Tom Widley is a man who is starting to emerge from the shadows.

General manager at Holywood Golf Club in Belfast, Northern Ireland, it would be very easy for the 35-year-old to fade into the background when it comes to the day-to-day running of a golf club recognised the world over as ‘The Home of Rory McIlroy’.

McIlroy’s DNA is all over Holywood Golf Club. A local lad, he grew-up just around the corner and learnt to play golf at the parkland course that overlooks Belfast Lough.

His association with the club cannot be underestimated – as soon as you enter the clubhouse, you get a feel for the connection, and the amount of pride that the members take in having one of the world’s best golfers associated with their club. Even the Wi-Fi code bears his name.

And although McIlroy’s involvement – and past financial support – should not be ignored, it’s important to appreciate that he has no influence in the day-to-day running of the club. That remit falls squarely on the shoulders of Bristol-born, Tom Widley.

A late comer to the game of golf, Widley only picked-up his first club aged 15, and within a four-year period, was playing off two. “I played a lot of golf around the age 18, when I should have been working on my A-Levels,” he recalls.

“My attention was easily grabbed by other things, and as I loved playing golf, I practised all the time. In the summer, I’d play twice a day, multiple times a week.”

Accepted into university to study business, Widley declined the offer, instead opting to pursue a career in golf.

“I knew myself well enough to know that if I went to university, it would have been more about having fun – which is not a bad thing. So, I thought it was probably a safer and more sensible option to move towards [a career] whereby I could learn and work at the same time.”

That decision has since paid dividends, and aged 19, Widley got his break when David Griffin – now director of golf and leisure at Celtic Manor – offered him his first role working as a PGA trainee professional at The Bristol Golf Club, then operated by Crown Golf.

Widley spent seven years working in Bristol, and during this period, met his partner Katherine – who hails from Hillsborough, Northern Ireland – which partly explains how the next few years saw his career yoyo between Belfast, and the west country.

“Crown Golf were in a transition period [in 2014] and were in the process of selling off some of their clubs, so at the time I was happy to move back to Katherine’s parents [in Belfast] which is how the job working at Darren Clarke’s Golf School came about.

“It was good, the students were great but it was also cold and wet,” laughs Widley.

The couple moved back to Bristol once Katherine had finished her PhD, so Widley landed a role as a golf coach at Long Aston Golf Club which is where, after a couple of years teaching, he realised that he wanted to progress a career in management.

“In my last year at Long Ashton, I would be working six days a week, for ten to 12 hours a day, so I was a busy coach. It was physically demanding and by the end of the day, my back and knees would be aching, which is when I asked myself ‘can I do this for the next forty years?’

“I remember looking at the GM at Long Ashton at the time thinking, rightly or wrongly, that I could do that job. I knew that I didn’t want to coach any longer, so decided that I wanted to move into the admin side but needed some experience that was relevant to business, and not coaching.”

Widley left Long Ashton in October 2018 – taking a year’s sabbatical from the industry – before cutting his teeth on his first managerial position at Worlebury Golf Club, just outside of Bristol, spending two-and-a-half years in the role before a vacancy captured his attention.

“The general manager’s job here at Holywood wasn’t advertised in the traditional way,” said Widley. “It wasn’t on the GCMA website or even the Irish GCMA’s website… I saw it on LinkedIn and applied.

“It was quite a forward-thinking job description, which is what appealed.”

So Widley returned to Belfast at the end of April 2022, armed with a remit to shift the focus back onto the golf course at Holywood, where a new £2 million clubhouse refurbishment – partly funded by Rory McIlroy – had taken centre-stage arguably to the detriment of the course.

Part of that clubhouse redevelopment included a state-of-the-art academy equipped with a gym, five indoor bays, three Trackmans and two HD simulators. But as Widley explains, as spectacular and grand as the new clubhouse is, it does bring financial pressures.

“Before this was here, it was very much a normal members club, it was a smallish clubhouse with a normal number of members and now it’s not. This is not a clubhouse you’ll get at a normal member’s golf club,” he explains. “So, we have to staff it, and need the income streams to actually support those costs.”

In homage to their benefactor, part of the new clubhouse includes a Rory McIlroy themed trophy room crammed full of memorabilia from his playing career, including bags from the Ryder Cup, and Major championships.

“It’s a lovely thing to have,” admits Widley, aware that the trophy cabinets help attract overseas visitors. And perhaps in a reflection of where the previous focus was directed, the club has often attracted more visitors to McIlroy’s trophy room, than it did to the course itself.

But one gets the impression that in Widley’s short 18-month tenure, Holywood Golf Club is shifting towards becoming a golf club known more for it’s course and service levels, than its association with McIlroy.

“I recall saying at my interview, that the club needed to stand on its own two feet, and I touched on the fact that course condition needed to be number one, and service levels, number two.”

Widley accepts that there is work to be done on the golf course, with drainage a key aspect especially in a part of Ireland that has an awful lot of rainfall.

Working with architect David Jones, Widley has plans to improve the drainage which he described as “priority number one,” admitting candidly: “In the winter, this golf course becomes a bit of a hodgepodge of holes, as the front nine becomes very, very wet – we have drainage issues that run from our second hole all the through the fifth, seventh and eighth holes.

“More often than not, the second, fourth, fifth, seventh and eighth are often closed as they get very wet, or we operate dropping from the fairway into the rough.

“So, for me to give value to members above more than anything else – which in turn will improve our green fee income – we have to have 18 holes playable. If we’re open, we’re open, and not open with just nine or twelve holes.

“So our first priority is drainage, and then we’ll start looking at bunkering and how the bunkers drain away. We don’t have a huge amount of bunkers, and have removed a couple in the last year, and are looking at ways to help them drain.”

Holywood Golf Club will always will be associated with Rory McIlroy, but if Widley gets his way, the best compliment he can have, would be for the club to be known equally for the quality of its golf offering, rather than merely it’s most famous benefactor.

Even Rory would endorse that.