Portrush bartender Willie Gregg not only serves drinks but serves as unofficial host and advocate for one of golf’s great destinations
A couple of summers ago, I approached Darren Clarke with two pints of Guinness in hand, gave him one, and told him we have to pose for a photo.
Explaining why, I showed him a picture that Willie Gregg, the manager of the Harbour Bar in Portrush, had recently shared with me. It was of the two of them sitting in a nook of the bar dubbed “Darren’s Corner,” each holding a pint and brandishing ear-to-ear grins while Clarke’s two Claret Jugs sparkled in the foreground (one for the 2011 Open Championship and one for the 2022 Senior Open Championship).
“Oh Christ, everybody knows Willie!” he joked. There’s more than a little truth to Clarke’s jest. If you’ve ever made the trek to Northern Ireland’s north coast for golf and stopped in at the Harbour Bar for a pint or a dram, chances are you’ve met the man who takes it upon himself to be an ambassador for the town, if not the entire country.
Standing 5 feet 10 inches and weighing a scant 130 pounds, Gregg, at 68 years old, doesn’t cast a formidable shadow. “I’ve caught bigger things in a net,” he declares. But the gregarious Irishman serves up a larger-than-life personality. “The reason I’m only nine stone and four pounds,” he adds, flashing a wry smile, “is because whenever I meet someone at the bar, they take a little bit of me home with them.”
The pride and affection he has for the town’s most famous watering hole resonates strongly. Walk into the Harbour Bar when Gregg is working and you’d think he owns the place. In reality, Gregg simply grew up there. As a child, he spent his afternoons hanging out with the bar’s owners, helping them wash Guinness bottles while his father, a boat builder, toiled in his woodshop next door. “From age seven to about 11, they adopted me from two o’clock to six o’clock,” he recalls. “So I met the world.”
At eight years old, Gregg met his first American tourist—a sharp-witted Californian who arrived at the bar, as Gregg recalls, “soaked to the skin.” When Gregg asked him, at the urging of other patrons, if the man was going to come back to Portrush, the fellow replied, “I’ll come back here, kid, when you put a goddamn roof on this country.”
It was just the response everyone expected, but then, everyone else knew who Bob Hope was. Gregg hadn’t a clue. It would be years before he grasped the magnitude of that chance encounter with the legendary actor/comedian.
In those days, Gregg was an enthusiastic, albeit poorly skilled, junior golfer. He gave it up when his junior status expired, but he never relinquished his affinity for the game or for those who play it. Thanks to his role at the bar, Gregg has enjoyed daily interactions with like-minded amateurs, though many of the world’s best professionals prioritize a visit to catch up with him whenever they’re in town.
Because of that, Gregg has amassed a notable collection of signed ephemera from golf’s major championships—flags, shoes, gloves, putter covers—and, back in 2020, he redecorated the front room of the bar, effectively converting it into a shrine to the game. The links of Royal Portrush are but a mile away, but the Harbour Bar is the club’s unofficial 19th hole.
“They come to see the memorabilia as much as they come for a drink,” Gregg says. But the barman also recognizes that, for many of the golfing tourists that he meets, a trip to Ireland is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s for that reason that Gregg invests so much of himself in making sure they have the time of their lives.
“Not only do they come to play golf, but they come to see the best island in the world,” he says, tearing up just a bit. “They come for civility, for hospitality, for madness—a bit of craic,” he adds. “That’s what it’s all about. Life is so short, you need to pack into it as much as possible. I give it everything.”
It’s been six decades since Gregg shook hands with Bob Hope, and plenty has changed, but one thing endures. “Selling good whiskey and good Guinness, that’s what I do,” he says. “I can sort everything but the weather.”
