Emerald Greens

A mere baby by Irish golf standards, Doonbeg Golf Club is already considered one of the best links courses on the Emerald Isle. credit: Daniel Aubrey

Few things seem more immediately incongruous than a man in a pink oxford cloth button-down, pleated khakis, and penny loafers standing on the windswept dunes of southwest Ireland, a cool breeze off the North Atlantic licking at his ears, a hand in a pocket just so, going on in an unmistakable South Carolina accent about his “kinship” with the land and residents of the Emerald Isle. Not to put too fine a point on it, but — come on. Not only do Leonard Long and Buddy Darby, internationally known as the geniuses behind the development of Kiawah Island, sound about as Irish as Dolly Parton; the two men can’t even name an Irish ancestor, although they’re pretty sure they have one somewhere — a great-great-grandmother, maybe…yes, something like that.

“The Longs and Darbys were English,” Leonard Long III, Charleston attorney and longtime developer, said in describing his family tree, an off-handed comment that made the “kinship” thing in County Clare sound even more like good old-fashioned Irish blarney.

While the Irish are a welcoming lot, they still harbor a respectful coolness — certainly something less than a bosom-buddy kinship — with the English and their descendants. Slavery and starvation will do that. Still, none of the tweed coat and dandruff locals winced as Long’s words flowed like syrup from a maple. Likewise, no one said, “Yada, yada, yada, where’s the bar?” out loud when Long slipped effortlessly into developer-speak, saying, “Buddy and I don’t know a lot — we’re not the brightest guys around — but we know quality, and we share an insatiable desire for quality.”

If anything, that comment evoked a few smiles and a knowing nod or two among the assemblage. The locals could certainly forgive a few spasms of hyperbole. After all, even though the only things Darby and Long had in common with the hardscrabble farmers of County Clare were an evening hankering for a nip or two and a passionate and unquenchable love for the game of golf — the latter being the reason the crowd had gathered on these grassy beachside dunes in the first place —the guys had made fine neighbors, and, in many ways, had become white knights in the local village.

You see, since 1999, when Darby (“Please, call me Buddy”) and his second cousin and business partner, Long, first set foot on the craggy crescent-shaped beach just west of the Shannon Airport, the two Americans have plowed somewhere north of $200 million into the ground, creating jobs and, more important, a sense of hope in one of Ireland’s most economically depressed regions, a spot Leonard described as “very much like Appalachia a few decades ago.”

They also created one of the best golf clubs in the world — one that is, without question, the best new golf club to be built in Ireland in the last two decades. In fact, the occasion for Long’s remarks on kinship and his obsession with quality was the May 2006 grand opening of the Lodge at Doonbeg, a stone-encased complex of forty-seven suites that dominates the landscape near the cliffs of Moher and is the centerpiece of the Doonbeg Golf Club. And while “Developer Builds Golf Course” is the worst kind of “Dog Bites Man” story, the tale of Doonbeg and the men who created it reads like a page from Frank McCourt’s diary. It is, at the end, a story of perseverance and deliverance centered on an old scrap of land and a silly outdoor game.