Joe Carr, who died aged 82 on Thursday night in Dublin's Mater Private Hospital, was a true golfing legend, a fact acknowledged far and wide.
Whether the story is of him playing off a cliff top at Pebble Beach; or extricating himself from a trouble spot at Muirfield - a feat that led the august members of that club to christen an area of that famed golfing terrain "Carr's Corner"; or of him playing golf with a US president, as he did with Dwight D. Eisenhower at Portmarnock, Carr's special qualities as a player and a person invariably win out.
His record speaks volumes for the impact he made on the game as a career amateur who forsook whatever appeal the professional game may have had to remain a golfing Corinthian. He won three British Amateurs, six Irish Amateurs, four Irish Amateur Opens, 12 West of Irelands, 12 East of Irelands and three South of Irelands while playing international golf for Ireland from 1947 to 1969, during which he played in 10 Walker Cups.
Joe also became the first Irishman to be captain of the R&A in 1991-92, an honour that especially pleased him because of his great love of St Andrews, the home of golf.
It was only upon the publishing of his autobiography, Breaking 80, two years ago that Joe revealed that he was actually born Joseph Benedict Waters on February 18th, 1922, and was unofficially adopted by his mother's sister, Kathleen, who was married to James Carr, the steward at Portmarnock Golf Club. They were childless and agreed to adopt Joe, who moved in with his adoptive parents when he was 10 days old, and so it was that he was effectively raised on one of the world's most famous links courses.
As a five-year-old, he witnessed George Duncan - using brown paper given to him by Joe's mother to protect him from the weather - win the Irish Open at Portmarnock. The young Joe learned the art of shot-making on the links, using a set of hickory-shafted clubs which the club professional, Willie Nolan, had cut down specially for him.
That swing, first honed on the north Dublin links, would make Carr into the greatest amateur golfer that Ireland had ever produced.
However, during a trip to the US Amateur at Oak Hill after the Walker Cup at Winged Foot in 1949, distinguished professionals such as Tommy Armour and Craig Wood advised Joe to change his method. So he embarked on change, even going so far as to have his own swing superimposed on a film of Ben Hogan's - the first great exponent of the power fade - and underwent consultations with John Jacob, who would later gain international renown as "Dr Golf", changing from a draw to a fade.
And with his reconstructed swing, Carr enjoyed the best wins of his honour-laden career. His first of three British Amateur Championship wins was achieved at Hoylake in 1953, where he beat the American Harvie Ward in the final and arrived home to be feted at his club, Sutton. This involved a victory procession with cars, a pipe band and hundreds of well-wishers. "It was easier to win the Amateur Championship than to face all this," he was to remark.
But his burning ambition was to win the British Amateur over the Old Course at St Andrews, where the history and mystery of the place appealed to him enormously.
In 1958 he achieved his ambition. The win was the result of countless hours of hard work. "With all the practice shots I hit by way of preparation for St Andrews, I almost wore through the blades of my eight and nine irons," recalled Carr.
Indeed, he was to estimate that he'd hit 47,000 tee shots in preparation for that championship and would regularly leave a bare patch of ground of about 10 square yards at Portmarnock where most of the practice took place.
Before Carr was leaving for St Andrews, so confident was he that he said to his first wife, Dor - who tragically died in 1976 - that he would "give you a ring between the two rounds of the final on Sunday . . . They can't beat me, I've done too much . There's no way I can lose." He beat Alan Thirlwell 3 and 2 in the final.
Carr married Dor Hogan in 1948 and together they had six children, Sibeal, Jody, Roddy, John, Gerry and Marty. When Joe and Dor celebrated their silver wedding anniversary in October 1973, the children clubbed together and bought a special medal for their mother, which was inscribed "For 25 years of service above and beyond the call of duty."
The milestone was also considered by The Irish Times to be worthy of a story headed "My best prize was my wife". Indeed, he considered himself extremely fortunate to have found love again with his second wife, Mary. "She has been the centre of my life for the last 10 years, and it is a marvellous bonus that she gets on so well with my children and my grandchildren," he said in his book.
Joe Carr was the greatest Irish amateur golfer of all time and was acknowledged as such far beyond these shores. He was given the Bobby Jones Award in 1961, initiated by the USGA some six years earlier for "distinguished sportsmanship in golf".
And the British golf writer Pat Ward-Thomas acknowledged Carr's qualities after his third British Amateur win in 1960, writing: "Human beings cannot be perfect all the time, although many in the public eye are often unreasonably expected to be so. It is hard therefore to criticise a famous player for having exactly the same faults as other people, without their opportunity of concealment.
"It is difficult to retain a sense of proportion when adulation, in the modern, absurdly exaggerated forms, is heaped upon one; it is no small achievement to be normal, balanced, modest and kind in private, when multitudes worship in public. It is exceedingly rare therefore, to find a man whose qualities as an individual have never been impaired by his fame as a golfer. Such a man is Joe Carr."
Joe Carr: born February 18th, 1922; died June 3rd 2004