LOVE FOR LYLE
TIGER Woods just doesn’t do “help” requests.
But there it was, a bold yellow pin on the great man’s hat.
It was 2012 and Leuk The Duck — the symbol that has come to represent Challenge Cancer — was splashed across TV screens around the world, courtesy of just one thing: the respect Woods has for Jarrod Lyle.
Lyle, just like he still does with the old dudes he learnt to play golf with in Shepparton in the early 1990s, had Tiger’s number in his phone and quickly shot him a text of thanks from his hospital bed as he battled through his second bout with leukaemia.
The gist of Tiger’s personal response was “just get better, you belong out here with us”.
That story still resonates with Lyle and, as the years progress, it is a story he holds fondly.
“Tiger got asked to do everything for everyone for so long and I knew that he just didn’t do that sort of stuff,” Lyle once told me.
“He made a blanket rule, but broke it … for me. A bloke flat in a bed in Melbourne, halfway around the world.” You can sense the pride. Here was a fella who some thought would die in a hospital bed in 1999 as a 17-year-old, an unfulfilled talent struck down by cancer on the eve of what would have been his senior pennant golf debut at Commonwealth.
Jarrod didn’t know the odds of a recovery then; he didn’t want to.
“Why? I was going to get better. I didn’t need to.”
If the odds were reasonable then, they were surely a million to one that he’d bounce back to thrive as a golfer, represent Australia as an amateur and then capture the nation’s heart with his recovery story during the 2005 Heineken Classic at Royal Melbourne.
In his fifth event as a professional and already with the country firmly in his camp, he made a bogey on the final hole to miss a playoff by a single stroke with no less a legend than Craig Parry eventually winning in a playoff over Nick O’Hern.
The next day, with his picture plastered across every paper around Australia as the “kid who beat cancer”, Lyle was winging his way to the New Zealand Open, loving every minute of the trip as stewardesses smiled his way as they recognised him as the person on the front page of the Herald Sun.
“So we get there and I’m walking through the car park at the course and I see a car come flying up and jam on its brakes,” he recalled.
“The window goes down and it’s Craig Parry. I said: ‘G’day mate, well done. Was a pleasure to play with you’.
“He said, ‘Who won that tournament in Melbourne?’. I said, ‘You did’. He said: ‘Well how come you got the *&^%$# front page? Everyone wants you and not me!’.
“I was beside myself, really worried about offending a champion like Paz, going, ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t know how to handle it’.
“With that, his face broke, he pissed himself laughing and just drove off.
“I knew I’d fit right in on tour after that.”
That image is perfectly Jarrod Lyle. The bloke who would do anything to have a laugh, particularly at his own expense. The bloke who would treat you the same as he would a head of state. The bloke who put others’ lives ahead of his, right up to what will be the end of his days.
Through it all, he overcame those odds.
From riding on his BMX pulling his sticks to the Shepparton Golf Club as a kid to duking it out with Tiger and company at The Open Championship.
From being told he’d be unable to become a father to having two delightful young daughters.
From using a radical double cord transplant in his second fight with cancer in 2012 to that emotional return to professional golf at the 2013 Australian Masters at his beloved Royal Melbourne.
All along, he was spreading not only great golf to galleries, but love and messages of hope and inspiration to the thousands of people worldwide who had cottoned on to his personable demeanour and gregarious nature.
He fought. For his career, for his young family, for his fellow patients in hospital wards in Shepparton, Melbourne and later Geelong. For anyone who needed him.
To sit with Jarrod after one of his almost daringly revealing posts during his latest travails was to watch his various platforms light up in response.
It showed not only the power of well used social media, but the sheer magnitude of his reach and impact.
And to a person, for as long as he could, he read them and thrived. His battles — and their documentation — were a revelation for so many cancer patients who read them and latched on to a public figure enduring the same traumas.
Lyle’s impending demise will obviously be a loss for golf, but it will be a far greater loss for Australia and the world.
His appeal is not just sporting, it’s for every person. He has that human touch so rarely found, as evidenced by the sheer volume of reactions to his gut-wrenching news yesterday.
He’d be the first to tell you what he brought to life’s table wasn’t in the most pristine wrapping; but as we ponder his final days on this planet, know that what’s inside is pure gold.
We’ll miss you, mate — way more than your humble soul would ever allow you to realise.
‘Jarrod was down there at Torquay getting around the boys and giving what he could. This was just him and the man he was. It was just incredible to have him there’
THE SANDS COMMITTEE MEMBER SHANE McGRATH
Mark Hayes is Golf Australia media manager and a former News Corp journalist
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