(Click here to read Ben Lowry on a small grant for the A75 road upgrade)​ If they are even held in the UK then they are not held in Northern Ireland: snooker or soccer finals or prestigious tournaments such as Wimbledon mostly take place in England. When I was younger and watched a lot of the major sporting occasions on TV (I do so less often since they have migrated to paid-for channels I don’t have), the greatest local excitement was seeing that distinctive piece of rock the Ailsa Craig from Troon or Turnberry, when the (then BBC) Open TV cameras panned away from the golf and out into the North Channel. It is long familiar to us in NI, particularly those of us who grew up in parts from which you can see Scotland. Yet last week the Open golf tournament, one of the most prestigious competitions in sport, was back in Royal Portrush. It was a resounding success, just as it was in 2019. I was up at the event both Saturday and Sunday last weekend and it was a marvel to witness. The weather both days was pretty good, albeit not hot and sunny like the weekend before (July 12 was one of the minority of years that Northern Ireland has hit 30 degrees Celsius). The web version of this article will include a video of the view from the Tourism NI top-floor suite on one of the many temporary pavilions constructed on the course. It is perhaps the finest view in Northern Ireland, over the manicured fairways and greens, and the ‘rough’ and the sand dunes, out to the North Channel. For years I have had an armchair interest in weather but only recently did I learn that Portrush is one of the sunniest places in NI, alongside two other locations in Co Down. While generally the south east of these islands have the most sunshine, coastal areas around the British Isles do better than inland. Portrush gets about 1410 hours of sunshine per year compared to 1280 in Belfast. It isn’t much yet it works out an average of 30 minutes more sunshine per day, and almost 45 minutes more in summer. My childhood memory of summers on the north coast being often sunny was not entirely an illusion. Six years ago at the Open I wrote about how surreal it was to see the best golfers in the world, then including Tiger Woods, up close at the Open, in Portrush. This time it was still a special sight. The presence of Rory McIlroy, and also to a lesser extent Darren Clarke and Graeme McDowell, in Portrush during the tournament was a reminder that the province has not only two of the best golf courses on earth, but also three of the best players of the recent game. On Sunday, when I was working in the large Open press room, I travelled up with someone who is not a golfer but was curious to see the event and the course. She enjoyed it greatly. Someone once said that golf is “a good walk spoiled” (it is not clear who – perhaps the brilliant writer Mark Twain). But anyone who doesn’t enjoy the game might nonetheless have got pleasure from having rare access to the precious Royal Portrush course setting, that is almost always closed to non players. Then there was the added interest of following Rory himself, a local golfing star who is ranked second in the world, behind the man who prevailed on Sunday, the American Scottie Scheffler. Incidentally I was impressed to hear him explain that his family and his Christianity were the two biggest things in his life, not sport – I thought that an endearing and perhaps unusual element of humility in a sporting genius. Sporting greats are so lauded in our societies that it is not surprising that some of them come to believe in their own immense value to mankind. The better part of 300,000 people were at the Open during the four practice days and four event days. Almost every aspect of such a logistically vast operation seemed to go well (we reported on Translink not putting on quite enough of their special trains). I left Belfast to drive up at 620am on Saturday, fearing queues, but had a barely interrupted run on the now mostly dual carriageway A26 road to Portrush, getting there in 730am. Even the drive, on a summery Ulster morning, was agreeable. As fans from round the world left the main stand on Sunday after the victory presentation, I took a video clip of a sample of them. To a person, they spoke in glowing terms about their time at the Open. Portrush is, it seems, now on the roster as one of the keep Open venues. What an honour for a Northern Ireland that has hosted the MTV awards, a G10 summit and is a popular cruise ship destination, and that – a few decades ago – was a tourist blackspot. Ben Lowry (@Benlowry2) is News Letter editor