CHASING HISTORY
Cameron Smith has cemented himself as one of Australia’s best golfers. Now he has the chance to become just the second man to win three consecutive Australian PGA Championships.
Cameron Smith has cemented himself as one of this country’s best golfers. But the unassuming PGA Tour player would more easily talk about a man he shares his name with than laud his own achievements, even with the chance to enter the history books at this month’s Australian PGA Championship.
“In my eyes, Cam Smith is a legend.” It is a statement that many a golfer, particularly young upand-coming Aussies, might have uttered when referencing the two-time defending Australian PGA Championship winner from Queensland, known for his quiet unassuming nature and loyal friendship.
However, the above words come from Cameron Smith himself, the golfer never one to toot his own horn, instead referring to the rugby league player of the same name when asked if the latter’s inevitable retirement is a chance for him to finally be known as something other than the “other Cameron Smith”.
That Smith himself is unwilling to suggest when his career is said and done he will have earnt greater notoriety among Australian sports fans, perhaps not to the level of one of the greatest league players of all time, is unsurprising for anyone who has had even the briefest of encounters with the still youthful looking 26-year-old from Wantima Country Club.
The World No.49 (at the time of going to press) does not seek the limelight, he is quiet, polite and most comfortable among those he knows well, where he more happily lets his guard down. However, as one of Australia’s ‘Big Four’ male golfers, Smith understands his profile will only continue to rise, particularly this summer, where he is the only other player alongside Australia’s lone Masters winner Adam Scott, who will play the three biggest tournaments of the summer over three consecutive weeks.
“I have never been an attention craver, I don’t run o it, I kind of just like to show up and do what I need to do and then kind of go home and just relax,” Smith exclusively told Golf Australia
magazine. “Try and keep it as casual as possible. But I need to work on that (added attention and responsibility), so it (the Australian summer) will be a good chance.”
Beyond simply returning to our shores as one of our best players, something he does regularly without fanfare throughout the year, the one-time PGA Tour winner’s popularity and profile could reach new heights this month as he attempts to add his name to the history books of Australian golf.
Smith has the opportunity to become just the second man in the 114-year history of the tournament to claim three consecutive Australian PGA Championships. And although the passion for his home Open and PGA is clear, Smith’s knowledge of the exact details of the history of the championship is not as deep as others.
“Definitely just hear about it after they happen,” laughed Smith when asked if he was aware of historical feats he is in line to achieve before they occur. “I don’t really know much about the history to be honest.”
The 2013 winner of the Australian Amateur is certainly not disrespectful to the list of golfing luminaries listed on the Joe Kirkwood Cup before him, including major champions Greg Norman, Scott, Geo Ogilvy, Seve Ballesteros and Gary Player among others, he simply would know more about former league international Danny Buderus than he would about Dan Soutar, the man he has the chance to equal with a hat-trick of PGA Championship wins.
Soutar’s record-setting run came in the first three ocial Australian PGA Championships starting in 1905. The transplanted Scotsman, and Australian Amateur champion, was also in his mid-20s when he achieved a feat that no other player has managed to equal since.
The similarities don’t stop there either between Smith and Soutar.
Soutar’s wins came when the tournament was a matchplay competition, with Smith’s two previous victories coming in almost head-tohead battles with Jordan Zunic (2017) and Marc Leishman (2018).
“I have always played pretty well in matchplay and my matchplay record is not too bad, I hadn’t really thought of the matchplay element to my two wins, but yeah I guess that has been true,”
IT SHOULD BE A REALLY EXCITING WEEK WITH SCOTTY PLAYING FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A WHILE ... LOOKING FORWARD TO IT, LOOKING FORWARD TO THE CHALLENGE. – CAMERON SMITH
Smith said.
Similarly, Soutar had a fondness for Royal Melbourne, where he would collect two of his eventual four Australian PGA wins and his lone Australian Open crown in 1905. Smith, on the other hand, has developed an obvious anity for the RACV Royal Pines layout that has hosted the PGA since 2013, when the reigning Masters champion Scott took out the Kirkwood Cup, and again the site of this year’s event.
“It should be a really exciting week with Scotty playing for the first time in a while, looks like a pretty decent field and looking forward to it, looking forward to the challenge,” Smith said. “And just looking forward to getting back down there (Royal Pines) that place really seems to compliment my game, which is nice.
“The course itself, if you took me there any other week I would say it wouldn’t suit me, just the outside stu away from the golf course makes me feel comfortable that week.”
The “outside stu ” Smith alludes to is something that has taken the majority of his burgeoning professional career to capture and take overseas and is, to his thinking, one of the chief reasons for his ability to collect wins at home, while only taking one other professional trophy overseas.
An admitted suerer of homesickness early
… I DO MY JOB LIKE I WOULD ANY OTHER WEEK, I PREPARE RIGHT AND MAKE IT ANOTHER WEEK. DON’T TRY AND THINK I AM HOME I CAN CHILL OUT A BIT, I AM HERE TO WIN GOLF TOURNAMENTS.
in his professional career, Smith has built a support team around him, including coach Grant Field, American girlfriend Jordan Ontiveros, close friend Jack Wilkosz and his parents, who make regular trips to the United States to visit him to maintain the feeling of home even when on the road.
But in an ominous warning for Scott and those hopeful of ending Smith’s dominant run at Royal Pines, the man always decked out in Queensland maroon on Sundays believes his comfort goes to another level when teeing it up at home.
“The more I have played and the more weeks I miss the family and just hanging out and stu like that, makes me realise how important o the course is when you’re playing a tournament,” Smith said.
“I just feel comfortable here. I sill spend a lot of time here and they are the courses I grew up playing during my junior and amateur career. So, most of the time I know the courses really well and can benefit from a little bit of local knowledge and the fact that when I am actually at the golf course I do my job like I would any other week, I prepare right and make it another week. Don’t try and think I am home I can chill out a bit, I am here to win golf tournaments.”
Although clearly comfortable at home and perhaps even more so at Royal Pines in December, Smith will be faced with three straight weeks of golf where he will be among the main attractions, with additional sponsor and media commitments, the Australian Open and PGA sitting either side of his maiden Presidents Cup campaign against the Tiger Woods-led American side. However, Smith doesn’t anticipate fatigue as a problem once he arrives on the Gold Coast, having undertaken a near identical schedule last year, partnering with Leishman to represent Australia at the World Cup of Golf.
“I usually do a pretty good job of trying to stick to the routine, obviously won’t be the first time I have played three events in a row, but with the extra attention from everyone it will be a little bit draining. That’s something I need to get better at anyway, so I will look at it as a bit of an opportunity to better what I do,” Smith said.
Getting better is certainly something Smith is becoming accustomed to doing. The Florida resident comfortably made the PGA Tour’s FedExCup playo s in 2018/19 despite a late season dip in form. Smith then recorded a T3 finish at the limited field CJ Cup in Korea to kick start his 2019/20 campaign before heading back to Queensland to get to work with Field and fitness coach Nick Randall on getting rid of the “crappy stu ” in his game.
Possessing a simple approach to the game, Smith relies on Field for technical guidance and has done so since meeting the Sunshine Coast-based coach as a junior. Field helped to develop Smith’s wedge play and short game in to one of the best in the world.
And Smith’s contemporaries have taken notice, with young players flocking to Field, including Smith’s former Queensland teammate Maverick Antcli , who now works with Field and has won three times in China and is seemingly destined for the European Tour in 2020. Smith is excited by Antcli ’s progression, as well as that of another long-time friend Jake McLeod, who secured the PGA Tour of Australasia Order of Merit crown at Royal Pines last year. Smith hopes his mates might be among those to challenge him for a third Kirkwood Cup this summer.
“It’s good to see the boys playing well, I always knew they had it in them and it’s just one of those things that behind the scenes I wanted them to do well,” Smith said. “It’s good to see a couple of the boys playing well and it would be so cool if we could battle something out over the summer. It would be back like old times.”
That Smith would take so much joy in his fellow professionals’ successes is once again of no surprise to anyone who has spent time with the man, who seems mature beyond his years, despite a penchant for fast cars and flat-billed caps.
Smith is close with Leishman and spends a great deal of time with the Victorian on Tour, but notes his Presidents Cup teammate’s tightknit family unit and a lack of wanting to intrude or take away from their time together.
His work with Queensland junior golfers is yet another sign of his maturity and generosity, which is becoming more and more public, despite the feeling Smith would prefer few people knew of his good deeds.
Smith regularly invites young golfers to stay at his home in Jacksonville and practice with him at his base of TPC Sawgrass – the experience of a lifetime for a junior golfer, something Smith believes he often takes benefits from himself.
“I don’t really feel like I need to do what I do, I just like doing it. I think back to when I was their age, there would have been nothing better for me than coming over and staying at anyone’s place for a week and getting to practice and pick their brain for a little bit,” says Smith of his regular visitors that have included young guns Louis Dobbelar, Elvis Smylie and Jed Morgan. “But I think more than anything else, hopefully one day they are playing over here and hopefully they feel like they’ve got a bit of a mate in me before they even get here.”
Regardless of whether Smith manages to replicate Soutar’s PGA Championship feat, if he continues to represent Australia with pride and class as one of the best golfers on the planet – whilst also keeping an eye towards looking after the next generation – there is no doubt there will be plenty of people echoing his comments on the legend status of Cam Smith. Only, unlike the modest golfer, they won’t be talking about the rugby league star.