You could credit the luck of the Irish, but DJ Naylor’s good fortune has more to do with a solid work ethic and good instincts than plain luck.

Still, there’s at least a little bit of it in his story. Some chance, too. And whiskey.

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Naylor, who owns Celtic Crossing in Cooper-Young, grew up in Ballina, a small town in the west of Ireland whose name might sound familiar: It was recently in the news when the ancestral home of President-elect Joe Biden threw a celebration after the election.

“His great-great grandfather, or maybe someone further back than that, left years ago, but I know his cousins, the Blewitts,” Naylor said.

He’s proud of it. To him, it’s a local-boy-done-good story.

Naylor moved to the states in 1994 and most of his story comes after that; he’s spent more than half his life on this side of the Atlantic, the last 20 years in Memphis.

But it started back in County Mayo. Derek John is the 10th child in a family of 12 children, born Aug. 5, 1969.

“That’s significant because it’s 50 years to the day after (master distiller) Elmer T. Lee was born, so that’s my bourbon,” he said.

He was a gifted athlete, a star soccer player and surprisingly, a semi-professional basketball player. He was the point guard for Team Harp in the Irish Basketball Association National Basketball League when it went to the finals in 1990 and won the championship in 1991.

He was bound for other things though, and in 1994 arrived in the states the day before onetime NFL star O.J. Simpson, charged with murdering his ex-wife and her friend, led police on a low-speed chase in a white Bronco.

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“It was on all the TVs,” he said. “I thought ‘What is this place? What have I done?’ ”

He was in Boston, where he would live and work in IT for the next six years. But he had a friend in Memphis and he ended up here for a visit, then another, and eventually he decided to move here.

“Well, I liked it, first of all,” he said. “But I also realized it would be a good place to invest in real estate, and that was my plan.”

For another five years, he was an IT “road warrior,” traveling around the country for a large accounting firm, troubleshooting software.

But he lived here and started buying real estate. One night he happened to go for a drink at the Glass Onion.

“I knew when I walked in there that I wanted it for a pub,” he said. “And when I waited over 15 minutes to order my beer, I knew I’d get my chance.”

He did. The Glass Onion closed and Celtic Crossing opened on June 2, 2005. This year they quietly celebrated its 15th anniversary with a shot of whiskey for everyone gathered on the patio. A party was out of the question during COVID but for Naylor, there is no question about whiskey. If it can be poured, it will be.

He started whiskey tastings at the pub four years ago, an idea he credits to his wife, Jamie. They met there in 2009, a lucky chance encounter when she walked into his gin joint.

“It was a Sunday night, but I was off the next day for MLK Day, so a friend and I went out for a few drinks and ended up there,” she said. “We met, ended up staying there talking late, and he called the next day and invited me to a Grizzlies game. And then we just started dating.”

Now they’ve got four kids, two dogs and a guinea pig. Their big house in an upscale and secluded Midtown neighborhood is easy to find: It’s the one with the bicycles, electric cars and wagons out front, with a pool out back where Naylor takes icy plunges through the winter. They communicate via Alexa devices in each room and the girls — they’re 8 and 5 —like to tell Alexa to turn the lights out in each other’s rooms.

The other two children are 3-month old twins, a boy and a girl. It’s a bit chaotic, very welcoming and warm. In a sunny corner room — windows on the east and west — is the library where Naylor keeps his extensive collection of whiskey.

He loves soccer, and opens the pub whenever there’s a game people want to watch. He likes a Guinness and good conversation. He’s a devoted father, doting husband and a constant and caring companion to his 16-year-old miniature pinscher; he’s smitten with Rosy, the furry guinea pig.

But he really loves whiskey.

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He travels to distilleries, schedules visits to liquor stores when he travels, makes arrangements to get nephews (he has plenty) to get bottles from Ireland to Boston, where he collects them.

COVID has dampened the travel, but it’s reinvigorated the whiskey tastings. On March 13, he co-hosted a Whiskeys of the World tasting with The Daily Memphian. It was the day COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and a week before Memphis dining rooms were closed.

In April, he was closed, so he held his first Zoom tasting and has continued to offer a Zoom option even though Celtic is open. It’s so popular that more people taste on Zoom than show up at the pub.

“We’ve done more than 100 whiskeys at the tastings now, and it’s gotten to where I really know a lot about it,” he said.

He can point to a bottle and offer something. This one is smoky, this was aged in a port barrel, this one in a Bordeaux barrel, he visited this distillery last year, that one the year before. Have a look at that bottle — isn’t that label a work of art?

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The collection includes bourbon and other American whiskey, Scotch whisky, Japanese whisky, the sole whiskey from Taiwan, and, of course, Irish whiskey. (Don’t worry; those “ey” and “y” spellings are correct.)

Aiden, the 3-month-old boy, is enchanted by the wall of whiskey. His eyes track over the colorful bottles, stopping when something — a color, a shape perhaps — gets his attention.

Naylor does the same.

“You have to taste this one,” he says, climbing on a chair, baby in one arm, to retrieve a bottle of Liberator Irish whiskey from the top shelf, shrugging off concerns: “Don’t worry. I do this all the time.”

He’s passionate about it. He’s evangelical.

“I don’t really consider myself a whiskey drinker,” he said. “I’m a whiskey taster. It’s just so interesting to me, it all has so much history and there’s a story in every bottle. I just want to share it with everybody.”

He just started private tastings. Last week he held his first corporate tasting for the company CBIZ, which did the tasting in lieu of a holiday party this year. He has others booked and will do tastings for a group of friends, a family — any group.

“It really creates some bonding that people need, particularly right now,” he said. “Once people get a little sip of whiskey in them, it just breaks the ice and they start talking to each other.”

He provides the samples and the instruction, and he conducts them from his library.

He’s found, since the twins have arrived, that the best time to prepare — whether researching on the computer or tasting — is about 5 a.m.

“Have you ever tasted whiskey in the early, early morning?” he asked. “I love it. There’s no noise, no distractions. It’s a great way to start the day.”