Paudie O’Connor has ‘em swinging in Las Vegas
Which is why at 65 years of age, the former basketball star from Killarney who transplanted himself to the Nevada desert, is now venturing into organising golf tournaments, namely the Las Vegas World Amateur, which takes place at the end of next month.
It has been a long path to this point in a life once dominated by the pursuit of sporting success as an athlete.
“I was a basketball player in my younger life and a footballer, playing with Dr Crokes in Killarney for many years,” O’Connor told the Irish Examiner by phone from the office of his O’Connor Golf tourism company close to the Vegas strip.
“My life revolved around that but basketball was my game and Killarney was one of the better teams nationwide. We started a national league and began attracting international players and that’s what led to the basketball development programme, but we won’t go into details about what they’ve done with that,” he added with a wry chuckle.
Nevertheless, he is overly modest about his achievements in Irish basketball with the St Vincent’s club, Kieran Shannon on these pages installing O’Connor at number five on his January 2015 list of Ireland’s greatest ever male basketball players, describing him as: “The Kerryman who shook it all up. Not just by bringing in the Americans in ’79 but by being able to hang with them.”
One would assume O’Connor’s involvement in golf, as a son of Killarney, went hand in hand with his other sporting pursuits but that was not the case and he did not take it up until he moved to the US in his early 30s. After four years in New York, O’Connor got the urge to go west and has been in Las Vegas ever since.
“Having been involved in tourism in Killarney I found myself here on the west coast and said to myself, it might be time to start a golf tour business with tours over to Ireland. It was something I was interested in and also tourism was what I had done, so it was a no brainer.
“So I started taking golfers over to Ireland and Scotland and I’m still doing it all these years later. There’s a number of big amateur events over here and they started one in Vegas a number of years ago and I was always anxious to get involved. It’s called the Las Vegas World Amateur and the opportunity came up to take over the event and I did.
“It’s for amateurs of all age groups, from the Legends category, golfers aged above 70, right down the line. We play it in Vegas over three days and we will have a full field of somewhere between 120 to 132 people playing at the end of February, next month, at a place called Paiute Golf Course, which has three Pete Dye courses on the outskirts of Las Vegas. They’re all really good tracks and one of the things I wanted to do was get people over from Ireland to experience this.”
O’Connor is offering a €595 package exclusive of flights and accommodation to play the tournament for three days as well as a practice round and there are parties on each of the nights which, he says, adds up to a very exciting event.
And if next month is too soon to plan a proper assault on Las Vegas, O’Connor said there would definitely be a 2018 event with plans to expand the tournament into a much larger event.
“That’s my plan, to expand and have more international participation but for now there’s a few boys from Killarney coming out to play this year’s event, and it’s not too late if you want to join us in a climate where it is not overpoweringly warm but comfortable at around 70 degrees. The practice round is Sunday, February 26, with the tournament on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, with those that qualify going on to a Thursday play-off to find the outright champion.
“And if you like your rugby as well, that weekend the World Rugby Sevens comes back to Las Vegas and that would make for a fabulous end to the week of golf.”
