John Craven relives the night his dream job at Carton House turned into a nightmare.
It was the dream gig, and to this day I don’t think I’ve had one to match it. Golf concierge at Carton House.
To think I was told Transition Year would be a waste of time. Sure, when my ‘Craven a Coffee?’ mini company fell on its arse, I might’ve believed it. Who knew the staffroom was already stocked with Maxwell House coffee, our only product. And theirs was free. The gall of those teachers looking for a pay-rise with instant on tap and my company €20 in the hole. Big money in those days!
With my first entrepreneurial venture flopping, I turned to the man instead. For work experience week I snagged five days down the road in the Golf Operations team at Carton while the rest of my friends stacked shelves in SuperValu. The privilege wasn’t lost on me.
My main job for the week was to meet and greet each player who passed through the gate. ‘If you could try to smile, John, that would be great’.
Try to smile? I couldn’t stop smiling even if I wanted to. My crooked teeth beamed off the bonnet of every golf buggy I shined. And they said this was the big bad world of work? I would “work” from the cradle to the grave in a gig like this. Believe me, I tried.
I was only rostered to be there eight hours a day, but I hung around for as long as they’d have me, cleaning shoes, collecting range balls, emptying bins or sweeping cigarette butts, anything to prolong the days.
But time waits for no man… or 16-year-old boy for that matter. When Friday flew round, my work experience was over, and it felt like it had only begun. I handed in my uniform staring at the Tyrconnell Tower logo trying not to cry until I escaped the Director’s door. Then I was told to hang onto it. Classy bunch at Carton. Bestowing me with a memento of the best week of my life.
“No John, you’ll be needing it all summer. Well, that is if you want to come back here and work?”
I thought the school year would never end. It was 2006 and Carton hosted the Irish Open that May. I made the trip with Dad suddenly cursing Transition Year for, you guessed it, wasting my time.
Mam was adamant that I couldn’t work until the holidays. I was adamant that my Leaving Cert was no longer worth a shite. I’d already made it.
Thomas Bjorn won the tournament that week, though Ian Poulter stole the headlines for blowing a gasket at a volunteer for supposedly standing on his ball during a weather delay. Even with the rain slapping you sideways I wondered how anyone could get angry in a place like this. Especially a postman.
I started “work” the following month in June, getting paid €9 an hour when I would’ve happily worked for free, suckers, picking range balls like mushrooms and weaselling away the odd Pro-V that Poulter and the boys had left behind.
Each morning, I counted my blessings on the drive in with Mam; the lush fescue giving me a guard of honour up the snaking driveway that dissected the Monty. The place might’ve been just down the road from our four-bed semi in Leixlip, but it felt like a different world. Celebrity encounters became the norm. Helicopters taxied golfers to and from the course, and cigar puffing Americans parted ways with cash like the wads in their wallets were weighing them down. I just had to be myself to get it.
Before too long I was entrusted with some of the club’s biggest corporate outings. Or at least lining up the carts and making sure they glistened in time for another no-expense-spared shotgun start.
I quickly graduated from the morning shift to the graveyard session, waiting patiently for the last carts to come in as the sun set on my patch of heaven on Earth. I’d only call Mam to come get me after I’d padlocked the last bollard and closed up shop for the night.
Then one evening after I’d called Mam to collect me, I heard the phone ringing relentlessly behind the blue barn door of our caddymaster quarters. It was the hotel reception calling to inform me that a group of Americans were flying home during the night and their golf clubs were locked away with me in storage. I ran across to the old stables to find eight burly sets of clubs inside the door just as the headlamps of Mam’s Fiesta lit up the cobbled yard.
In hindsight, I should’ve loaded all eight sets into the Fiesta. What I did was load all eight onto a buggy with the recommended capacity for two. Sure what harm? Bloody western bureaucracy creating health and safety regulations to keep people in jobs. I’d seen a lad in Vietnam move his whole family, a couch and a goat on the back of a Vespa. This was nothing.
I drove with pride and winked at Mam as my Tetris playing days paid off in abundance, ambling the few hundred yards to the hotel reception where I parked as close to the door as I could to ensure maximum efficiency before hopping out to admire my ingenuity one last time.
Then the buggy started moving.
Rolling, rolling, rolling, on she goes and no one on it. Picking up speed and nothing to stop it smashing straight through the sliding glass doors of the luxury hotel that have no time to automatically open. Glass smashing into smithereens as time stood still. Fragments of crystal exploding against the light. My ashen face in pieces amongst them. My dream career shattered by a ghost of the Earls of Kildare taking my buggy for a joyride.
Actually no, one of the bags had slipped onto the accelerator.
I came to just in time to sprint after the getaway vehicle as it made a beeline for the second set of sliding glass doors that protected the hotel lobby. Inside, the bourgeoisie of Dublin toasted to good business over expensive champagne oblivious to a rogue golf buggy squashing the dreams of a distraught teen on the other side of the glass.
I managed to wrestle the bag from the go pedal just in time to spare my ears from aristocratic gasps that would’ve haunted my sleep for eternity. And when I stepped inside to find the manager to explain what I’d done, all I could muster was a bottom lip wobble before bursting into tears and pointing to the crime scene.
They could probably sense I was on the verge of vomit, giving me a reprieve for the night so I could explain myself in the morning. On the drive home with Mam I tried to make sense of how Tetris had betrayed me and told her that I’d come clean the next day and accept my sacking with dignity.
Back in the Director’s office, I confessed to the lazy man’s load. I acknowledged that western bureaucracy probably got this one right when limiting golf bags to two per buggy, and I also admitted to parking way too close to the hotel doors. In short, it was a calamity of errors, a Jean van de Velde, and I resigned myself to handing in my gun and holster before rethinking my Leaving Cert CAO.
But there was no need. They weren’t going to fire me. They absolutely would have if I had come in and lied, not least because the whole thing was caught on CCTV in a clip worthy of Ireland’s Funniest Home Videos. But the truth had set me free.
As for the video, to this day I’ve never seen it. Honestly, I don’t think I want to. I don’t think I’m over it. But as far as life lessons go, those yanks sleeping soundly that night taught me a valuable one: Resist the lazy man’s load. Own up to your actions. Always tell the truth, and above all else, whatever you do, never park a golf buggy anywhere without turning off the ignition.
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