Rory McIlroy had a 1.08pm start for his third round at the Irish Open and one of the marshals assigned to follow his round arrived with a minute to spare, panting for breath.
He had been held up en route by a mass motorcade of around 30 vehicles; an obsidian black chain of armoured Cadillacs, Mercedes’ saloons, ambulances and, incongruously, a bus bearing the name of Spain’s Coach Hire.
The convoy did not include the US president – it was merely a rehearsal event for the delivery of Donald Trump to the front door of his hotel. Further down the course, one fan was so rapt by the convoy that she didn’t hear golfer Joe Dean yell fore from the third teebox. His ball thwacked her on the back.
Trump stepped off the stage at the US ambassador’s residence about 40 minutes before the announcer at Doonbeg welcomed McIlroy to the first tee. That whole speech distilled the extent to which the world is being governed as if it’s a country club. First, the Irish ambassador praised Trump as an “amazing golfer”, then calling him an “amazing man” and repeated one of Trump’s favoured fantasies in heralding him as a winner of 41 club championships.
The American writer Rick Reilly wrote a book Commander in Cheat debunking Trump’s various golf claims. In it, he explained one of his tactics was to build or renovate a course, play the inaugural round alone, and then simply declare himself a club champion. Reilly also said Trump earned the nickname Pele for his habit of kicking the ball onto the green. Trump used this formal occasion to tell the crowd “it’s not that I wouldn’t cheat,” but that the 250 Secret Service agents now detailed to guard him during a round of golf don’t allow him to get away with it. Perhaps this is power being held to account.
Trump left the stage with a leaderboard update from Doonbeg – “Shane is leading and Rory is doing very well” – but we wonder whether the golf course owner in him would have enjoyed watching Lowry slice it apart with Friday’s 62. There is a story doing the rounds of the media tent in Doonbeg about Trump’s attendance at this year’s LIV event at his Washington DC course. The US president was allegedly so miffed at the easy scoring that he visited the tournament office and changed some of the pin locations himself.
Shortly after Trump stepped off the stage, Jim Gavin was spotted walking around Doonbeg with Paul McGinley. The mind wandered to the alternate version of history which would have seen Gavin greeting Trump at Áras an Uachtaráin.
The third tee was the prime viewing spot for Trump’s arrival, with the helicopters due to touchdown on the vast, steel-reinforced helipad in an adjacent field. McIlroy’s drive from the third went right, and so he hit a provisional ball to the middle of the fairway. As McIlroy and his caddie Harry Diamond went foraging for their ball in a dune, they heard a rumble overhead. They picked up their heads to see Air Force One arcing ostentatiously across the sky, on its way to Shannon Airport.
McIlroy double-bogeyed the third to end his interest in the tournament. Everyone else’s interests were already suspended. Journalists and photographers clambered to the top of a dune behind the third tee overlooking the helipad, backs to the second green. That same green thudded intermittently with flighted golf balls, to which everyone remained exquisitely ambivalent. Robert MacIntyre made birdie and yelled up: “Must be a sweet spot up there.”
The crowds swelled and a put-upon marshal had the job of shooing fans down the dune on which the media were perched. “Excuse me, out!,” she barked before turning around to tell us with a mortified grin that she hated having to talk so stridently. But we were all putting our stern faces on for the Americans.
The motorcade reassembled along the narrow road that split the golf course from the helipad, Spain’s Coach Hire still among them, sticking out like the fan who wears a GAA jersey to the Masters. A secret service agent ushered each vehicle to pull in tighter to the vehicle in front; another agent came along a few minutes later and asked each vehicle to angle themselves outward a few inches. Perhaps this was skittishly done for the sake of doing something to pass the time.
Eventually, at 2.47pm, a pair of chinook helicopters appeared as distant specks in the sky, advancing towards the agog masses like the scene from Apocalypse Now. Agolfalypse Now.
The trio of golfers at the third teebox laid down their clubs and whipped out their phones once they heard the whump-whump of the helicopter blades. The chinooks disgorged the journalists and assorted staff within them as the first of the presidential helicopters touched down.
While all of this was happening, Shane Lowry and his group hit their shots into the second green. Next time you hear a professional golfer complain about the click of a camera phone or a murmur in the crowd, know that some can play their way through a quartet of military helicopters landing in the field next door.
We looked around to see Lowry standing on a dune behind us, putter in the crook of his elbow, watching Marine One touch down in Doonbeg. Trump landed at precisely 3pm, and seven minutes later he was whisked away by motorcade to his hotel a kilometre away.
At 3.22pm Trump emerged with his sons on a balcony overlooking the 18th green. He waved to the half-empty grandstands and pumped his fist at Brooks Koepka, leaning over the railing to exchange a few words. Koepka made bogey to fluff his lines before his president.
These surreal two hours in Doonbeg were an exercise in making sure nobody in Ireland could be accused of doing likewise.