​The 45th Walker Cup match, held in September, saw five Irishmen on the GB&I team for the first time ever.  Gavin Moynihan had already played in the 2013 match, but the first appearances for Dunne, Hume, Hurley and Sharvin brought the total number of Walker Cup players from Ireland to 42.  That number might have been 43.  Lionel Munn, Ireland’s first star amateur golfer, very nearly played Walker Cup in 1934.  What happened this year with Sam Horsfield’s withdrawal was reminiscent of Munn’s story.
 
When the last two places on the GB&I team were made public on 30 April 1934 the Irish Times commented that the selection committee had ‘sprung a first-class surprise’.  Less than two weeks before the match at St. Andrews the selectors announced that Eric McRuvie of Scotland and Ireland’s Lionel Munn would join the other eight team members already named.  McRuvie, the Irish Amateur Open winner in 1931, had played in the 1932 Walker Cup match, but apparently he had not shown recent form.  Munn was just about to turn 47 and his selection came out of nowhere.
 
Nevertheless, The Times of London considered Munn worthy of his place.  Referring to his early career before the Great War, it said that he was ‘nowadays an even better golfer than he was then’, adding ‘For sheer devastating accuracy there is not a player in the British Isles who is his master, and he is, moreover, a match winner in excelsis.’
 
Lionel Munn was born in Clondermot in Derry on 4 May 1887.  He first came to the fore as a 21 year old student at Trinity College, Dublin, when he won the 1908 Irish Amateur Close championship at Portmarnock.  Making his debut that year in The Amateur Championship at Sandwich he reached the third round and went to the tenth tie hole before being beaten.  The following year he became only the second home winner of the Irish Amateur Open, then dominated by the cream of English and Scottish golf.  He retained the title in 1910 and was runner-up in the Irish Close.
 
1911 was a phenomenal year for the then 24 year old.  Not only did he win the Irish Amateur Close and Open but he added the South of Ireland title.  At the time these were the only three amateur championships in Irish golf.  For good measure he was a member of the Dublin University team that retained the Senior Cup that year and a member of the Co. Donegal team that won the inaugural Barton Shield.  The Barton Shield was then competed for by foursomes pairs representing counties rather than clubs.  Lionel and his brother Ector Munn, playing out of their home club of North-West, made up half of the Donegal team.
 
Also in 1911 Lionel had his best run in The Amateur Championship to date, reaching the Last 16.  He was selected for the amateur team in the Coronation Match which preceded The Open at Sandwich in June 1911.  The opposing teams were made up of the best amateurs of the then United Kingdom against their professional counterparts.  Munn was the only Irish representative on the amateur team while Michael Moran, his senior by one year, was the only Irishman among the professionals.  In The Open itself Moran finished in a tie for 21st place and Munn in a tie for 40th.
 
After the dizzy heights of 1911, the following year was an anti-climax.  His best showing was a semi-final finish in the Irish Amateur Open.  In 1913 he played in the first official amateur international for Ireland, against Wales, and won the Irish Close.  In 1914 he won his fourth Irish Close before competitive golf came to an abrupt end as the Great War commenced.  During the conflict Munn served as an officer in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers.
 
It was not till the 1930s that he returned to serious competition.  He won the Belgian Amateur in 1931 and 1932.  In 1932 he also reached the semi-finals of The Amateur and finished in a tie for 29th in The Open, but there were no significant results the following year.  Living in Kent, he did not compete in Ireland and was not selected to represent Ireland.  Not surprisingly, therefore, his announcement for the 1934 Walker Cup team raised eyebrows.
 
Two days before the match was to begin Munn was practising on the Old Course, but apparently his form was not impressive.  He left St. Andrews before the announcement was made that ‘owing to disposition’ he had withdrawn.  With the agreement of Francis Ouimet, the American captain, his place had been filled by Leonard Crawley.  As with Horsfield’s withdrawal 81 years later, no further official explanation was given for Munn’s decision.
 
Just ten days after the match Munn competed in The Amateur Championship at Prestwick.  The Irish Times reported that he was ‘still suffering from the cold which had forced his withdrawal’ and that ‘his voice was husky’ when he spoke to the reporter.  He won three matches in the championship to reach the Last 32 and was beaten 3/2 by the eventual winner, Lawson Little, a member of the US team.
 
Lionel Munn went on to play for Ireland in the 1936 and 1937 Home Internationals, and to reach the final of The Amateur in 1937, again at Sandwich.  The 50 year old Irishman was beaten by Robert Sweeny, another American.  Munn later retired to Kerry where he died aged 71 on 25 October 1958.  Whether the cause back in 1934 was a cold, poor form or an atmosphere of criticism, it was ultimately Munn’s choice to not be among Ireland’s Walker Cup players.
 
[First published in the Irish Clubhouse, Issue 4, 2015]

​In recent years the South of Ireland championship has suffered because of the changing nature of amateur golf.  It’s important to remember that most tournaments have ups and downs in their fortunes.  The Open Championship itself has had peaks and troughs.  So the ‘South’ is likely to bounce back in no time.  Not only is it the oldest regional championship in Ireland, it is one of the oldest amateur tournaments in the world.
 
Over the past 120 years the ‘South’ has been competed for on 113 occasions, always at Lahinch.  This year’s event, on 22-26 July, will be the 114th staging.  In its first two decades it regularly attracted substantial numbers of competitors from England and Scotland.  The War of Independence put paid to that level of overseas participation, but the championship soon recovered and went through a long period of greatness.  John Burke’s dominance threatened its competitive edge to such an extent that he was encouraged not to take part for a while.  Joe Carr was not a regular competitor, yet he won the ‘South’ three times.  In more recent decades it was an essential stage on the domestic amateur calendar and the names Darren Clarke, Paul McGinley and Graeme McDowell were inscribed on the cup, while Padraig Harrington was twice beaten finalist.
 
Only a handful of amateur tournaments pre-date the South of Ireland.  It was first held on Thursday 19 September 1895, the week after the Irish Open Amateur, and its closeness to that event soon attracted cross-channel competitors.  The first staging of the ‘South’ was ‘played for by holes’, with George Browning beating M.W. Gavin in the final by 9/8.  Most reference books list the wrong runners-up for that inaugural year and for 1897.  On the latter occasion Fred Ballingall of Scotland recorded the first foreign win.  It has been said that he was as young as 14 but in fact he was aged 17 years and 185 days.  Nonetheless he remains the youngest ever winner. 
 
Fred Ballingall retained the title the following year.  In the championship’s history there have been only four other winners under the age of 20.  Cian McNamara was the second youngest in 2004 (18 years & 30 days).  Mark Campbell was the youngest winner in the twentieth century (aged 19 in 1999).  Simon Ward was also 19 on his first win in 2006, while the current holder Stuart Bleakley was 19 when he won last July.
 
Over the first nineteen years of the ‘South’, preceding the Great War, there were only five Irish wins.  The most memorable of those was in 1911, when Lionel Munn beat J.S. Kennedy of Scotland.  Its significance was that in 1911 there were only three amateur championships in Ireland – the Irish Amateur Open, the Irish Close and the ‘South’ – and Munn made a clean sweep of all three.
 
The man whose name is synonymous with the ‘South’ is John Burke, a local who only started playing championship golf in his late 20s.  He won on his first attempt in 1928 and went on to take the titles a further ten times, including four in a row (1928-31) and six in a row (1941-46).  He wasn’t a one track pony, either, as  he won the Irish Amateur Open once, the Irish Close (8 times) and the ‘West’ (6 times) as well as making one Walker Cup appearance.
 
A combination of reasons brought on the recent decline in the fortunes of the ‘South’.  Firstly, apparently pressured by the U.S. collegiate calendar, the Home Internationals were brought into August from their traditional September date.  The Interprovincial matches being played just before the ‘South’ and the Irish team being selected in advance of it gave no encouragement to team hopefuls to compete in the oldest regional championship.
 
Another factor was the advent of the R&A’s World Amateur Golf Ranking [WAGR].  The ‘South’ retained the traditional format of amateur golf, being an entirely match play event up to last year.  Tradition is under attack from a system that favours stroke play qualifying and encourages top players to chase points in order to gain team selection and prepare a CV for potential sponsors in the professional game.  The WAGR does not award points to an event based on its traditional prestige but instead based on how many high-ranking point-accumulators it attracts.  If a venerable match play event has to compete with a points-rich stroke tournament it loses out and the spiral gains momentum each year.
 
In 2014 ‘South’ was rated in the WAGR way down in category F, meaning that it had minimal points on offer.  By comparison, the ‘East’, ‘North’ and ‘West’ were all rated in category D or higher.  It should not be thought that recent winners of the South of Ireland were unworthy.  Their victories were hard won against fields with in-depth talent.  The fact that high profile players stayed away meant only that WAGR points went down but the WAGR is a questionable barometer of excellence.
 
Thankfully Lahinch is fighting back.  This year’s event takes place a few days earlier than normal and it begins with a 36-hole qualifying competition.  With less competition on the calendar it may attract more high profile contestants from Ireland and indeed overseas.  For the record, the last foreign win was by England’s Geoff Roberts in 1959.  The last overseas finalist was Philip Johns of Australia in 1991.
 
[First published in the Irish Clubhouse, Summer, 2015]