When we were growing up, I remember playing with wooden clubs and then Taylor Made came along. I was still young and I remember when TaylorMade brought their first titanium driver out.

Steel-headed drivers then came on the scene. It has become a hitting game, yeah. There is talk about them changing the ball in the pro game to pull that back, they’re hitting it so far.

But we would train them now for speed. Speed is a huge aspect of youth development and getting their legs and their core as strong as oxes. Everybody in the world top 50 would have a personal trainer, their glutes are like rocks.

They’re training to be as stable as they are on the ground as possible because it’s a hitting game now. If you’re not hitting it a long way, because the courses are so long, you’re giving up too much ground at the top level.

They’re hitting wedges in and you’re hitting a five-iron in, obviously it’s much easier to hit a wedge closer. It is getting that way, whether they do anything with the ball, it’s debatable. I don’t like the courses getting longer and longer and longer because it’s making the game more difficult for the average guy who is actually the guy or the girl who plays the game.

Why make them 7,000-yard golf courses? It’s a difficult game to play at the best of times, we all know that. At the end of the day, why make it more difficult? What happens then is people are dropping off because it is just too bloody difficult to play the game.

I don’t agree with that. I’d like to see different tees and starting points for people starting the game so that it becomes easier. Instead of you walking out as a newcomer to the game and it’s a 450-yard par four, it could be 250 yards.

Instead of having a 12 on the hole, they’ve had a six. Then they stay at the game and can be moved back a little longer till they progress to the full golf course.

That’s how juniors would progress, shorter tees and working their way back up instead of starting on the full golf course and hitting 10 shots before they get to a green, there’s no enjoyment in that as such.

Q: What are the most common mistakes you see high handicappers making when they come into you for a lesson?

A: The basics are key. I worked with a good player this morning and we worked on a lot of basics, good grip and alignment. People sometimes just stand to the ball any old way. As Nicklaus said years ago, if your fundamentals of grip and posture and alignment are sound, it’s difficult to swing it too badly.

You’ll always go back to the fundamentals. The majority, 90% of the amateur players are slicing the golf ball, obviously that’s because of their movement but a lot of that is to do with the way they’re setting up to it or gripping it.

Getting them to understand what they’re trying to do is important. That’s why players should have lessons and even the best players have lessons. Woods has a coach, McIlroy has a coach, they all have coaches, they all have people looking at them. It’s not just a case of they hit it brilliantly so they know what to do, it’s good to have a person who knows what they’re talking about, giving you feedback.

You then understand your issues and it makes the game more enjoyable because you’re learning. It’s not a game of ‘perfect’ and it never is. One day you’ll have it and one day you won’t. That’s the way the game is. We as golfers say that is the beauty of the game – nobody will ever master it as such and when they think they have mastered it, the next day or two weeks later it will be totally different.

The elements change, the golf courses change. It’s not like a tennis court is a tennis court or a football pitch is a football pitch – every golf course is different. We have such choice with the game that we play, links, parkland, bunkerless holes, tree-lined golf courses… Obviously I’m biased!

Q: Have you heard much talk from people in the industry about a surge in membership off the back of the recent lockdown?

A: Yeah, I have. The under 30 age bracket for membership has come up. The GAA aren’t playing any games and those guys who might have played golf the odd time here or there have come into clubs which is great for the game. I was in Headfort yesterday and they got an influx of 100 new members or along those lines. I was in Royal Tara and it was the same.

We’ve got an influx, I think Cavan… everywhere has. People want to play a sport and we were lucky enough as a sport to start on May 18 in that first phase, we were given the go-ahead. Hopefully they will stay on and will see the benefits of it.

The guys who were only playing casually can see it’s a competitive game and you’re playing against the golf course as opposed to other people, it makes it interesting.

Q: The link-up with Gareth Raflewski seems like one of the most exciting things to happen on the local scene in some time. Can you tell me how it came about?

A: A mutual friend of ours put me in touch with Gareth. He is living in Canada, he’s originally from Omagh. His father is Polish and his mother is Irish which is where the name comes from.

He tells the story of being close to Sean Foley who taught Woods at one stage. He was trying to find a niche in the market and he saw there were lots of full-swing coaches so he got into looking at the short game, the wedges, putting.

He’s an engineer so he’s very technical-minded and saw there was a gap in the market for short-game specific coaches. Someone came to him that was on the LPGA tour, Jane Park, and she made a significant improvement under him. He got a huge improvement in world ranking points.

He started picking up players and it snowballed. He’s currently looking after the world number one and that’s his third world number one out of the last four that he’s looked after.

He has 60 players on the LPGA and he has a good few players on the PGA tour. The players last year earned in excess of $10 million in prizemoney so it’s crazy, the pool of talent that he has.

Basically we started talking and he was looking to do something in Europe and Ireland specifically then. Get his name out there, work with him and shadow him. Because of lockdown I was meant to be over in Canada with him and shadowing him at times over there and learning from him but we’ve had to do zoom calls and stuff like that.

I will continue working here but under him as well and learning from him. I am going to run the European base of his performance academy and it will be based with us here. The technology that’s going into it is state of the art, there’s nothing like it in the country.

We’ll have GC2Quad which is a top of the range radar tracking system for path of swing, ball flight, how much spin is on the ball, all the putting machines and technology. We have ordered an indoor putting green which was specifically made for that area, it’s 26 feet by 20 feet so we can do indoor stuff when it’s raining.

He loved the fact that we have the academy course here. We can look at the numbers from all the technology and go out to a short course like par-three course here. The Maguire twins would have honed their skills there, it’s perfect for short game.

We want people to stay here after their lesson, keep working on their game. It’s not just that they go in and have their lesson and then leave. You actually stay here on site at PGA National and continue to work on your game.

We are expecting the best players in the country to come here but we are targeting every level. Everybody can improve with what we are going to be doing here.

He’s someone at the top of his game coaching-wise, he won PGA Teacher of the Year a couple of years ago in north America. The players he has under him is phenomenal. For me to learn from him, to shadow him and go to tournaments on the PGA tour and LPGA tour, it’s a dream come true for me.

Then tapping into looking at the best players in the world and learning from that, it’s only going to benefit me, the Slieve Russell and golf in Ireland in general.

Q: It probably is a sign of the increased standing of the resort since it achieved PGA National status.

A: It is, yeah. I know it was mutual friends that put it together but it was a factor. Having the facilities here was paramount to his decision to opt for PGA National Slieve Russell. It’s a significant upgrade going into the driving range and putting greens and all the technology, it’s colossal money that’s being spent to upgrade it into what it needs to be.

It’s exciting for me, as a coach, without question, to be working with somebody like that.

In May of last year we became PGA National and without question we had an increase in 2019 in the uptake of green fees. Obviously 2020 we were really going to push it forward as our first full year with the status of being the PGA National of Ireland.

A lot of our business has moved just later into the year, postponed as such to 2010 or later into 2020. We have an awful lot of repeat business which would come back to us year on year and stay in the hotel and so on.

The big clubs who have lost out on this moreso than ourselves are the big links courses with the Americans coming in who haven’t come in at all whereas our domestic market is strong anyway. It has been tough for every business in the country but in a couple of weeks, restrictions will be eased if everyone adheres and people will be able to move around.

If we get good weather and we keep the virus at bay, the season will just extend out further than it normally would.