McManus is no better than the Kinahans.
He’s basically the most powerful and important person in the world of GAA, Horse Racing and Golf.
John magnier is more important than him in horse racing around here.
Jumps racing is only a past time in comparison to the flat.
I’d say JP has fair influence in Coolmore
Nothing like magnier for the past 30 years.
The videos of the private jet taking the players away is something else 
JP is up there with Martin McGuiness as one of the greatest Irishmen that ever lived.
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If I could pay less tax I would. And so would everyone else that posts here
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Could you then complain about public services though? I know, we pay enough tax as it is, and they are still shit, hence wanting to pay less.
The last time there was a Proam in Adare wasn’t there a charity auction. Stupid money being paid by rich people for stupid things.
Did it happen this time?
From the Times a couple Sundays ago.
How JP McManus and Tiger Woods created the biggest event in Irish golf
The discrete friendship that animated the McManus Pro-Am
Tiger’s entrance carried a scent of Hollywood, naturally. Collected by limousine from a PGA Tour event outside Chicago and whisked to a private plane arranged by JP McManus for a transatlantic flight. Alongside Woods in the travelling party was David Duval, the world No 2, and Lee Janzen, the 1998 US Open champion, all of them dancing to the tune of the same pied piper. Their destination? At face value, a pro-am in Ireland’s midwest, worth 30 grand to the winner.
Woods grabbed three hours’ sleep at Adare Manor, and was brought by helicopter to Limerick Golf Club to meet his 1.30pm tee time. The chopper landed in a field next to the farmhouse where McManus’s mother lived, a few hundred yards from the course. Bridie McManus was ready with the kettle. Tiger called in to say hello. The world No 1 yanked his first drive into thick rough and a few hours later signed for 64, a course record. Dazzling, on command.
At the time, Woods was the undisputed champion of the world. A couple of weeks earlier he had lapped the field at the 2000 US Open, winning by 15 shots. And because his time was a commodity, it also had a price. When an Irish tabloid claimed that Tiger was being paid his usual appearance fee of a million dollars to play at the JP McManus Pro-Am, the tournament host called the reporter directly and a retraction was published without delay. Woods didn’t take a cent; when he won the event he put his winner’s cheque back into the pot.
So, what was he doing there? And why has he kept coming back? The simple, unvarnished answer is: friendship.
The first contact was in 1998. McManus and Dermot Desmond met Mark O’Meara, Payne Stewart and Woods at the Isleworth Golf Club in Florida, and persuaded them that a few days of links golf in Ireland would be ideal preparation for The Open. Once they landed in Shannon they were taken by helicopter to Waterville, and for a few days they immersed themselves in the local hospitality: golfing, fishing, dining out, drinking late. They loved it so much that a year later they came back.
The first JP McManus Pro-Am had been staged in 1990 and it was McManus’s aim to run the tournament every five years. By the time he met Woods at the 1999 Ryder Cup at Brookline he was assembling a field for the 2000 event. According to McManus’s account, he raised the possibility of Woods dropping by, not necessarily as a player, but as a guest. Woods could read clearly between the lines.
“If you’re asking me,” he said, “I’m coming.” The following March, on the week before the Cheltenham Festival, Woods’s office contacted McManus, just to confirm that there was still a spot for him in the field.
Neither of them has ever elaborated on their friendship. Both of them are intensely private people, whose privacy has occasionally been invaded over the years; in Woods’s case, ruinously.
When Woods turned up for the 2005 event reporters tried to get into the flesh of his relationship with McManus, and he replied with warm, bland, generalities. “This is all for JP,” he said. “I am here as a friend. You have no idea what he has done for me in my life, and for my good buddy [Mark] O’Meara. We are very close to JP and his entire family, and any time we can support him and his cause, we are always there.”
When pushed for specifics, Woods was not forthcoming. “Whether in business or friendship,” he said. “He was gracious enough to have a special day for me and my wife at a hotel he owns. These are wonderful things. He doesn’t have to do them. That’s what people don’t understand. It’s just unbelievable.”
The “special day” was his wedding to Elin Nordegren in October 2004 in a ceremony at Sandy Lane, the lavish resort in Barbados partly owned by McManus. It was reported, though not confirmed by McManus, that when he spent €40 million redeveloping Martinstown, his Limerick mansion, that a room was set aside for whenever Woods and Nordegren came to visit.
When their marriage disintegrated in a blizzard of tabloid revelations about Woods’s serial infidelity, the first tournament that Woods played outside of the United States was the 2010 JP McManus Pro-Am. In other years, even in years when there was no Pro-Am, Woods would stay in Ireland for a few days en route to The Open, but that year he came especially for the Pro-Am, and returned to Florida before The Open.
He agreed to face the media in Limerick, too, but the exchanges were terse. Like this one.
Reporter: What will your build-up be to St Andrew’s [venue for The Open]?
Woods: Practising.
Reporter: Where?
Woods: Home.
Reporter: Why not play links golf beforehand?
Woods: Need to get home.
Reporter: Personal stuff?
Woods: See my kids.
At a time when Woods’s aptitude for commitment had been publicly trashed, he had been faithful to this promise at least. “It was an enormous ask [by me],” said McManus, “and an enormous effort by Tiger.”
The Pro-Am has always concluded with an outrageous charity auction, with the exception of 2010, when Ireland was gripped in a recession, and McManus thought it would be inappropriate. In 2000, the first year that Woods played, one of the items up for auction was a round of golf for four with him and O’Meara at Isleworth, their home course in Florida.
The highest bidder was Joe Lewis, the currency trader and majority shareholder in Tottenham Hotspur, whose fortune is reported at £4.3 billion in the latest Sunday Times Rich List. He paid IR£1.4 million to play with Woods, on a course that Lewis owned. It was later calculated that if Lewis had put his fortune on deposit for three days the interest would have covered the cost of the round.
Five years later, McManus spent €10 million at the charity auction — including €1 million for a round of golf with Woods — and Dermot Desmond paid €2 million for a Peter Deignan painting of Woods. Since the Pro-Am started, over €140 million has been raised for good causes in the midwest, climbing from about IR£3 million in 1990 to precisely €40,298,615.23 in 2010, the last year that the event was staged.
McManus’s critics, though, have always set his philanthropy against his status as a tax exile. McManus has consistently claimed that there were legitimate business reasons for his residency in Geneva, and when there was no staging of the Pro-Am in 2015 he cited changes in the tax exile rules as one of the reasons why he couldn’t organise the event that year.
His relationship with Woods continued, regardless. This year’s event was originally scheduled for 2020, only to be scuppered by the pandemic; Woods announced his commitment to play as far back as September 2018. When Woods was forced to pull out of the US Open earlier this month, he made it clear in a statement that the next time he would hit a ball in public would be in Limerick.
The full line-up for the event is astonishing: ten of the world’s top 11 players, 25 of the world’s top 50. In order of world ranking, Woods sits sixth from the bottom of the 48 professionals in the field, just inside the top 1,000, sandwiched between two young Irish players trying to make their way on the Challenge Tour.
Woods’s magnetism, though, doesn’t have a number.
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A real feel good story.
Sure woods sued the indo back in 2001 after they said he took his appearance fee which was a million quid at the time. Newstalk done a piece on it at the weekend.
Are the son’s any use?
I know Kieran was involved as a selector with a UCD Fitzgibbon Cup team a few years back with Nicky and likes drinking pints but outside of that has he any interest in taking over the empire? The daughter manages the Foundation i think?
In fairness to the young Magnier’s they are trying to make a go of things themselves.
One or two of magniers sons got the road from coolmore. Think one manages farms in Argentina and the other lad runs hotels in Spain.
Your man Tom always struck me as a bit of goose too when you’d hear him interviewed. I’d say Mv is a pretty serious operator.
Well you’ve certainly done your homework there. It’s the attention to detail that sets you apart from other posters.
I’d say.
Huh ?
Ya a real feel good, started from the top and stayed there story
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