Australian golf’s leading commentator, Jack Newton, celebrates the brilliant career of Seve Ballesteros. Newton also suggests how golf’s rulemakers could revive shot-making in today’s power game. 

This is part of a series marking the 50th anniversary of Australian Golf Digest and commemorating the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story.

It’s hard enough remembering something that took place 40 years ago, let alone having to wrack your brains while suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Yet for Aussie icon Jack Newton, the drama that unfolded on a Sunday afternoon at Augusta National in April 1980 remains as clear today as it did in the moment.

This year marks four decades since Newton almost did the unthinkable and reined in a swashbuckling Seve Ballesteros to become Australia’s first Masters champion.

For three days the young Spanish superstar made Augusta National his own personal playground, carving and curving shots in all directions to set up a seemingly insurmountable seven-shot lead after 54 holes. But, as we know, no lead is safe around that place come Sunday on the back nine – just ask Greg Norman.

Paired together for the final round, the result looked beyond doubt when Seve birdied three of the opening five holes to extend his gap over Newton to 10. But the tournament was flipped on its head when they arrived at Amen Corner. After taking bogey at 10, Seve dunked balls in the water at 12 and 13 to make double-bogey, bogey, while Newton went on a tear, birdieing the 11th, 12th and 13th to cut the margin back to three shots.

But Seve steadied the ship with a birdie at 15, while Newton rued missed chances virtually the whole way home, including a costly three-putt par on 15 that ultimately sealed his fate.

“Heading into that final round I had a mindset to push Seve as hard as I could,” Newton recalled to Australian Golf Digest over a Zoom chat last month. “I did get close to him for a moment there and it was a lot of fun.

“I remember after we went through Amen Corner, all I could hear was Seve effing and blinding to himself on the 14th tee. I asked him what he was carrying on about and he said he was just going over his blowouts over the previous few holes. I said, ‘You’ll have to wipe it off and move on,’ and, to his credit, he did just that and went on to win by four shots.

“He was a good bloke, Seve. I never had any complaints or regrets about him. At the end of the day I was happy I finished the tournament well. Seve was always a dangerous player to come up against because he could produce golf shots nobody else could.”

Shot-making, “si”. His English? Not so flash.

“He always called me ‘Yak’,” Newton laughs. “But I always knew when he was in a bad mood because I could make out the swear words in Spanish pretty easily.”

To help mark the 40th anniversary of their 1980 showdown, we revisit one of Newton’s mot telling contributions to our magazine. Written with long-time senior writer Rohan Clarke, Newton’s analysis of his great mate Seve appeared in our October 2007 edition, not long after Seve retired from competitive golf. What makes it so timely, apart from reliving the remarkable talent of Seve, are Newton’s unanswered cries for golf’s rulemakers to make a stand against technology, which he believed was robbing the game of the true art of shot-making, and its next generation of Severianos.

Sadly, that void remains. – Brad Clifton

Few golfers have had greater influence on the game of golf than Seve Ballesteros. His retirement this year brings to an end one of the most brilliant careers. Ballesteros won five Majors and 94 professional tournaments. More importantly, Seve helped to shift the balance of power in golf away from America towards Europe. There can be no greater influence on the Ryder Cup than Ballesteros, who almost single-handedly revived that contest.

Ballesteros, who turned 50 on April 9, will always be remembered for what he brought to the game as one of the great shot-makers. I feel for the younger generation of TV viewers that never got to see Seve in his prime. I would hate to think they might remember him as someone who struggled to break 80 in the latter part of his career.

Seve was an enigma. Because of his Latin temperament, he had that bit of fire in the belly that made people love watching him play. He was a long hitter in his day and flamboyant. If he hit a wild shot off the tee, people enjoyed seeing Seve try to get himself out of trouble. And he was a freak at it.

When Seve walked on the golf course he stood out like Greg Norman and Jack Nicklaus. He was famous for his stare, which would make lesser players crumble. Similarly, Seve polarises people. He has got very staunch supporters in Europe but there are those that will point the finger at him and say he’s surly and had too much influence.

I knew Seve quite well. He came onto the professional scene in 1974 when I was playing in Europe. In those early days, he asked me to go and have a look at his swing. (I felt the only time Seve struggled was when he got across the line at the top of his backswing. And, sometimes, that caused him to stay back and either push the ball or hook it with the overuse of his hands.) So I used to have quite a bit to do with him. When he went to the United States, he used to regularly have dinner with my wife Jackie and I.

It’s well documented that Seve was not a big fan of Americans and America, in general. Perhaps it was a little bit of the stigma from the ‘Old Gringo’ days when foreigners, especially Mexicans, were shunned. (In the early 1980s, Seve insisted that he shouldn’t be required to play 15 tournaments to keep his PGA Tour card, since Nicklaus only had to play about seven or eight events. Seve refused to play the minimum 15 and, after having a huge blue with then-tour commissioner Deane Beman, subsequently lost his card.)

Regardless, I don’t think the Americans ever rated him as highly as he should have been. I can remember at Greensboro in 1978, the week before the Masters, Seve had just started playing in America for the odd tournament apart from the Majors. He was seeking to get his tour card and play there full-time. I vividly remember a discussion going on in the locker room. Seve had shot 76 in the first round and there was a few snide comments that he wasn’t that good. Then Seve put together three incredible rounds to win the golf tournament quite handsomely. To some of the Americans who were around on the Sunday afternoon, I said, “I think you’ve under-rated this fellow a bit. He can play, don’t worry about that.”

Talk in the locker-room changed a little bit afterwards. You would hear the odd remark like, “Here comes the Spaniard to take our money.” But it still took more time for Seve to begin to be appreciated. I recall the Masters at Augusta in 1979 when we were both in contention, eventually tieing for 12th. One of the American journos asked me, “What about this kid, Ballastinos or something. What’s his name?”

And I said, “Well, you better learn how to spell it. Because he’s going to be around for a while and he’s going to win a lot of tournaments. And big ones.”

In 1980, Seve won his first Masters, beating me by four strokes.

The most innovative shot-maker I’ve ever seen
It was often said about Seve that you don’t have to worry about him when he’s on the fairway; it’s when he’s off the fairway that you have to be concerned. That originated from the 1979 British Open at Royal Lytham where he made a miraculous recovery to save par from a temporary carpark and went on to win his first Major at the age of 22.

If he’s not the best shot-maker, Seve is certainly the most innovative shot-maker I’ve seen. I would put him and Lee Trevino on a different level to everyone else. Gary Player was a great bunker player but those two had all the shots, particularly out of trouble. They seemed to be able to invent a shot. Trevino, for example, invented the greenside shot through the fringe with the sole of the sand iron to make the ball come out with topspin. (I’ve also seen Trevino hit a bunker shot with a 9-iron from a fried-egg lie. With no green to play with, he was able to stop it on a downslope to a pin cut less than four metres from the edge of the bunker. Tom Watson and I were gobsmacked.)

I remember a shot that Seve played at Royal Melbourne one year. He was in the first bunker on the 14th hole of the old Composite layout, a par 5 that doglegs to the right. In that bunker on the left, he hit it off his knees about 40 metres, over the greenside bunker, to about eight feet from the pin. With ti-tree entering his back swing as well! And that’s where he was phenomenal.

What is often overlooked is that Seve was a very good putter in those early days. At times, you could suggest that his putting made his short game look good. But I think one sort of complemented the other – when you put the combination of a freakish uninhibited short game like he had with the ability to get the ball in the hole like he did.

I think a big reason for Seve’s unique ability and creativity was that he learned the game while playing around the beaches near his home in Pedrena, Cantabria, Spain. He mainly used a 3-iron that was given to him by one of his older brothers. Both Seve and Ireland’s Christy O’Connor were what you might call ‘handsy’ players by modern-day standards. They had incredible ‘hands’. Incidentally, Christy learned to play on a beach near Dublin where he used to practise by hitting 2-irons off the sand. With the wind as a contributing factor, they both learned to manufacture shots.

It’s an incredible thing to watch a handsy player because they have great timing and great feel to play the shot required. What they see in their mind, they also have the ability to execute under pressure. It’s all very well to practise those shots, but you’ve got to have the self-belief, and the ability to see the shot and pull it off under pressure. That’s the difference between a great player and a manufactured player.

However, with a lot of modern teaching, one of the main pushes has been to eliminate the use of the hands. I’m not sure that eliminating the hands is the right step with the short game. The best short-game players I saw all had fantastic hands. From a short-game perspective, Seve was one of the greats.

Today’s players have ‘quiet’ legs as opposed to the overactive body movements in our era. Seve had considerable lateral movement with the upper half of his body, culminating in a prominent leg action, which generated great power. Now, it’s all about the upper half and body rotation. But we were all taught to swing like Jack Nicklaus. Take the club back wide and drive with your legs. Still, to this day, with one arm, my biggest problem is that I drop my right knee and hip down early in the downswing and that’s a legacy of the way we were taught to play.

I have no doubt Seve would have been as successful with today’s equipment. The modern golf ball almost semi-corrects itself. Apart from travelling about 35 metres further than it used to, it provides a much more consistent ball flight. In the old days, if you hit one out of the heel it just went off the world. With the bigger clubheads you’ve got a 50 per cent greater sweet spot. Add the graphite shaft along with the other technological advances and I believe Seve would have enjoyed a massive improvement to his driving – which was the obvious weakness of his game.

It was a shame to see Seve’s game tail off in his 40s the way it did. I didn’t see a lot of him over the past 15 years, but he gave me the impression that he was unhappy. It didn’t look like all was well in his world. I was shocked to hear recently of allegations that he tried to commit suicide on three occasions.

It was my perception that his unhappiness began when he went through a tumultuous period while trying to win the favour of his wife’s parents. Seve was perceived to come from the wrong side of the tracks. It was quite some time before his marriage to Carmen was approved, eventually after the intervention of King Carlos of Spain. I got the feeling that was the start of when his game started to deteriorate. Then he appeared as though he became a bit dirty on the world. It wasn’t the Seve I knew. So I didn’t think he was happy, then the swing started to get off track and he began listening to all and sundry. In the end, it became the old ‘paralysis by analysis’.

Bringing back Seve’s flamboyance
It stands to reason that golf will miss Ballesteros. His absence underlines a noticeable trend away from shot-making in professional golf. In the United States, they are playing homogeneous resort courses on such a regular basis that it gets down to a putting contest on a lot of occasions. I don’t think that is helping American golf – and it’s to the detriment of the game’s shot-makers.

I would like to see the PGA Tour get away from the TPC and resort layouts and play some of the traditional courses with smaller, firmer greens. The good championship courses demand better shot-making. If you play these better courses, you can’t fire at the pin on every shot. The Americans have become accustomed to aiming at the flag. They’re not deterred by hitting it in the water because they’re flying off to play for $US5 million next week. Years ago, if you missed the cut you mightn’t get into another tournament for a month.

But should the governing bodies consider changes to the rules in order to bring back flamboyance? Should they modify the golf ball, ban oversize drivers or introduce some other innovation?

Talking to the players about these big-headed drivers, they find it more difficult to shape the ball with the modern equipment. In our day, we had to manoeuvre the ball and trying to keep it down in the wind was no mean feat. So I would like to see some changes. I have long agreed with Jack Nicklaus’ contention that the modern ball must be brought back to reality. If not acted upon, I’m afraid it’s going to destroy some of the great golf courses and the history of the game. Already, we’re starting to see some ‘funky’ winners of Major championships. That comes from tricked-up courses where the tournament becomes too much of a lottery.

I think the size of clubfaces should be addressed. The sweet spot on these new oversize drivers is probably 50 per cent bigger than the gear we played with. If you hit it out of the heel or toe, you’re not getting the drastic results. Having said that, Tiger Woods is 167th for driving accuracy and fourth for greens in regulation (averaging 69 per cent). What does that mean? Driving accuracy doesn’t matter a fig, quite frankly. So you can tee it up and belt it as far up there as you can. Even if it’s in the hay, you go and find it and hit a sand iron on the green.

I would also be inclined to prevent the use of any club with a loft beyond 55 or 56 degrees. With the 60-degree lob wedge, tour players can escape from long grass and get the ball to stop stone dead on a rock-hard green. I can remember when 48 degrees was a 9-iron and 52 degrees was a pitching wedge and 55 degrees was a sand iron. That was all we had in the bag. Now pros have a wedge with 48 degrees, and there’s three further pitching clubs in the bag at 52, 56 and 60 degrees. It’s a controversial call to ban the very lofted irons, but they have completely changed the game.

Another thought to revive shot-making is to limit the number of clubs in the bag. By reducing the number of clubs from 14 to, say, 10, it would force the pros to manufacture new shots in order to compensate for yardage gaps between clubs. I remember playing at Bob Shearer’s home course in America and we often used to play for big money with one golf club (I always selected a 6-iron) and a putter. It’s amazing how proficient you can get by shutting the face, hooking it off the tee and sending it out there 40 yards further than you normally would. Opening the face up and playing bunker shots with a less-lofted club is a great way to learn to play golf. I can see some advantages in reducing the number of clubs. But I don’t think there’s any way the custodians would allow it to happen. It would be hard to curtail the advancement of club technology, which gets backs to the ball being addressed.

Will there ever be another Seve?
All of the great stories from years gone by are about people who are extravagant. And it’s the same with golf. You have the Tommy Bolts and Chi Chi Rodriguez’. In the modern era, John Daly is a character in the true sense; in the way he grips it and rips it. He’s one player, along Jim Furyk, who doesn’t have one of those well-honed, over-coached golf swings. He’s got his own way of playing. I think we’re likely to see more of these self-taught players come from the Latin countries. Angel Cabrera’s swing isn’t textbook and he’s been a good player for a long time and has now won a US Open. Andres Romero, also from Argentina, looks like he’s very good, too.

The inherent shortcoming with today’s coaching is that there is a sameness about everyone’s golf swing. It might produce more consistency, but it doesn’t produce natural flair. I would assume that someone with all the right ingredients as well as some individuality and flair will beat the rest because, in my opinion, they’re all too stereotyped.

Only a rare golfer like Seve Ballesteros or Lee Trevino would attempt to execute the extraordinary that typifies true shotmakers. For that reason alone there will only be one Seve Ballesteros. – with Rohan Clarke

The post FROM THE ARCHIVE: Seve Ballesteros – the end of an era of great shot-making appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

This is a new series on the 50th anniversary of Australian Golf Digest commemorating the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story.

It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history. Peter Dobereiner wrote this prescient profile of Greg Norman in mid-1984 when Greg had won only two tournaments on the PGA Tour. He would win 18 more plus an additional 70 around the world. Norman would go on to dominate the Official World Golf Ranking as No.1 for 331 weeks, but his nemeses were the Major championships – the measuring stick of greatness in the post-Nicklaus era – of which he would win only two, the 1986 and 1993 Open Championships. He became equally known for failing to close in them down the stretch, the epic example coming at the 1996 Masters when he led by six after three rounds. Upon entering the clubhouse on Saturday night, all but triumphant, Norman encountered his old friend Peter Dobereiner on the way to the locker room. They embraced heartily and Peter whispered in his ear, “Greg, even you can’t f— this one up.” The next day, Norman shot a 78 to Nick Faldo’s 67. Norman had finished runner-up in the Majors for an eighth time.

But Norman had an uncanny touch for making money. Besides piling up prize winnings, he was exceptionally successful at business ventures. In the high-flying IPO days, he took his endorsement money from Cobra in stock and cashed out a rich man. He was Tiger before Tiger. And Norman flaunted it with race cars and mansions. A modest Englishman like Dobereiner looked at Norman in bewilderment, yet his assessment of the golfer-to-be at the start of his career proved prophetically accurate.

In his own right, Dobereiner was a giant of sporting literature, the heir to Bernard Darwin. In fact, Dobereiner was the last link to that roundtable of British writers, including Henry Longhurst and Pat Ward-Thomas, who defined golf for the English-speaking world after WWII. Dobereiner once managed a sugar plantation in India and took up the game on the maharajah’s nine-hole course. He wrote a daily column for the Guardian and a weekly column for the Observer (both out of London) and a monthly column for Golf Digest. He was reckoned to have travelled two million miles, written one million words and collected 200 million readers. He authored or edited 30 books. This piece appeared in September 1984, and it foretold all that was to come for Mr Norman.

– Jerry Tarde

According to the statistics of foreign prejudice, the average Australian is a potbellied drunk with bad teeth. According to the view that Australians hold of themselves, the average Australian is seven feet tall, stomach hard and flat as a spade, built like a brick outhouse with muscles abulge, dazzling white grain against mahogany complexion and clipped, flaxen hair. Furthermore, he is a two-fisted, spit-in-your-eye, down-to-earth cove with none of our effete English intellectual pretensions, and the sheila has not been born who can resist his vibrant sexual magnetism for more than seven seconds.

The mythology of this Australian stereotype is sustained by a tiny fraction of the population, of which Greg Norman is a Class A member. He is a slight disappointment because he does not have the essential Australian coarseness of Jack Newton, who tends to order his steak with the instruction: “Just cut off its horns, wash it off and serve it up.” And Norman does not stay up until 2 every morning drinking 20 pints of ice-cold lager and emphasising his points of view with lusty punches to the face of anyone who voices a contrary opinion.

Otherwise, Norman is an Aussie’s ideal of an ideal Aussie, 6-1, hair the colour of whipped cream (inherited from his Nordic mother) and shoulders so wide that he has to edge sideways through the average doorway.

He is deeply religious, which in Australian terms means that he is a sports freak. As a boy growing up near Moreton Bay on the eastern coast of Australia he played them all: tennis, cricket, soccer, rugby and that curious amalgamation of the two football games plus a liberal seasoning of kung fu, Australian Rules. He also boxed and swam and surfed, and it was a reluctant 16-year-old who was pressed into service to caddie for his 3-handicap mother in a competition. He thought golf a sissy game and it was only curiosity after the round that prompted him to try a few shots for himself on the range. He nailed one shot, and that is all it takes.

In less than two years he was down to scratch and facing a quandary. His ambition was to be a fighter pilot, a properly macho occupation, and he had passed his examinations for flying training. His father went with him for the enrollment formalities into the Royal Australian Air Force. A squadron leader had the enlistment papers prepared, and Norman had his hand poised to sign when he tossed down the pen and announced: “No, I am going to be a pro golfer.” For better or worse, the choice was made and he became an assistant, winning his fifth tournament as a pro (better) and then blowing sky high when he was paired with his idol, Jack Nicklaus, in the Australian Open (worse).

On balance it was a highly promising start to his career, and it was at this time he established the origins of his nickname the Great White Shark. Like Nicklaus, he relaxed from golf by deep-sea fishing, and there are few better waters than off the Brisbane coast.

It annoyed Norman that, having hooked into a big one, his catch would be devoured by a passing shark just as he was reeling it to the surface. He bought a government army surplus rifle. Almost every male over the age of 55 within the British Commonwealth is familiar with the Short Lee Enfield rifle, the standard infantry weapon for half a century or so. (Even today I swear I could dismantle and reassemble it blindfolded, naming each part down to the rear spring retaining pawl. My left palm still tingles at the mention of the Short Lee Enfield because as a young cadet I was detailed for the ceremonial party for the funeral of a Lord of the Admiralty. We must have slapped those magazine a thousand times in rehearsing our “Present Arms” because the admiral inconsiderately took two weeks to die.) Norman’s association with the Short Lee Enfield was less formal. When he saw a shark gliding into the vicinity of his boat as he was hauling in a catch he would give the creature five rounds of .303, rapid fire, and that way he began to land more than dismembered fish heads.

In his first full year as a tournament pro, Norman made the top five of the Australian order of merit, and that qualified him to compete on the European circuit. He arrived in Britain in 1977, having won a Japanese tournament en route, and immediately established himself as one of the most exciting young players on the tour. His attitude was modest and mature. “I am in no hurry,” he told me. “I regard Europe as my apprenticeship as a golfer. Once I have learned to win here there will be time enough to start thinking about Major championships.”

“I am in no hurry. Once I have learned to win here there will be time enough to start thinking about Major championships.” – Greg Norman

For the next five years professional golf in Europe provided fascinating competition. The fledgling European circuit was raw in many ways, compared with the richly endowed and efficient US tour. There was no great depth of playing quality, but the annual battle for supremacy was intense – and the golf, I insist, was often the best being played on any circuit in the world. As well as Norman there were the emerging Severiano Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle and Bernhard Langer, with classy but veteran players such as Neil Coles and Christy O’Connor to pit experience against youthful zeal. Norman regularly won two or three tournaments a year, although only once, in 1982, did he take the title of European No.1. His international reputation, founded on two victories in the World Match Play championship, was enhanced by successes in his increasing world travels, with wins in Fiji and Hong Kong and dominance of his home circuit (Australian Open, 1980; Australian Masters, 1981, 1983).

Norman is a streak player, as he again demonstrated with his winning the Kemper, finishing second in the US Open and winning the Canadian Open in successive outings. He is no slouch at any time, with his booming drives (averaging 274.4 yards on the PGA Tour stats), but when every department of his game clicks into place he is unbeatable. I have only once seen him in total command of his swing, when he walked away with the 1980 French Open at St Cloud and made nonsense of the par 5s with driver and 9-iron.

You could have put Vardon, Jones, Hagen, Nelson, Hogan, Nicklaus and Watson against him that week and they would have been powerless to match his sublime play. Last year he decided that he was ready for America and had already taken unto himself an American wife and sired a daughter. He made a leisurely journey to the United States, winning four successive overseas tournaments on the way to Bay Hill, where he has a house on Arnold Palmer’s up-market development. Norman was a revelation to the cloistered world of American golf that tends to believe foreigners are incapable of playing golf until the ritual laying on of hands by commissioner Deane Beman and the awarding of a PGA Tour card.

At the Bay Hill Classic, Norman tied for first and was beaten, by an absurdly rash putt and Mike Nicolette, in the sudden-death playoff. It was always a matter of some delicacy knowing what to say to a friend who has just blown a winning chance, and a long friendship with Ben Crenshaw has not taught me a diplomatic turn of phrase for the occasion. My trepidation was groundless. Norman sought me out and said, “Come and look at something.” The something was a blood-red Ferrari that had just been delivered, an event of much greater importance in Norman’s mind than losing a playoff. He is an unabashed car perv, in his phrase, and his stable contains two Rolls-Royces plus sundry high-performance beasts. On this occasion, my envy was expressed in a caustic question about what shall it profit a man to own a Ferrari in a country with a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, not counting a reasonable tolerance on the part of the highway patrol.

Norman completely ruined my day by saying that he had an arrangement with a racetrack and could give his hairy monsters their head anytime he liked. My guess is that he will soon start flying lessons.

A few more guesses are in order at this state of his career as, at the age of 29, he is poised at the crossroads. Will he take the Pilgrim’s Progress path to greatness and spiritual fulfillment? Or will he be delivered into the lush byways of winning millions of dollars without causing a flutter among the record books? Well, I will wager my Scottish castle, my Black Forest shooting estate and 20 of my most attentive handmaidens that he will win at least one Major championship. Beyond that I would prefer to hedge my bets. It all depends on that core of ambition and determination residing so deeply within him that even he cannot unravel its secrets.

Those who know him best are equally ambivalent about his potential. Every golfer respects his ability, but, in the rarified level that we are discussing, technique is 10 percent of the game, at most. Australians are notoriously reluctant to find a good word about their fellow countrymen. Peter Thomson, five times the British Open champion, has serious reservations about Greg Norman’s capacity to go all the way in golf. Jack Newton refers to him as the Great White Fish Finger. Graham Marsh, on the other hand, believes that Norman will improve further and become a truly dominant figure. It is, of course, best that we do not know, because life would be arid without the mystery. It is enough to know of the rich rewards to be had from watching Norman’s progress, win or lose.

The post From the archive: Will Greg Norman reach superstardom? appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

This is a new series on the 50th anniversary of Australian Golf Digest commemorating the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story.

Peter Thomson joined the Golf Digest staff as a contributing editor in 1986. At the time, I wrote in the editor’s letter: “Thomson is best known to America as a player, but internationally he is recognised as an architect, writer, administrator and statesman. He once ran for Parliament in Australia and was narrowly defeated. He is credited with founding the Far Eastern tournament circuit, ranging from India to Japan. He is unique in the sport, a reader of hardcover books, kind of an outdoor intellectual.”

After winning a tour event, it would be common to see him accept the trophy, then go into the press tent and roll a piece of paper into a typewriter carriage, and rap out a report on the final round as the golf correspondent to far-flung newspapers. He was the rarest of athletes who didn’t just talk his stories into a tape recorder to be cleaned up by a ghost writer; like Bobby Jones, Thomson laboured over his own syntax. Trying to entice the five-time Open champion to write a column for Golf Digest, I invited him to our offices in Connecticut, and we went to lunch down the road on this beautiful fall day at a typical New England restaurant called the Red Barn. In a private, wood-panelled room, we had an animated discussion about a wide range of potential topics.

What clinched it for me was one sentence. I asked his opinion of Jack Nicklaus’ design work. Jack was the No.1 architect at the time with Pete Dye 1a, and their influence reshaped modern architecture worldwide. “Nicklaus courses,” Thomson said, parsing his words, “are like Jack himself – grim and humourless, with sharp edges.” Even if you didn’t agree with his assessment, you had to recognise the mind of a columnist who would stir and shake our readers.

Following is the first column he wrote for Golf Digest, in February 1987. It refers to a statement made by Jack Renner, who played the PGA Tour from 1977-’88. Known for exceptionally straight driving, Renner had his most historic moment come in the scorer’s tent leading the 1983 Sony Open in Hawaii by a shot over Isao Aoki, who proceeded to hole out his 120-yard wedge on the last hole for an eagle to win. Renner’s good humour at the time demonstrated a sense of perspective for the game that endeared him to Thomson. Jack, now 64, lives in San Diego. Peter continued to travel the world, design courses and offer incisive commentary until his death at age 88 in 2018.

– Jerry Tarde

You don’t have to be a weatherman to notice a change in the climate. Just read Jack Renner’s quote about the US Open course at Shinnecock Hills last year.

“I’ll tell you what’s great about Shinnecock,” he said. “No railroad ties and no greens in the middle of lakes. There are choices here, options. The modern golf course removes strategy and options from the game of golf. It’s a defensive game. You just try to keep away from trouble. Here there are three or four ways to play most holes.”

Does this mean what I think it does? Have railroad ties and greens in lakes had their day? Passed out of fashion like Bermuda shorts and fins on Cadillacs? Are the cold, grey skies of depressing winter giving way to warmer days of celebration and good fun? I, for one, hope so.

The truth is, the TPC at Sawgrass and courses of that ilk are hell to play. Such courses were designed and built for the amusement of spectators, not for the pleasure of playing. They were born in commercialism as part of commissioner Deane Beman’s bold plan to make the PGA Tour self-sufficient by the staging of tour events in its own stadiums. Built into these arenas are the features that make for colourful television – the horror stretches of water and wilderness, railroad ties and savage sawgrass, areas within it might be hoped a front-runner will come to grief to the sniggers of the multitudes watching from the high mounds. The mixture of these patterns makes for the photogenic aspect that magazines and calendars lap up, the reflection of green grass and trees in calm, blue water. (Out west you can even have snowcapped mountains mirrored in the hazards.) It sells a load of real estate but has little to do with golf and, more often than not, gets in the way.

What we are seeing in these courses are not practical innovations, but distortions of dimensions – not works of art but caricatures.

The whole sorry business stems on the one hand from the silly attempt to keep winning scores up at around par for four rounds, about 288. Winning scores in the early 1900s were near the 300 mark, but they steadily declined with the advancement in clubs and balls and the tremendous improvement in course maintenance.

Winners of Major championships, in this day and age, should crack the 270 mark, but for some nonsensical reason the game’s authorities decided that scores should hold at the par mark. To counter low scores came the mucking about with the course, distorting its length and width, and the conversion of non-hazard areas into “penalty zones”. The result of this misguided policy is the present-day competition for the most outrageous and bizarre.

On the other hand is the modern axiom that a golf course will sell real estate, and that the more notorious the course, the higher the surrounding land prices. The trick for the developer, as devised through his architect, is to build something that is photogenically stunning, however impractical, extravagant or absurd. Never mind the golfer, that most gullible of all citizens. “Just get us into the colour magazines” seems to be the working theory.

The effect of this kind of marketing is to lead the game of golf down the garden path. By pounding out the message endlessly that golf is a gambit of tortures, and that it is somehow plebeian to play an entire round of golf with one ball, commercialism is doing a great harm to a noble sport.

These trends have been raging now for two decades or more. The consumer has had precious little say in the matter. The free market has not been in effect, he has been caught up in a mad competition of propaganda.

Yet there is a ray of hope. There are signs of a change of season as a few brave professionals like Jack Renner are beginning to speak their minds. But the little man should be heard from, too. Not
the land speculator or investor, but the golfer who loves the game.

As for me, when I first took to journalism, my kind but stern mentor laid down the principle that if grandmother couldn’t understand what I was writing about, it was a lousy piece of composition. If my grandma can’t play it, it has to be a lousy course.

The post From The Archive: A Lost Art appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

The first in a series of classic stories in Australian Golf Digest looks at a declining Bobby Jones at the end of his life and the enduring relationship he had with the author

This is a new series on the 50th anniversary of Australian Golf Digest commemorating the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts the story in context.

The late Charles Price had the raspy look and voice of the Burgess Meredith character in the “Rocky” movies, but the man had style. He could toss a double-breasted blazer over a silk shirt and a pair of linen trousers and, with an ever-present cigarette at his fingertips, give a perfect impression of Fred Astaire on his way to pick up Grace Kelly. He had style on a golf course and at the typewriter. He was a low-handicapper with a sweetly crisp swing, reliably shooting in the low 70s. And he liked to hang out at good places; he was the official Writer-in-Residence at various times at Hilton Head, the Old Course Hotel and, in his final days, Pinehurst. He liked to complain how expensive it was in St Andrews, even though his lavish room was ‘comped’. “Charley, it wouldn’t be so expensive if you didn’t order your cigarettes and scotches by room service,” I told him. He was the first guy I knew who owned an Acura car, when it was introduced in the image of Japanese luxury and mechanics. He said they named the model after him: Legend.

Charley was the founding editor of Golf Magazine in 1959; a frequent companion of Bobby Jones and Gene Sarazen; correspondent for Newsweek and Cosmopolitan; golf historian whose books included The Complete Golfer, Golfer-at-Large and A Golf Story: Bobby Jones, Augusta National and The Masters Tournament; and a monthly columnist for Golf Digest in the early 1980s through until his death in 1994. His writing had an ageless quality. He liked to remind me to avoid allusions to modern culture: “How people popularly put things today may already be on the way out. In 1956, the most popular lyric in America was ‘Some enchanted evening.’ Six months later it was ‘You ain’t nothing but a hound dog.’”
The piece we’ve selected for this collection is a wonderful exposition of his philosophy of writing in three rings. As he once told our staff, “Everything must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In writing they must interconnect, like the three rings of logic. The first ring is your proposition: what the hell is this piece all about? The second ring contains the proof of the proposition. The third ring draws a conclusion from the proof. The trick, though, is to make the third ring interconnect with the first somehow. Thus the reader is reminded of whatever it was you were trying to prove.”

Along with Herbert Warren Wind and Dan Jenkins, Charley might be considered the third player in American golf writing’s Great Triumvirate. His monthly columns were lessons in how to write. This one originally was published in Golf Digest in April 1991. Once you’ve read it, it’s unforgettable.
– Jerry Tarde

BY 1968 Bobby Jones’ health had slipped from the terrible to the abysmal. His eyes were bloodshot from the spinal disease he had endured for 20 years, his arms atrophied to the size of a schoolgirl’s, his ankles so swollen by body fluids they spilled over the edges of his shoes. This was a man who could once effortlessly drive a golf ball a sixth of a mile.

Still, he had not lost the humour with which he viewed so many things, often at his own expense. Confined to a wheelchair all day, he had to be put into and taken out of bed by a male nurse, who was the size of a linebacker. “He handles me like a flapjack,” Bob said by way of complimenting the man when he introduced us. Then he chuckled. Bob laughed a lot, although never out loud, and he laughed during his last days mostly to put people at their ease, especially strangers. Meeting him then for the first time could be a shock, and Bob knew it. But he insisted on shaking hands with everybody, painful as it had to be, excruciating if his hand were squeezed.

But it was part of the price he insisted on paying for having been Bobby Jones, the one and only.
Having covered the Masters for 20 years, I had become his companion during it by a choice that was as much his as mine. Those years became the most fulfilling of the 44 I have been writing about golf. I’ve never written about them, and don’t know why. In looking back, that period in his life seems as towering as the Grand Slam.

For 10 years we had been collaborating on a number of writing chores. Since I then covered the tournament for Newsweek and wrote a column elsewhere that appeared only monthly, I had the time to act as his legman. He had long been unable to watch the Masters even from a golf cart, and his son, Bob III, was on the course most of the day as an official. I became somebody who could bring younger players and foreign writers to him, someone with whom he could pass off a casual observation about the tournament on TV without fear of explaining himself, someone he could share lunch with now that he no longer would eat where people could watch him.

We would sit at a card table next to a window in his cottage that overlooked the 10th tee. A curtain prevented spectators from looking in but allowed Bob to peer out. He had the same thing for lunch almost every day. First there’d be a couple of dry martinis, which he drank with relish but scolded himself for. “I shouldn’t be drinking these,” he said to me one day. “They don’t mix with my medicine.” The martinis would be followed by a hamburger, in part because he liked hamburgers but mainly because he could no longer cut meat and disliked anyone cutting it for him, so gnarled had his fingers become.

Bob smoked more than two packs of cigarettes a day, sometimes in chain fashion, and they were lined on the card table in neat rows for him, each in a holder so he would not accidently burn himself. An elegant lighter, covered in leather, sat ready. All he had to do was push down a lever that any child could. But even that was becoming an effort. So, with as much nonchalance as I could devise, I’d pull out a cigarette of my own, thereby giving me the excuse to light his.

He had been a man who never looked as though he needed help, even when he was dying, and it was part of Bob’s magnificence that disablement evoked admiration more than pity. Those cigarettes were actually a token of his will to live, not the other way around. One day he left me speechless after I lighted one for him. “I’ve got to give these things up,” he said. “They’re bad for me.”

I had long known what was wrong with Bob, and he asked me not to write about it while he was still alive. “People think I’ve got arthritis,” he said. “Let’s let it go at that.”

Actually, he had what is known as syringomyelia – pronounced sir-ring-go-my-ale-ee-ah – an extremely rare disease of the central nervous system. It took eight years to diagnose. Researching it, I found neurosurgeons who had never even seen a case. “And I guess,” one told me, “that I’ve treated 20 cases of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.”

Syringomyelia is a disease you are born with, although it is not hereditary and does not manifest itself until much later in life. Bob had been 46 when his symptoms first appeared. His right leg began to pain him, then the right arm. Eventually, he lost the use of both legs. For a while he got around on elbow crutches, then a “walker” and finally a wheelchair. Then his whole body began to waste away. Even in that condition he went to law offices in Atlanta every day he could, chiefly to keep from vegetating. The disease had no effect on his mind. Indeed, the complex nature of it is such that it doesn’t kill you, as it didn’t Bob. Clinically, he died from an aneurysm, but actually from the exhaustion of just trying to stay alive. “If I’d known it was going to be this easy,” he told Jean Marshall, his secretary, days before he died, “I’d have gone a long time ago.”

Bob and I first collaborated in 1959, when he agreed to rewrite some old instructional articles for Golf Magazine, of which I was the first editor. Three years later he wrote the introduction to a history I had written with his help, which by itself has been widely quoted, especially his line about golfers sometimes being “the dogged victims of inexorable fate”.

“He had been a man who never looked as though he needed help, even when he was dying,” Price wrote of Jones, “and it was part of Bob’s magnificence that disablement evoked admiration more than pity.”
A few years later another book of mine had been dedicated to him, and we had talked about golf at such length and in such detail that I suggested he put together a book from his old newspaper columns and magazine articles. He had written hundreds, not a word of them ghosted. Bob was reluctant, what with his flagging energies, but I convinced him it had to be done. People would be interested in what he had to say about golf a century after he was gone, or long after every other golfer’s thoughts had left the public yawning. His ideas were so eloquent, so down to earth, so free of technicalisms. He agreed when I volunteered to collect them, cut out what was dated, and dovetail the rest into logical order. These were words Bob himself hadn’t read for 30 years or more.

Like a lot of people who are good at it, Bob did not like to write, only to have written. Notwithstanding, he threw himself into the project. My manuscript was retyped by Mrs Marshall into triple-spaced pages so Bob could mark between the lines any changes he wanted, which he did with a ballpoint pen inserted into a rubber ball he could grip with his crippled fingers.

Sitting with me across from his desk in Atlanta, he’d study every word, pushing each page aside only after he was sure of what he wanted to leave to posterity. I’d note the changes, all the while finding excuses to light his cigarettes. When he was finished, I’d take the changes back to New York, where I lived, while he pondered what was still to be done. The whole process took almost a year. Bob was the most honestly modest golf champion ever. But he was well aware of, and conscientious about, his unique role in the game’s history.

The book became Bobby Jones on Golf (Doubleday & Co, 1966) and I was pleased to learn from Mrs Marshall that work on it had given Bob a new purpose in life. For the first time in years he was doing something creative and constructive, something only he could do, of which the Grand Slam is just a monument.

At this stage in our friendship, it had become apparent that Bob was passing some sort of torch to me. I was a writer, and I represented the generation immediately after his. He wanted to leave somebody behind who could straighten out the facts of his life if they had to be, as O.B. Keeler did when Bob was at the peak of his career. Bob not only seldom reminisced, he disliked to.

We were joined once in his cottage by two former US Open champions from his era. Bob did all the listening, and I could see he was getting restless. Finally, he made an announcement. “I wonder if you fellows would excuse us,” he said. “Charley and I have something to discuss that can’t wait.” Minutes went by after they left. I had to come out and ask him what it was he wanted to discuss. “Oh, nothing,” he said. “I just can’t stand sitting around talking about ancient history.”

Yet he would with me, all day long, with the Masters Tournament taking place just outside his window. Armed with his confidence in me, I approached him about doing a film on his life, concentrating on the Grand Slam, the drama of which had never been explained to my satisfaction. He was reluctant, as I knew he would be. But I pointed out the inevitable. If he didn’t do the film, somebody else would eventually, disarticulating it with the sort of hyperbole he hated and which he made such an effort to avoid in his own accounts.

So he agreed. Somehow word got out before we had hardly begun, and we were approached by potential producers, one of whom conferred with us in Atlanta. But the project never got much further. Bob became too exhausted to continue. He never came back to the Masters and died in December 1971.
I was abroad at the time. When I got home, there was a package from Bob’s office for me. In it was that lighter with which I had lit so many of his cigarettes, trying to circumvent his pride. There was a note from him, typed by Mrs Marshall but signed by Bob in his scrawl. “You weren’t fooling me a bit,” it said.

The post From the archive: The last days of Bobby Jones appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

This is a new series on the 50th anniversary of Australian Golf Digest commemorating the best literature we’ve ever published. Each entry includes an introduction that celebrates the author or puts in context the story. 

It’s often said that journalism is the first draft of history. Peter Dobereiner wrote this prescient profile of Greg Norman in the summer of 1984 when Greg had won only two tournaments on the PGA Tour. He would win 18 more plus an additional 70 around the world. Norman would go on to dominate the Official World Golf Ranking as No.1 for 331 weeks, but his nemeses were the Major championships – the measuring stick of greatness in the post-Nicklaus era – of which he would win only two, the 1986 and 1993 Open Championships. He became equally known for failing to close in them down the stretch, the epic example coming at the 1996 Masters when he led by six after three rounds. Upon entering the clubhouse on Saturday night, all but triumphant, Norman encountered his old friend Peter Dobereiner on the way to the locker room. They embraced heartily and Peter whispered in his ear, “Greg, even you can’t f— this one up.” The next day, Norman shot a 78 to Nick Faldo’s 67. Norman had finished runner-up in the Majors for an eighth time.

But Norman had an uncanny touch for making money. Besides piling up prize winnings, he was exceptionally successful at business ventures. In the high-flying IPO days, he took his endorsement money from Cobra in stock and cashed out a rich man. He was Tiger before Tiger. And Norman flaunted it with race cars and mansions. A modest Englishman like Dobereiner looked at Norman in bewilderment, yet his assessment of the golfer-to-be at the start of his career proved prophetically accurate.

In his own right, Dobereiner was a giant of sporting literature, the heir to Bernard Darwin. In fact, Dobereiner was the last link to that roundtable of British writers, including Henry Longhurst and Pat Ward-Thomas, who defined golf for the English-speaking world after WWII. Dobereiner once managed a sugar plantation in India and took up the game on the maharajah’s nine-hole course. He wrote a daily column for the Guardian and a weekly column for the Observer (both out of London) and a monthly column for Golf Digest. He was reckoned to have travelled two million miles, written one million words and collected 200 million readers. He authored or edited 30 books. This piece appeared in September 1984, and it foretold all that was to come for Mr Norman. — Jerry Tarde

According to the statistics of foreign prejudice, the average Australian is a potbellied drunk with bad teeth. According to the view that Australians hold of themselves, the average Australian is seven feet tall, stomach hard and flat as a spade, built like a brick outhouse with muscles abulge, dazzling white grain against mahogany complexion and clipped, flaxen hair. Furthermore, he is a two-fisted, spit-in-your-eye, down-to-earth cove with none of our effete English intellectual pretensions, and the sheila has not been born who can resist his vibrant sexual magnetism for more than seven seconds.

The mythology of this Australian stereotype is sustained by a tiny fraction of the population, of which Greg Norman is a Class A member. He is a slight disappointment because he does not have the essential Australian coarseness of Jack Newton, who tends to order his steak with the instruction: “Just cut off its horns, wash it off and serve it up.” And Norman does not stay up until 2 every morning drinking 20 pints of ice-cold lager and emphasising his points of view with lusty punches to the face of anyone who voices a contrary opinion.

Otherwise, Norman is an Aussie’s ideal of an ideal Aussie, 6-1, hair the colour of whipped cream (inherited from his Nordic mother) and shoulders so wide that he has to edge sideways through the average doorway.

He is deeply religious, which in Australian terms means that he is a sports freak. As a boy growing up near Moreton Bay on the eastern coast of Australia he played them all: tennis, cricket, soccer, rugby and that curious amalgamation of the two football games plus a liberal seasoning of kung fu, Australian Rules. He also boxed and swam and surfed, and it was a reluctant 16-year-old who was pressed into service to caddie for his 3-handicap mother in a competition. He thought golf a sissy game and it was only curiosity after the round that prompted him to try a few shots for himself on the range. He nailed one shot, and that is all it takes.

In less than two years he was down to scratch and facing a quandary. His ambition was to be a fighter pilot, a properly macho occupation, and he had passed his examinations for flying training. His father went with him for the enrollment formalities into the Royal Australian Air Force. A squadron leader had the enlistment papers prepared, and Norman had his hand poised to sign when he tossed down the pen and announced: “No, I am going to be a pro golfer.” For better or worse, the choice was made and he became an assistant, winning his fifth tournament as a pro (better) and then blowing sky high when he was paired with his idol, Jack Nicklaus, in the Australian Open (worse).

On balance it was a highly promising start to his career, and it was at this time he established the origins of his nickname The Great White Shark. Like Nicklaus, he relaxed from golf by deep-sea fishing, and there are few better waters than off the Brisbane coast.

It annoyed Norman that, having hooked into a big one, his catch would be devoured by a passing shark just as he was reeling it to the surface. He bought a government army surplus rifle. Almost every male over the age of 55 within the British Commonwealth is familiar with the Short Lee Enfield rifle, the standard infantry weapon for half a century or so. (Even today I swear I could dismantle and reassemble it blindfolded, naming each part down to the rear spring retaining pawl. My left palm still tingles at the mention of the Short Lee Enfield because as a young cadet I was detailed for the ceremonial party for the funeral of a Lord of the Admiralty. We must have slapped those magazine a thousand times in rehearsing our “Present Arms” because the admiral inconsiderately took two weeks to die.) Norman’s association with the Short Lee Enfield was less formal. When he saw a shark gliding into the vicinity of his boat as he was hauling in a catch he would give the creature five rounds of .303, rapid fire, and that way he began to land more than dismembered fish heads.

In his first full year as a tournament pro, Norman made the top five of the Australian order of merit table, and that qualified him to compete on the European circuit. He arrived in Britain in 1977, having won a Japanese tournament en route, and immediately established himself as one of the most exciting young players on the tour. His attitude was modest and mature. “I am in no hurry,” he told me. “I regard Europe as my apprenticeship as a golfer. Once I have learned to win here there will be time enough to start thinking about Major championships.”

For the next five years professional golf in Europe provided fascinating competition. The fledgling European circuit was raw in many ways, compared with the richly endowed and efficient US tour. There was no great depth of playing quality, but the annual battle for supremacy was intense – and the golf, I insist, was often the best being played on any circuit in the world. As well as Norman there were the emerging Severiano Ballesteros, Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle and Bernhard Langer, with classy but veteran players such as Neil Coles and Christy O’Connor to pit experience against youthful zeal, Norman regularly won two or three tournaments a year, although only once, in 1982, did he take the title of European No.1. His international reputation, founded on two victories in the World Match-Play championship, was enhanced by successes in his increasing world travels, with wins in Fiji and Hong Kong and dominance of his home circuit (Australian Open, 1980; Australian Masters, 1981, 1983).

Norman is a streak player, as he again demonstrated with his winning the Kemper, finishing second in the US Open and winning the Canadian Open in successive outings. He is no slouch at any time, with his booming drives (averaging 274.4 yards on the PGA Tour stats), but when every department of his game clicks into place he is unbeatable. I have only once seen him in total command of his swing, when he walked away with the 1980 French Open at St Cloud and made nonsense of the par 5s with driver and 9-iron.

You could have put Vardon, Jones, Hagen, Nelson, Hogan, Nicklaus and Watson against him that week and they would have been powerless to match his sublime play. Last year he decided that he was ready for America and had already taken unto himself an American wife and sired a daughter. He made a leisurely journey to the United States, winning four successive overseas tournaments on the way to Bay Hill, where he has a house on Arnold Palmer’s up-market development. Norman was a revelation to the cloistered world of American golf that tends to believe foreigners are incapable of playing golf until the ritual laying on of hands by Commissioner Deane Beman and the awarding of a PGA Tour card.

At the Bay Hill Classic, Norman tied for first and was beaten, by an absurdly rash putt and Mike Nicolette, in the sudden-death playoff. It was always a matter of some delicacy knowing what to say to a friend who has just blown a winning chance, and a long friendship with Ben Crenshaw has not taught me a diplomatic turn of phrase for the occasion. My trepidation was groundless. Norman sought me out and said, “Come and look at something.” The something was a blood-red Ferrari that had just been delivered, an event of much greater importance in Norman’s mind than losing a playoff. He is an unabashed car perv, in his phrase, and his stable contains two Rolls-Royces plus sundry high-performance beasts. On this occasion, my envy was expressed in a caustic question about what shall it profit a man to own a Ferrari in a country with a 55-mile-per-hour speed limit, not counting a reasonable tolerance on the part of the highway patrol.

Norman completely ruined my day by saying that he had an arrangement with a racetrack and could give his hairy monsters their head anytime he liked. My guess is that he will soon start flying lessons.

A few more guesses are in order at this state of his career as, at the age of 29, he is poised at the crossroads. Will he take the Pilgrim’s Progress path to greatness and spiritual fulfillment? Or will he be delivered into the lush byways of winning millions of dollars without causing a flutter among the record books? Well, I will wager my Scottish castle, my Black Forest shooting estate and 20 of my most attentive handmaidens that he will win at least one Major championship. Beyond that I would prefer to hedge my bets. It all depends on that core of ambition and determination residing so deeply within him that even he cannot unravel its secrets.

Those who know him best are equally ambivalent about his potential. Every golfer respects his ability, but, in the rarified level that we are discussing, technique is 10 percent of the game, at most. Australians are notoriously reluctant to find a good word about their fellow countrymen. Peter Thomson, five times the British Open champion, has serious reservations about Greg Norman’s capacity to go all the way in golf. Jack Newton refers to him as The Great White Fish Finger. Graham Marsh, on the other hand, believes that Norman will improve further and become a truly dominant figure. It is, of course, best that we do not know, because life would be arid without the mystery. It is enough to know of the rich rewards to be had from watching Norman’s progress, win or lose.

The post 50 YEARS OF AGD: Will Greg Norman reach superstardom? appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

The passing of former Prime Minister Bob Hawke gave us cause to reflect and to delve into our archives to reprise this ‘My Shot’ dialogue feature from our October 2009 ‘Golf and Politics’ issue:

The post From the archive: My Shot – Bob Hawke appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

By the time you read this there will be a new leader of the free world. And one of the candidates they were all talking about was an old boss of mine.

My media teachers at the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) advised me never to speak ill about a celebrity. But I’m about to break that rule and spill the beans on “The Donald.”

The good. The bad. The ugly.

After my traineeship at Royal Sydney, I landed a dream job in 2011 and moved to the United States to be a teaching pro at Trump National Golf Club in Westchester County, New York. This is one of America’s most affluent and salubrious areas – 40 minutes north of Manhattan. Its membership includes Bill and Hillary Clinton, actor Mark Wahlberg, NFL star Tom Brady, half of the New York Yankees side and many more. It was a mix of celebrities, millionaires and billionaires. During my time at the club I got to know Donald Trump and his many vices – cheating at golf, placing banana skins and empty diet Coke cans in other golfers’ bags, even asking me to sell his used belts in the pro shop (kind of strange for a billionaire). It’s disturbing to think a potential President of the United States possesses this sort of juvenile and eccentric behaviour. These acts are evidence he lacks integrity, maturity and rationale – the very traits I would imagine are critical for a leader to have.

His intellect is on the questionable side too – he isn’t educated at the level as his predecessor, Barack Obama, and his history of personal financial instability demonstrates he is a risk taker.

Without question the man is obscure in every way. Some of the behaviour I witnessed during my time in New York defied belief. He threw tantrums at staff when things weren’t as he wished, he selected his staff on their looks and has even fired ‘fat’ girls. He yelled at everyone and didn’t understand the process of conversation. He fired questions and didn’t wait to hear the answers. He fired staff that were loyal and capable because they annoyed him once. And once you were in his bad books, you were never given a second chance.

He told me directly he held a theory where he tried to surround himself with beautiful things – beautiful women being the most obvious one – and he believed beautiful things will eventuate from this.

But I’m a fair person, so I will list the positive aspects of his leadership I witnessed within the golf club environment.

He is a family man – all members of his family were with him most of the time and the support system amongst them was evident. His sons, Donald Jr and Eric and daughter Ivanka are heavily immersed in his businesses and he fully supports them in their own endeavours. He understands business transactions – you can’t run an empire (golf courses, real estate, Miss America and Miss Universe competitions) without comprehending commercial deals and relationships. He is patriotic and wants to make a difference in his own country using his position of power and influence as a major public figure. He wants to stand up and take action. I respect his industrious and proactive attitude.

Donald Trump is a juvenile and eccentric man driven by the dollar and beautiful women.

Should he become the leader of the free world and will he be a good one? Only time will tell.

But I’m comforted there is at least a Congress in place.

•  Annabel Rolley is an Australian Golf Professional and host of Australian Golf Digest TV www.annabelrolley.com

The post From the archive: What it was like working for Donald Trump appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.

E.B. White wrote, “Analysing humour is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested, and the frog dies of it.” So it would stand to reason that ranking it would be equally devaluing. But logic wasn’t going to stop us. Our goal was to archive the farcical history of our dear game, and to do it right we spent many hard, taxing days in our climate-controlled offices searching YouTube and laughing our faces off. If you disagree with the order or feel a great moment has been omitted, relax. Put down the scalpel.   

34. The joy of streaking is the surprise factor, but the young man who cavorted onto the 72nd green during the 1985 British Open at Royal St George’s got the shocker in the end. Peter Jacobsen recalls executing a perfect tackle: “I jump up, and I’m holding my fingers just a couple of inches apart, telling everybody that, you know, he had a tap-in.”

33. A couples golf date? What could possibly go wrong? After taking a screamer to the shin and holding up play in the 2009 comedy “I Love You, Man,” Jason Segel’s character declares “This is my nightmare!” Sarcastically, he mutters these parting words to his lady: “Please don’t go…”   

32. When Seve Ballesteros won his second Masters, in 1983, then-Augusta National chairman Hord Hardin was charged with asking the first question in the Butler Cabin: “Seve, let me ask you, a lot of people have asked me . . . How tall are you?” There are bad questions that sometimes get good answers, and bad questions that live on simply for their epic badness.

31. After winning the 1982 Players Championship, Jerry Pate throws course designer Pete Dye and PGA Tour commissioner Deane Beman into the water before diving in after them. “Everybody was all mad at Deane,” Pate said. “Everything was wrong about the Players Club, in the players’ minds.” After birdieing the final hole, “I saw Deane, and I walked over and told him, ‘You better give Judy [Beman] your wallet – I’m going to throw your ass in the lake.’ Pete didn’t know it was coming.”

30. In the 139th episode of “The Simpsons,” aired in 1995, Bart hides disappointment at receiving the video game “Lee Carvallo’s Putting Challenge” for Christmas instead of the much more violent “Bonestorm.” As the credits roll, Bart attempts to squeeze as much excitement as he can from the game by selecting driver from the green.

29. The 2004 dramedy “Sideways” posits two friends dealing with midlife criseson a road trip in wine country. Of course, there’s a golf scene.“I know you’re frustrated with your life right now, but you can choose to be less hostile,” says Jack, played by Thomas Haden Church, to Miles, played by Paul Giamatti. Just when it looks like a slow-play skirmish will boil into a full-on brawl, Jack growls, twirls his driver over his head and sneers like a lunatic, “This is going to be fun.”

28. The infamously sour former Augusta National chairman Clifford Roberts was once tricked into being a punch line at a members’ event. The club’s Frank Christian Jr had filmed Roberts holding a rubber duck and explaining why there were no ducks in the ponds. But Christian sped up the film and dubbed audio of a child singing the bath-time refrain, “Rubber Ducky.” “You could look around the room and see tears coming down the members’ cheeks as they tried to keep from laughing,” Christian said.“Mr Roberts didn’t take it too well.”

27. Late actor Jack Lemmon missed the cut in all 25 of the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Ams he played, but not for a lack of trying. His hard-luck story was best exemplified in 1987 when he attempted a dangerous cliff-side shot at Cypress Point. To keep him from falling, playing partners Clint Eastwood, Peter Jacobsen, Greg Norman (and Norman’s caddie, Pete Bender) formed a human anchor by holding onto one another’s belts. Lemmon swung and put the ball back in the fairway, but, as was his custom, shanked the next one into the ocean.

26. If the prank happened to you, you’d be pissed. But when you’re watching Johnny Knoxville and crew in “Jackass: The Movie” hide in the bushes and airhorn-blast other unsuspecting golfers in their backswings, it’s hysterical. Kudos to the victim who settles the score by calmly teeing a ball at the cameramen.

25. Most “Entourage” fans can’t relate to Vince, the dashing, insouciant Hollywood megastar who fends off women’s advances at every turn. But his half-brother, Johnny Drama (played by Kevin Dillon), speaks our language, especially on the course. There’s Johnny getting grief about his 15-handicap and not being able to play to it. There’s Johnny betting more than he has, then doubling down even as he’s fighting the hooks. There’s Johnny taking the club Tom Brady lent him and snapping it in two. Well, at least most of it’s relatable.

24. “Space Jam” is not only the highest-grossing basketball movie of all time, it boasts a golf scene of heavy hitters. Bill Murray marks himself and Larry Bird for birdies after the Looney Tunes kidnapping of  Michael Jordan through the cup. His rationalisation? “We weren’t in any emotional state to putt.”

23. In one episode of the 1960s sitcom “The Munsters,” the Frankenstein-like character Herman causes mayhem on a golf course, including making doormat-sized divots (flown past the camera using primitive Hollywood trickery). Says son Eddie about Herman’s opening drive: “It’s in the rough, on the third hole, 1,500 yards away.”

22. Rarely do we see tour pros exhibit genuine, childlike exuberance. Boo Weekley mounting his driver like a horse before cantering off the first tee on the final day is a classic image of the 2008 Ryder Cup. A down-to-earth country boy from the swamps of Florida helps the US team secure victory by horsing around.

21. So many memorable quips in “Tin Cup,” but our favourite moment is the understated portrait of the struggling pro. After Roy McAvoy (Kevin Costner) tells psychiatrist Dr Molly Griswold (Rene Russo) he doesn’t need the full 30-minute session because he’s “not that f—ed up,” he plops on the couch to reveal golf shoes with the spikes removed.

20. In a four-minute skit on “The Honeymooners,” Art Carney as Norton teaches Ralph, a bus driver from Brooklyn played by Jackie Gleason, how to play golf from an instruction book. “What do they mean by ‘address the ball?’ ” Ralph asks, which leads to Norton taking his stance and intoning, “Hello, ball!” The episode premiered in 1955 and remains a cult classic.

19. Bubba Watson, Rickie Fowler, Hunter Mahan and Ben Crane showed skin and proved they could sing and dance (sort of) in 2011 when The Golf Boys debuted the hit single “Oh Oh Oh.” They followed that jam with “2.Oh” in 2013.

18. In 2007, the golf world largely believed Tiger Woods’ dominance had made the game more accessible to African Americans. So Chris Rock drove a golf cart through Harlem to test the theory. His first interviewee mistakes Rock as Tiger. Rock then asks a young boy on the street: “Who do you like better, Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan? Tiger Woods or O.J.?” In both cases the boy answers the latter. Much of the stunt is slapstick, but Rock shrewdly shines a light on more serious issues.

17. What are you doing when you sit on your hands, stick out your gut and appear entirely uninterested? Jason Dufner attended a youth centre for a charity event in 2013 and was photographed spacing out. Keegan Bradley was among those who noticed the candid image and immediately tweeted it. Within 24 hours, Dufnering became a verb, and the man whose pulse seemingly never wavers became a sensation.

16. Just another note for the file of Bill Murray can do no wrong in golf. In the 1993 Pebble Beach National Pro-Am, he pulls a kindly old lady from the stands to give her a twirl, flings her onto her backside in a bunker, and ends up with laughs and a classic highlight. He got a slap on the wrist. Anyone else ends up getting arrested.

15. Ben Hogan was a perfectionist down to the extra spike in his shoes. To emulate him was first and foremost to get the details right. In the 1951 movie “Follow The Sun,” Glenn Ford, a fine Hollywood leading man but a chop on the golf course, got everything earnestly wrong. Ford’s deferential manner was the opposite of Hogan’s commanding coldness. The iconic white cap was clownishly big. When the actor was holding a club, let alone swinging it, we groaned. Now enough time has passed that we can laugh.

14. “I’d give up golf if I didn’t have so many sweaters. . . . Arnold Palmer told me how to knock eight strokes off my scores – skip a par 3. . . . I’ve been playing the game so long, my handicap is in Roman numerals.” Bob Hope had a million of them, fuelled by a love of golf and a commitment to servicemen and women. For nearly six decades of Christmases, Hope entertained the troops, always with a golf club in hand.

13. Drinking, eating, gambling, getting arrested: John Daly’s Bacchanalian career provides us with memories fun and not so fun. His 2008 shirtless interview with a reporter is superlative for the fact Long John is being himself while totally in control. After a pleasant, articulate promotion of his Murder Rock Golf Club, Daly adds: “Don’t underestimate the fat man.” 

12. Formerly known as that angry dude who bent a putter around his head, Woody Austin changed his image forever at the 2007 Presidents Cup when he faced a precarious stance that ended with a face-first splash into a water hazard. Embracing the joke, he donned diver goggles in his singles match and became forever known as “Aquaman.”

11. Erma Bombeck wrote: “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humour and hurt.” The 72nd-hole triple-bogey made by Jean Van de Velde at the 1999 British Open would crush most mortals, but the spirited Frenchman found a way to keep on the right side of that line.

10. The swift and vicious downturn of Tiger’s personal life in 2009 was easy fodder, especially with all the innuendo golf naturally provides. Striking just the right notes was Tina Fey on “Saturday Night Live” with her character, former mistress Ashlyn St Cloud. Alongside an uneasy Jim Nantz (Jason Sudeikis) and a perplexed Nick Faldo (Bill Hader), St Cloud offers her unorthodox reads on the former World No.1.

9. In the 1953 classic “The Caddy,” Jerry Lewis plays Harvey, the son of a famous golf pro who wants him to be a tournament player. But Harvey is afraid of crowds and becomes a teaching pro. His best student, played by Dean Martin, gets good enough to join the tour, with Harvey as his caddie. The two have a fight during a tournament so uproarious that they’re advised to get into show business, whereupon they meet another comedy team known as Martin and Lewis. Ben Hogan, Sam Snead and Byron Nelson star as themselves.

8. A golfer losing his head can be sad, but also entertaining. Legendary steamer Tommy Bolt flung his driver into a lake in the first round at the 1960 US Open, claiming that the sound of fish jumping caused him to hook back-to-back tee shots into the drink. Claude Harmon had to duck out of the way. A kid in the gallery swam out and returned the driver to its owner.

7. “Right now there are 600 Titleists that I got from the driving range in the trunk of my car!” In “The Marine Biologist” episode of “Seinfeld,” Kramer sings this line with enthusiasm. But Jerry’s eccentric neighbour grows frustrated with the game when he attempts to hit those balls into the ocean and makes contact with just one. (“I stink! I can’t play! The ball is just sitting there, Jerry, and I can’t hit it!”) The episode concludes with Kramer’s quiet satisfaction when he learns that the ball stuck in a whale’s blowhole. (“A hole-in-one, eh?”) Excitement, humiliation and gratification – Kramer exudes three distinct emotions golfers know all too well.

6. Few golf moments have as many sound-comedy ingredients as Lee Trevino tossing a rubber snake to Jack Nicklaus on the first tee of the 1971 US Open playoff. It starts with the showmanship of Trevino – a jaunty, irrepressible outsider with an intuitive gift for funny. It builds with the clash of an irreverent “low” act against the idealised “high” totems of a dignified sport: the tense stillness before a playoff for a Major, the grim presence of the ultimate champion in Nicklaus, the hallowed ground of Merion, the prim USGA officials. Finally, it closes with the validating kicker: Trevino wins.

5. When Bing Crosby was hospitalised during his Crosby pro-am in 1974, his friend Phil Harris, the singer with a penchant for the drink, pinch-hit in the TV booth, with predictable results. After Chris Schenkel observed that Johnny Miller had hit a shot with a smooth touch, Harris replied, “Yeah, as smooth as a man lifting a breast out of an evening gown.” Said Crosby: “I was under such heavy sedation that week I hardly remember anything about watching the tournament on TV. But that remark from Phil woke me up.”

4. Of all the scenes from “Happy Gilmore,” we’re giving the greenside fistfight the nod. Just think how many times you’ve heard golfers and non-golfers alike quote Adam Sandler’s taunt to a hard-jabbing Bob Barker: “The price is wrong, bitch!”

3. How high did Phil Mickelson jump when he sank the birdie putt for his first Major win, at the 2004 Masters? So high you could have fit a dictionary under his feet. Well, not an Oxford, but maybe an abridged Merriam-Webster’s. Phil slipping to his keister on the rocks in 2013 at Pebble Beach, though a rivalling display of athleticism, was not as grand a moment.

2. In 2002, Robin Williams performed what The New Yorker called “probably the funniest, and the most profane, peroration on the sport that anybody has ever delivered.” His send-up of a ribald Scotsman explaining golf delights lovers and haters of the game equally. A somewhat censored version: “Here’s my idea for a sport. I knock a ball into a gopher hole. ‘Oh, you mean like pool?’ No, forget pool, not with a straight stick. With a little broken stick, I knock a ball into a gopher hole. ‘Oh, you mean like croquet?’ No, not croquet – that’s a pussy sport. Put the hole hundreds of metres away. ‘Oh, kind of like a bowling alley?’ No way. I put shit in the way like trees and bushes. So you whack the ball, and you keep whacking away until you feel like you’re going to have a stroke. That’s what we’ll call it, because every time you hit it, you think you’re going to die. And right near the end, I’ll put a nice flat piece with a tiny flag to give you hope. In front I’ll put a pool and a sand box to grab your ball. ‘You do this one time?’ Oh, no, 18 damn times.”

1. Humour, said Sid Caesar, is truth with little curlicues. In the “Caddyshack” Cinderella scene, Bill Murray understood with a comic’s intuition how in our sports fantasies, everyone secretly and grandiosely self-narrates in an announcer’s voice. In an inspired moment on a chaotic set, he channelled his genius for the freewheeling and bravely personal into 186 words that earned a rightful place in the “100 Greatest Movie Quotes of All Time.” In 2014, Murray said, “You have to remind yourself that you can do the very best you can when you’re very, very relaxed.” Murray’s reverie of the “former greenskeeper about to become Masters champion,” like his Dalai Lama soliloquy (“Big hitter, the Lama. Long.”), was completely improvised. The scene’s only stage direction: “Carl cuts off the tops of flowers with a grass whip.” But after director Harold Ramis mused on the play-by-play device, Murray shot back, “Say no more.” His curlicues – “tears in his eyes, I guess . . . this normally reserved Augusta crowd” – are slightly off in a way that is ineffably dead-on, so that a daydream becomes the most golf-authentic moment in the film (and the way Carl Spackler self-consciously lowers his voice around two Bushwood members is among the most authentically human). Spackler’s concluding words, “It’s in the hole!” sum up a perfect performance.

The post The 34 Funniest Moments In Golf History appeared first on Australian Golf Digest.