59 help me? I don’t know how to build a golf course,’ and so I got involved. There was very little budget. Now it’s a success, but it took time. If money guys had got hold of it, they could have done it quicker, but I don’t know if it would have been any better. I lived in Kinsale for five years, not a bad place to spend your time.” Some critics of Old Head have complained that the greens, in particular, are too f lat and lack interest, but Kirby says this was a deliberate choice in response to the site. “Joe originally said the greens would need to be f lat, and he was right,” he says. “You can’t have severe undulations in your greens that close to cliff edges in a windy place like that. The ball would blow right off. We built collecting greens for that reason.” And now, late in his career, Kirby is rebuilding the Apes Hill course in central Barbados. He has a long history of working in the Caribbean, building nine holes for Jones at Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico, and the Palmas del Mar course for his own firm, with Gary Player as its signature designer. “Roddy Carr, Joe’s son, asked me to do a redo at Bahamas Country Club – which was tricky, there was again very little budget, and they didn’t have enough water, but we got it in play – and it was him who got me involved at Apes Hill,” he says. “Landmark Land originally developed it, and it was designed by the company’s in-house team, Chris Cole and Jeff Potts. They didn’t do a bad job, the routing is pretty good, but it was too difficult – the opening hole was an uphill par five straight into the prevailing wind, and it went on in the same kind of mode. Landmark brought in some shapers who had worked with Pete Dye, and the course had 100-odd unplayable bunkers. But it is a fantastic site with great vistas and plenty of water – the owner has a huge reservoir.” In 2019, Apes Hill was sold to Canadian investor Glenn Chamandy, and since then Kirby has been at work, revising the course. “My goal was to make a course that, after you played it, you wanted to play it again,” he says. “I said to the owner, ‘Have you played Augusta?’. He said yes. I said, ‘Well, there’s thirty bunkers on that course, let’s try for that’. I think it is coming out really well – the real estate is selling now, and the new ownership is on the plus side.” After six decades in golf design, Kirby has, surely, seen it all. What has changed? “Marquee golfers got into the design business in the past, but I don’t think we’re going to see much more of that. You’ve got to look more at the quality of the designer, not the name of the Tour player,” he says. GCA I NTERV I EW “ Marquee golfers got into the design business in the past, but I don’t think we’re going to see much more of that” Kirby visiting Old Head, which he helped design in the mid-1990s, and left, alongside the club’s general manager Jim O’Brien and owner Patrick O’Connor
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