ON APRIL 13, somewhere near Johnson City, Tennessee, Fred Warren couldn’t peel his eyes away from the television. The former East Tennessee State head golf coach watched as Rory McIlroy, the curly-haired firecracker of a golfer he had first seen at just 13 years old in Ireland, was now trying to hang on to a lead on Augusta National’s second nine.
Birdie. Bogey. Par. Double Bogey. Bogey. Birdie. Par. Birdie. Bogey. Playoff. Twenty-one years after Warren nearly got McIlroy to play for him, McIlroy was taking the old coach’s emotions for another ride.
“He’s got a five-shot lead after 10 holes and you think he’s going to cruise in,” Warren said. “Next thing you know he’s making a mess and you’re so entrenched in the experience of watching him because he has always been so compelling.”
As McIlroy’s birdie putt on the playoff hole dropped, Warren’s phone started buzzing. Congratulatory texts filled his inbox. A few weeks after McIlroy’s grand slam victory, Warren couldn’t help but laugh as he talked about the frenzy.
“I started getting texts from people within a couple minutes saying, ‘your guy just won!'” Warren said. “I never even coached him!”
For a brief moment in time, a single frame in a multi-decade film, McIlroy’s was set to move to a small city sandwiched between Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia and North Carolina. McIlroy’s short-lived commitment to East Tennessee State is barely a footnote in the ongoing epic of one of the best golfers of his generation. But in Johnson City, this small fragment is not forgotten.
“He could have gone wherever he wanted,” Aaron O’Callaghan, who had a front row seat to McIlroy’s rise in Northern Ireland, said. O’Callaghan was one of McIlroy’s playing partners on the famous day at Royal Portrush in 2005 — the site of this year’s Open Championship — when McIlroy shot a course record 61 at just 16 years old. “Life came at him fast once he couldn’t stop winning.”
In recent years, the advent of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness in college sports has diluted the meaning of the National Letter of Intent, which seals an athlete’s commitment to an institution. But hanging inside the halls of ETSU’s golf performance center in an emerald green frame, is a two-page NLI – a quaint piece of evidence that still holds its weight.
The date on the letter is November 15, 2004 and though McIlroy’s name and all of the cursory information is typed at the top, the signatures at the bottom, one by a 15-year-old McIlroy and the other by his mother, Rosaleen, have yet to fade.
FRED WARREN WAS ahead of his time.
The longtime golf coach for East Tennessee State took the job in 1986 and quickly realized he needed to change his recruiting strategy.
“We’re a mid-major, we’re not a flagship school,” Warren said. “I realized with golf being a global game, I could find talent outside of the United States so I was probably one of the early coaches as far as going overseas.”
“Fred realized that he probably wasn’t going to get the best player in Tennessee,” O’Callaghan said. “But he felt that if he got the best player in Wales, the best player in Scotland, and the best player — maybe second best player — in Ireland or what have you, then he could be really competitive. And he proved that.”
The first Irish player Warren ever recruited to play for the Buccaneers was JP Fitzgerald, who later went on to become McIlroy’s caddie from 2008 to 2017. Warren didn’t stop there. He continued making his way to different regions of Ireland, Scotland and Wales, establishing a pipeline between the region and East Tennessee State. His work eventually brought about the commitments of players like Gareth Shaw, who went on to be an All-American at ETSU, and Cian McNamara.
Both McNamara and Shaw (as well as O’Callaghan) were part of Ireland’s boys teams. So when Warren was recruiting them and traveling to tournaments all over the United Kingdom and Ireland, there was a name of a younger player that kept coming up. “They’re the ones who told me about Rory,” Warren said. “I started watching him when he was about 13 or 14. You could tell then he had it, whatever you want to say ‘it is, he had it.”
On one of his many trips over to Ireland, Warren found himself watching a 15-year-old McIlroy at Portmarnock Golf Club in Dublin for the 2004 Boys Home Internationals where he played alongside O’Callaghan and McNamara — the latter was already set to play for ETSU — and continued to stand out among older, bigger players.
“One thing I noticed Rory had – and he has that now – you watch him and I use the term like starting a bag of potato chips,” Warren said. “You think you’re going to eat just one or two and then you stay for more. So I would plan to watch him for two or three holes and I’d watch the whole round because he was so exciting.”
Even back then, it was already evident to Warren that McIlroy was not going to be long for college golf. But if there was any chance that McIlroy and his family would entertain the thought of playing for just a year or two, Warren knew he had as good a chance as anyone. After all, some of McIlroy’s closest friends were already bound for Johnson City.
That day at Portmarnock, Warren walked with Gerry McIlroy around the course. When they made their way to the parking lot, Warren finally made his pitch. This, he thought, was his opportunity to sell the McIlroys on East Tennessee State.
What Warren didn’t realize at the time is that Gerry had already done his homework. They had already talked to McNamara and Shaw, their parents too, about Johnson City and why ETSU was the right place for Rory. Still, Warren eased into the topic.
“Would Rory be interested in playing college golf?” Warren asked.
“Yes,” Gerry said. “And he’d like to play for you.”
IF YOU’RE FROM Holywood in Northern Ireland where the population barely crests 11,000, Johnson City’s 73,000-plus may feel like a culture shock. But the town’s quaintness is precisely what made it an easy choice for many junior players abroad looking to hone their games in the States. The scenery helps too.
“Johnson City is quite a bit like Ireland in just the terrain, just rolling hills and cattle,” O’Callaghan said. “People are very welcoming and really, they love their golf here, the small town feel, it’s very appealing.”
“It’s just not a place where you’d want to go as a top American golfer. But us guys over here, we don’t really know college golf,” Shaw said. “When you see the tournaments, you see the schedule. And then when I went first, I went out and saw the practice. It was like, ‘Oh my God, this is unbelievable.'”
Beyond a familiar face in Warren, a practice facility designed by Tom Fazio that was, at the time, rare for a college program, and a stellar schedule, what attracted Irish players like Fitzgerald, McNamara and Shaw was also what brought McIlroy to East Tennessee State on an official visit in the fall of 2004.
“Being in a bigger city, that would be a big turnoff for guys like myself and Rory,” O’Callaghan said. “Here [in East Tennessee] the facility is about a kilometer from where the guys would live.”
Warren’s biggest recruiting tool was word of mouth among players in the UK, so when McIlroy came to Johnson City there wasn’t much convincing to do.
“I think the appeal was going through a place with teammates that he would’ve known guys that he enjoyed being around and could see that it was a place for him to develop his game and take it to professional golf,” O’Callaghan said. “It checked all his boxes.”
Even though Gerry and Warren had come to a verbal agreement on McIlroy’s commitment at Portmarnock, Warren knew well enough that in recruiting, nothing was certain until pen was put to paper. As Warren tells it, one day, he called the McIlroy household to check in and McIlroy’s mother picked up the phone. She told Warren that the head coach at Oklahoma State, Mike Holder, had called their house recently looking to speak with McIlroy.
“They have won 12 national championships and [Holder] is responsible for eight of those,” Warren said. “It would be like Coach K calling one of your recruits.”
Warren said Rosaleen tried to call McIlroy down from his room to the phone, telling him Holder wanted to speak to him.
“She said Rory yelled down, ‘tell him I don’t need to talk to him. I’m going to ETSU,'” Warren said. “So that was the decision. Then, in November, he signed.”
Even as McIlroy turned away other coaches and remained committed to Warren and ETSU, he couldn’t avoid what was happening: the more Mcllroy played, the more it became evident to everyone, including himself, that he was ready – not just for college golf, but for the pros. It’s why O’Callaghan, Warren and Shaw aren’t surprised about what McIlroy has become.
“He was four and a half years younger than me, so at that stage when I was 18, 19, we were on par so to speak,” Shaw said. “He was hitting at the same distance but he could hit it lower, he could draw it more. He could fade it more. He was a very confident young person.”
They all remember the way he hit balls during practice when they first met him at 12 years old and how they sounded different. O’Callaghan remembers the time he couldn’t sleep because he, at 15, was set to face off against 12-year-old McIlroy in a match he thought he might lose. The 61 at Portrush that brought out what felt like the whole town to the course is, for them, impossible to forget.
“I remember a little bit of it. I don’t remember a lot of it,” McIlroy said this week when asked about that round. “It was certainly the first time I’d ever felt in the zone.”
O’Callaghan remembers one particular moment in 2006, when he witnessed McIlroy stitch together four near-flawless rounds of golf that helped him secure the European Amateur in Italy.
“There was a PGA Tour event going on that week [the 2006 Buick Open] and Tiger won by shooting 66 every round,” O’Callaghan said. “And I remember us celebrating Rory’s win and him seeing Tiger’s score and comparing it to his. He was already trying to hunt down Tiger when he was 16.”
The writing for ETSU was already on the wall. O’Callaghan and the rest of McIlroy’s friends knew he was committed to Warren; they also knew that at that point that he was destined for bigger things. Back in Johnson City, Warren also wondered whether McIlroy would actually make his way over. Then, he finally received a call from McIlroy who, Warren says, had a message for the longtime coach: I’m still coming, but you can give my scholarship to someone else.
Warren read between the lines and knew then that McIlroy would likely never sport an East Tennessee State uniform. There was disappointment, sure, but also a very clear understanding. McIlroy was a rocket ship.
“There were no hard feelings,” Warren said. “He was such a kind person and I understood the situation.”
A few days after McIlroy’s call, Warren met with one of the school’s compliance directors and explained the situation. McIlroy was no longer going to be coming to ETSU. As the director moved to close McIlroy’s file, Warren had one final request.
“Do me a favor, don’t get rid of that letter,” he told her. “I think that young man is going to become no. 1 in the world.”
MCILROY MAY HAVE never arrived in Johnson City, but in the history of East Tennessee State golf, he is an essential character. The ripple effects of both his decision to sign there and his decision to not play there linger to this day.
Back in 2005, Jordan Findlay was prepared to stay another year in Scotland and wait for the right time and place to commit to a school. Then, Warren called.
The ETSU coach had known that Findlay, winner of the 2004 British Boys Amateur Championship, was interested in making a move to the States, but there was a problem: Warren had no more room for him. But once McIlroy appeared to be on his way to staying abroad and eventually turning pro, Warren reached back out to Findlay and his family. He couldn’t give them the full scholarship that McIlroy was set to get, but he could offer a spot on the roster that fall.
Without knowing much more about Warren and the program than hearsay and never having visited Johnson City, the Findlays turned to a familiar face.
“My dad was reasonably friendly with Gerry, Rory’s dad, so he actually called him and asked for advice,” Findlay said. “We knew Rory had been on a recruiting trip there so we did it blind and trusted their judgment on it.”
The decision proved to be fortuitous. Findlay didn’t just end up playing for ETSU, he stayed and still works and lives there to this day. “I’ll give you one guess why,” he said, before answering his own question. “I met my wife during my first week here.”
The following season after McIlroy’s unofficial decommitment, Warren also utilized the vacant scholarship left behind by McIlroy to help recruit and bring another player from Ireland: Seamus Power.
“You get one guy and it can lead to a dozen guys. And I think the familiarity of having people from a similar country or same country was attractive,” Findlay, who grew up in a town of 15,000 in Scotland, said. “It just became that Scottish people and Irish people knew. It was a friendly environment.”
“It was a home away from home,” said Shaw. It was fitting then that when Warren retired last year, Power knew who to turn to to replace the Hall of Fame coach. The two-time PGA Tour winner and East Tennessee State alum was on the putting green at the Memorial Tournament in Ohio when he called O’Callaghan to see if he would be interested in the Buccaneers’ head coaching job.
O’Callaghan never played for Warren (he ended up at Southern Louisiana), but he watched as ETSU’s reputation grew in his home country and admired Warren’s program from afar. The link between him and Power, him and McIlroy and the way all their stories have intertwined their home country with this tiny Tennessee town, made the decision easy.
“To be able to lead a program that means so much to your buddies, that people that you grew up with playing with and competed with and played for Ireland with,” O’Callaghan said. “It’s a huge honor for me.”
These days in Johnson City, the connection between the school’s golf team and the part of the world that raised McIlroy remains. O’Callaghan has continued the Warren playbook; the current team features six players from all over Europe.
There’s a senior from Denmark, a junior from Germany, a redshirt sophomore from England, a redshirt senior from Scotland and two young freshmen – Gavin Tiernen from Dublin and Ben Oberholzer, who grew up in Belfast, just a few miles from Holywood.
“It’s come full circle,” O’Callaghan said. “It’s very unique.”
On Monday, McIlroy arrived at Royal Portrush early and played a practice round by himself. As he plotted his way around the golf course he once conquered as a teenager, a robust crowd followed, relishing their chance to welcome home their grand slam winner. Standing among them, watching every shot intently, was Oberholzer.
