Lahinch on Pin High Press

GB&I's Stunning Comeback Wins the Walker Cup at Lahinch

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a golf crowd when a match comes down to one putt on one green, and Lahinch got the full version of it on Sunday evening. Josh Hill, twenty-two, from England by way of a college career at Tennessee, stood over four feet on the 18th with the Walker Cup itself resting on the putt. He had already hit the shot of the week to get there, a bunker recovery from the front-right trap that finished three feet from the pin, the kind of up-and-down that either buries a match or ends one outright. It ended one outright. Hill holed it to beat Tyler Watts one-up, and Great Britain and Ireland had completed the biggest comeback in the history of the fixture to win the 51st Walker Cup 13½ to 12½.

Lahinch: The Old Course That Waited a Century for Its Biggest Week

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are golf courses that get discovered by the wider game and golf courses that simply carry on regardless, and for most of its 134 years Lahinch has been the second kind. Tucked into the northwest corner of County Clare, where the Atlantic weather arrives with nothing in front of it to slow it down, the Old Course has been quietly regarded by the people who actually play it as one of the finest links tests anywhere, while the wider golfing world caught up in fits and starts, a 2019 Irish Open here, a Golf Digest ranking there. This year it hosted its first Walker Cup, and for a few days in September the rest of the world finally paid the kind of attention that Lahinch members have taken for granted for over a century.