There are countless tales of the greats of golf who have strode the fairways of Moortown in the storied history of the Leeds golf club - from Walter Hagen to Greg Norman, Seve Ballesteros to Nick Faldo - but they can even regale anecdotes of those that didn’t quite make it to Yorkshire’s pristine heathland treasure.

Take the story of Shane Lowry, for instance, the 2019 Open champion and holer of the clinching putt at the last Ryder Cup in September.

“It was the last time we hosted the Brabazon Trophy,” begins Jamie Allison, the club chairman who was captain of Moortown that year of 2009.

“The winner was an Irish guy called Niall Kearney, but the one Irish guy who couldn’t play in it because he got a wildcard into the Irish Open was Shane Lowry.

In the swing: Sam Bairstow playing in the 2021 English Amateur Championship at Moortown won the Brabazon Trophy earlier that year.

placeholder image — In the swing: Sam Bairstow playing in the 2021 English Amateur Championship at Moortown won the Brabazon Trophy earlier that year.

“And he only went and won the Irish Open as an amateur.

“So I had a photograph taken of the Irish players and myself giving the cup to Niall.

“We were up at the Jigger Inn at St Andrews for the Dunhill Links a few years ago. I bumped into Lowry, showed him the picture and said we nearly met once back in 2009 when you didn’t turn up to play in the Brabazon at Moortown. He paused for a second, looked at me, then burst out laughing. He said: ‘Niall still pulls my leg because it was a really big deal that he won the Brabazon but he never got one line in the newspapers because I was all over the papers winning the Irish’.

“And if I’m right,” continues Allison, “Tommy Fleetwood came fourth that year. He always used to go to all the tournaments with his grandparents. There were one or two famous people playing.”

Moortown Golf Club, Alwoodley, Leeds. Pictured A golfer heading up the 10th Gibraltar the signature hole on the course.

Another field of 144 of the world’s leading men’s amateurs are headed back to Moortown later this month as the club hosts the Brabazon Trophy for a sixth time. No other club has held the four-day strokeplay event more.

“We’ve very excited about having the Brabazon. It’s quite an honour,” says Allison, a member at the club for 50 years.

The event costs nothing to bid for and doesn’t bring much money into the coffers, but for a club of Moortown’s repute - three years away from the centenary celebrations of its staging of the first Ryder Cup in the UK - it merely reaffirms the club’s standing. Leading amateur events bestowed on them by either England Golf or the R&A are Moortown’s ambitions these days. Back in the 1980s the club was a regular stop on the European Tour, hosting the Haig Whisky and CarCare Plan-sponsored tournaments.

“They put Bernhard Langer up in one of the rooms above the clubhouse,” says Allison. “All the cleaner could hear at night was him putting up and down the carpet.

A view up the 18th at Moortown to the clubhouse.

“Then you’d get Greg Norman turning up in a different colour Ferrari every day. We used to pick Seve up from the airport.

“We just didn’t have the infrastructure to keep up with the growth and they’re hitting the ball such prodigious distances, even though we’re over 7,000 yards, they’d just kill us.”

The Brabazon Trophy, won in recent years by Yorkshiremen Sam Bairstow, Nick Poppleton and Ben Schmidt, runs from Thursday, May 21, to Sunday, May 24, at Moortown.

Club secretary Peter Rishworth said: “It’s hugely important. Amateur golf is something we’ve been big supporters of for many years. We used to do European Tour events but as times change, professional events and the demands on the courses means we have leant more towards the amateur events.

“Six times as Brabazon hosts is wonderful for us. It’s about as good as it gets for amateur golf and is exciting for the club.”