On dozens of Monday mornings throughout the late 1960s, a gentle and unassuming former club pro from Portmarnock would tuck the Irish Press into the pocket of his tweed coat and board the train in Dublin for the four-hour ride west to Killarney. There he’d be met by Noel Cronin, now the club secretary of Ireland’s exceptional Waterville Golf Club, and the two men would drive to what was then a dormant nine-hole links on County Kerry’s lush southwestern coast.

Though virtually unknown outside Ireland as a course architect, Eddie Hackett was gaining respect within his home country—and he worked for next to nothing, a crucial factor in Ireland’s depressed economy of the time. Waterville’s Irish-American owner, Jack Mulcahy, was convinced enough of Hackett’s talents that he asked the humble little man to build “the best golf course in the world.”

Upon arrival at Waterville’s rugged linksland, Hackett would tug on some green rubber Wellington boots and ask European Senior Tour player Liam Higgins to join him on his walks through the heaving grass-covered dunes, where Higgins would hit various clubs to imaginary fairways and greens.

“He could see things that none of us could see,” recalls Higgins, now Waterville’s head pro. “He had his notebook and pencils and never really said much at all. Just things like, ‘This would make a lovely green,’ but later you’d realize that was not just a perfect place for the green, but the only place.”What Hackett created at Waterville, which opened in 1973, has become a near-consensus top-10 course in Europe, and is perhaps the most notable achievement in a 30-year career that includes Enniscrone, Ring of Kerry, Connemara, Ballyliffin, Donegal, Old Head and Carne. In all, this Johnny Appleseed of Irish golf worked on more than 100 projects, leaving a personal and enduring imprint on one nation’s golfscape unlike that of any other architect in history.

“Hackett’s overall contribution to Irish golf has been incalculable,” says Dermot Gilleece, considered the dean of Irish golf journalists.

More impressive, however, than any single course or design feature Hackett ever fashioned was the method and manner of his genius. “Oh, Eddie Hackett was a saint,” Connemara’s club secretary, Peter Waldron, once said. “He was totally self-effacing and had more integrity than almost anybody I ever came across.”  

Those who knew him well say Hackett cared little about money—no doubt endearing him to club members and developers—and was certainly underpaid on most projects by almost any standard. In a time when most Irish courses were modest labors of civic pride, rather than American-style monuments to ego, Hackett reportedly told course owners they could pay him his standard fees when they started making money.

None of which, family members say, should lead one to think he struggled to pay his bills or was so unsophisticated about money that he invited exploitation. He lived frugally but comfortably in one of Dublin’s more expensive neighborhoods, says son-in-law John Purcell, and he had a formal schedule of fees for everything from feasibility studies to the final designs. “I know I’ve charged too little all my life,” Hackett once said, “but starting out, I didn’t have the confidence in my abilities.”
Hackett was slight of stature—maybe 5-foot-8, 140 pounds. He contracted tuberculosis and meningitis early in life and looked more like an aging priest or poet than a rugged land sculptor. “He was 100 when he was 50,” Higgins says with affection, “but he was very active. He went out in rain or snow, even when water would be pouring down his face.”

By all accounts Hackett, a teetotaler, widower and father of five, was a man who genuinely loved to listen to other people, including the workers on his courses, and he could not force himself to be disagreeable. “We’d go to the first tee and he would grab my arm like an old lady, partly to steady himself but also just to be close so he could hear every word,” Higgins recalls. “He really listened, and if he absolutely disagreed, he’d say something like, ‘I’m not sure about that,’ which was his way of saying no.”

Born in 1910 in Dublin, Hackett spent most of his life in golf, with stints as an assistant pro in Johannesburg in the ’30s, a clubmaker at Royal Dublin, an assistant pro to the famed Henry Cotton at Royal Waterloo in Belgium, secretary of the Irish PGA and resident pro at Portmarnock for 12 years, until 1950. His venture into course design in the early ’60s came at a time when Irish interest in the game had surged, due to the televised Canada Cup at Portmarnock in 1960. But Ireland had few course architects of note and England’s were thought too expensive. So Hackett’s vision, reverence for linksland and willingness to work for modest pay made him a logical choice.  

A Hackett course is typically characterized by elevated tees, obvious but not overly generous landing areas, spacious greens and an absence of blind drives and concealed hazards. He believed that bunkers within about 150 yards of the green should carry a penalty. “In most of them, you’ll have to come out sideways,” says Higgins.Famed for the natural feel of all his links designs, the deeply religious Hackett, who attended mass daily, sought holes “where God intended them to be,” moving precious little soil and hardly using machinery at all. He once remarked: “I could never break up the earth the way they tell me Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer do. You disrupt the soil profile and it’s unnatural.”

At Waterville, which Hackett called “a beautiful monster,” he laced together so many photogenic holes along the elegant strands of mystical Ballinskelligs Bay that they have become mainstays on Irish golf calendars. The 506-yard, par-5 11th is characteristic of Hackett’s vision. Nicknamed “Tranquility,” it plays through a valley of wild dunes to an elevated green, and is shielded from every other hole, creating a solitary, almost tunnel-like experience.

Perhaps the greatest praise for Hackett is that his many admirers still actively debate which is his finest design. You’ll hear impassioned lobbying for Donegal, a sweeping, muscular layout in northwest Ireland, and Enniscrone, with its enthralling elevated tees. But the man himself, who died at 86 in 1996, was loathe to show favoritism—except on one occasion.

“Once at Waterville, Eddie put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘I don’t want to hurt your feelings,’” Higgins remembers. “At first, I thought I had done something wrong. But then he lowered his voice and said, ‘I think I have built an even better golf course than this one, on the most natural piece of terrain I’ve ever found.’”

He was speaking of Carne, near the town of Belmullet, a links so rolling and wild it makes Ballybunion almost seem demure. But don’t let the master’s self-ranking stop you from seeking out every known and unknown Hackett design, just to make sure he was right.