LLEWELLYN A TRUE SWING GURU
ONE of Australia’s finest coaches, Kel Llewellyn, was recently inducted into the Victorian Golf Industry Hall of Fame.
If the name is unfamiliar, it is because the majority of his career has been spent in Asia, China and India where his students include dual US PGA Tour winner Daniel Chopra and China’s No.1, Liang Wen Chong. In 57 years as an Australian PGA member he has coached the national teams of India, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Bhutan using a blend of eastern philosophy and western wisdom.
The eastern side of Llewellyn embraces yoga – “you’ll never get injured” – and Buddhism while his west looks towards many of the great players of the 20th century he has met, questioned and studied.
For most of us, the last person we’d want to sit next to at a dinner party or on a long flight is an Aussie who has just discovered an exotic philosophy or religion and radically changed his diet and lifestyle.
Happily, Llewellyn does not belong to this class of pest. He has examined the belief systems intelligently over a lifetime and found a balance that eludes most Nirvana seeking neophytes. He’ll talk about the exotic stuff if asked but he does not force it down your throat. If there is one thing that is hard to like about him, it is the way he looks. Turning 75 in December, he is 10 years older than me and looks 10 years younger. He has no plans to slow down and says if a young golfer starting out today embraced yoga and watched what he ate, he could look forward to an injury-free career and live to 120. Not that his own start was exemplary. Aged 16 he was taken by a drunken father to be interviewed by Len Boorer for the assistant professional’s job at Geelong Golf Club. “It was the only decent thing he ever did for me,” he recalled in the Curlewis clubhouse on the Victoria’s Bellarine Peninsula where he is a member and lives for four months of the year. When the pro heard he’d never played golf and did not even know what a handicap was, he told him to stop wasting his time and get out. Llewellyn persisted in asking him to explain a handicap and was told it was a system devised to allow people to play against those who were better than them. “I still have trouble believing what happened next,” he recalled. “I said to my father as we were walking out, ‘I don’t think anyone is better than me’. The pro then said, ‘Come back here, son.You start on Monday.’ Three years later I won the Heidelberg Open.”
After Geelong, Llewellyn was engaged by the Hamilton Golf Club in Victoria’s west and while there from 1962 to 1965 he was the only pro between Geelong, Ballarat and Adelaide and travelled widely in this 50,000 square kilometre territory to teach. He continued to play on the circuit and in 1983 met dual US PGA champion Paul Runyan, who invited him back to America and introduced him to Sam Snead, Tommy Bolt, Miller Barber and many of the other leading players at the time. Runyan, who won the PGA in 1934 and ‘38, became a mentor and friend. “I have always been interested in the short game and Runyan was the best,” he said.“I never saw anyone better. Even today, nobody could touch him in the short game. I used to sit for hours and watch him .He had a revolutionary way of chipping and putting which I don’t use but I can teach. You change your hands over, putting the bottom hand on the top. It is pretty good for the yips.”
Runyan was staying with Llewellyn in 1995 when one of Australia’s most colourful golfers, Ted “Cricket” Ball, died. A tournament in his honour was played at Clifton Springs Golf Club and it drew a marvellous field including Peter Thomson, Ian Baker-Finch, Jack Newton, Bob Shearer, Wayne Riley and Ian Stanley. Runyan, then 87, made his par on the long opening hole by hitting driver, driver, driver, 7-iron and
making the putt. That’s how he beat Snead in the 1938 PGA at the Shawnee Country Club in Pennsylvania. Standing at five foot and seven inches and weighing just 125 pounds, he was outdriven by 50 yards but downed the strapping Snead 8 and 7 after going to lunch 5-up. At the press conference Snead referred to him as “little poison” and the name stuck.
Another colourful friend was Tommy ‘Thunder’ Bolt, the 1958 US Open champion who is better remembered for breaking and throwing clubs. “I never saw him break a club, but I talked to him about it,” Llewellyn recalled. “He said it was all a show. He said, ‘They paid to come and watch me and I never let them down’.
“Tom came out in 1975 to play in the Australian Seniors. He came to the last hole and was leading. He said to his caddie. ‘What do you think? ’The caddie told him 9-iron. Then he said, ‘Isn’t that guy in the white cap the one who wrote bad things about me during the week?’ The caddie said, ‘Yes, that’s Phil Tresidder’. Tommy said, ‘Hand me my one iron’. This is a true story. He aimed it right at Tresidder and he had to duck. It left him with a wedge to the green and he won.
“When he got back to America he called Ben Hogan. I was sitting at his dinner table when he told me the story. He said, ‘Hey, you little SOB, I’ve just won the Australian Seniors. What about a bit of cash?’ He wanted the money because he used Hogan clubs. He brought out this letter, which he gave me. It said: ‘Congratulations on winning the Australian Seniors. I knew you could do it, particularly as all those old fellers out there probably still use hickory shafts and gutta percha balls. Next time you are in my neighbourhood, drop by and I’ll give you the usual one shot a side start.’ It was signed Ben Hogan and I still have it.
“Hogan was the benchmark. Thomson (for whom he caddied as a 16-year-old and later played against) was influenced by him. So was Trevino. Bolt told me that when he won his US Open he was coached by Ben Hogan. Nobody knows that.”
As befits a man of 75 with a yen for eastern mysticism, he does not have a high opinion of many of the modern teaching gurus.
“Modern coaches are too technical,” he says.“It is commercial, bullshit and far too complicated.You only need to know four things in the golf swing: the set-up; how you start the club off the ball; your position at the top; and how you start it down and release. An exception is Sean Foley (coach of Tiger Woods). He knows a thing or two. I think he has a yoga-type mentality. Woods will come back. He is a champion.”
As well as making the hall of fame, Llewellyn is one of 37 life members of the Australian PGA. “I am proud to say that I knew all but two and played with most of them,” he said.
Some of the older guys will tell you Llewellyn used to wear cowboy boots with a knife inside when coaching in exotic locations. Was this true? He said it was just for show, although he once held it to the throat of a taxi driver who took him to the Calcutta docks, which after dark are reputed to be one of the most dangerous places on earth, instead of his hotel.The cabbie’s night got worse when the hotel security staff got hold of him and let him know Mr Kel had been coaching their kids for free.