57 should go live there for a bit’. We had a job in Yorkshire, England, at Moor Allerton, so I lived there for some time.” Kirby says that Jones was a classic ‘big picture’ designer. “When he was on site, we’d go over the land for the new courses, and then, one night, he’d sit down and do the layout,” he says. “He had a marble table in his garage, a scale, and a pencil that was dull, with an eraser on the end of it. He’d sit there, asking which way does the wind blow, Ron? And all the layouts that were good were done on that marble topped table in his garage!” Kirby founded his own design firm in 1970, working for a time with Gary Player, and then, in 1986, sold the business to Golden Bear, Inc, and went to work for Jack Nicklaus, overseeing European projects. They had first met in 1963, when a young Nicklaus came to the Bahamas to go fishing, and Kirby arranged a boat and skipper to take them out. “Nicklaus was the opposite of Jones – he was very detail-oriented,” Kirby says. “He wouldn’t draw anything till he had everything sorted in his mind. When we were building the Monarch’s course at Gleneagles, now the Centenary, on which the Ryder Cup was played, we were walking past the eighth hole one day. He said, can we back it up a bit? See how far back you can go. Next trip he said, the green’s not right. He’d remembered we could back it up, we had backed it up by 10 yards, and he said, ‘You didn’t back up the landing area!’ He wanted the dogleg moved. He’s a detail guy. I had Jones get me started, but Nicklaus is a finishing school. Meeting Jones and meeting Jack were two of the greatest things that happened to me.” In the 1990s, the great Irish amateur Joe Carr got Kirby involved with the Old Head project in Kinsale on Ireland’s south coast. Old Head remains the most high-profile project Kirby has worked on in his long career, and surely the most spectacular site, on a headland poking two miles out into the Atlantic, and with steep sea cliffs all the way round. Kirby’s routing puts as many holes right next to the cliffs as possible, creating a golf course of almost unmatched memorability. “The O’Connor brothers, who developed the course, said they had an Eddie Hackett layout, and there was a greenkeeping guy there who was shaping some greens, but that was about it when I got there,” he says. “Joe said to me ‘I’ve been asked to do a golf course; can you Kirby is working at Apes Hill to emphasise the course’s natural beauty, including many of its spectacular vistas Photo: Mike Toy
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