Darren Clarke

Darren Clarke is a professional golfer and a golf course architect, born on August 14, 1968 at Dungannon in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He played his college golf at Wake Forest University in the United States and turned professional in 1990. His first win on the European Tour came at the Alfred Dunhill Open in 1993, and he has won 14 times on that tour in all. At the WGC-Andersen Consulting Match Play Championship in 2000 he beat Tiger Woods in the final, and in 2003 he took the WGC-NEC Invitational as well. In 2011, at Royal St George’s, he won the Open Championship and with it his first major. He played in five Ryder Cups in a row for Europe from 1997 to 2006 and captained the European side in 2016. He was appointed OBE in 2012. Past fifty he won on the senior tour in the United States, and in 2022 he took the Senior Open Championship.

As a designer he has laid out two courses in Ireland. Moyvalley Hotel & Golf Resort in County Kildare is described on the club’s official site as the first golf course Darren Clarke designed, drawn up with the principles of links golf in mind. It is a par 72, and it staged an event on the European Challenge Tour in 2009 and the Irish PGA Championship in 2016 and 2017. Castle Dargan at Ballygawley in County Sligo is an eighteen-hole parkland course on some 170 acres of ground around the ruins of an old castle, and its official site credits the design to Clarke. It is said to have opened, together with the hotel, in 2005.

As a player he has won in Asia too. On the Japan tour he won three times, at the Chunichi Crowns in 2001 and the Mitsui Sumitomo VISA Taiheiyo Masters in 2004 and 2005, and in 2008 he took the BMW Asian Open at Shanghai in China. GoGolf does not at present list any course designed by Clarke.

See the other golf course architects here.

Photo: Jenni Douglas（Flickr） / CC BY 2.0