INSIDE THE ROPES: MIKE CLAYTON
MACK Hall, a Perth real estate agent and enthusiastic golfer, used to play cricket with Graham MacKenzie, the great Australian fast bowler of the 1960s. Playing a club match together on a typically windy summer’s day in Perth, Hall suggested his fellow fast bowler bowl his seamers into the wind while he go with the sea breeze behind. The very gentlemanly MacKenzie quickly put him in his place with a quiet,‘Why don’t you just ‘eff’ off?” Each May, MacKenzie plays the Mack Hall pro-am at Cottesloe and every year Mack tells the story. It sort of gets old but somehow it doesn’t lose much in the retelling. MacKenzie just laughs.
The pro-am is on a Friday followed by the Mack Hall Cottesloe Open, an event played for first time in 1948 and with a proper group of winners, including Graham Marsh, Terry Gale, Greg Chalmers and Roger Mackay.
It is a throwback tournament to an era long past when clubs ran Open events with fields made up of the best pros and amateurs. Victoria used to have at least six or seven clubs, including Yarra Yarra, Woodlands, Heidelberg and Eastwood, and the golf association ran the quaint Close Championship, a tournament only open to Victorians. Lest you think it discriminatory, the English Amateur Championship is still only open to Englishmen.
Pro-ams played with members with handicaps covering the whole range have largely replaced Open events and become the event of choice for clubs to wanting to see how pros would deal with their course. “No one ever burns our course up,” is a common refrain and most pros are too polite to suggest it’s hard to hole putts on greens resembling a Rivita biscuit. Pro-ams have a role and they keep younger players in subsistence money but arguably they have been at the expense of real club Open events; events that were a feature of golf all across the country 50 and more years ago.
Either way, Cottesloe and Hall contribute something worthwhile. Generously, too, they put up some money for ten over-50s guys to play for and this year Bob Shearer came to Perth, more to catch up with Terry Gale than to shoot 69, as did Mike Harwood and the very soon-to-be-50, Peter O’Malley. It doesn’t seem all that long ago that ‘Pom’ was shooting 65 at New South Wales in a state junior championship.
The fun for us is getting to play with some of the best young amateurs in the country. It’s a window into their skills and how much the game has changed from our time. They all smash it, mostly they have terrific techniques and it’s funny to ask them questions about players past.
I played with Kiran Day, who not only played beautifully but also was a real pleasure to be around for 18 holes. As we waited for Shearer to putt out ahead on the 11th green, I asked him if he’d heard of the man who beat Jack Nicklaus and Payne Stewart to win the 1982 Australian Open. Not a clue, would be a fair summation. Perhaps it’s not surprising. It was 33 years ago and Day is only 18. I was the same age in 1975 but I well knew of the exploits of the legends of the 1940s, including Norman Von Nida, Jim Ferrier, Ossie Pickworth, Harry Williams and Eric Cremin.
The question is whether knowledge of players from our past and what they overcame and how they managed their careers is now any use. It’s unimaginable any great author, film maker, musician, artist or playwright not studying their craft and intimately understanding the masters of the past and how their own profession evolved. Maybe all you need to know is how to get around in 68 and understanding Ben Hogan’s life and how he overcame poverty, the witnessing of the suicide of his father as a nine-year-old in the family kitchen, a horrific car wreck and an equally horrific hook isn’t going to help you shoot 68. It might put a discouraging 75 into more perspective, though. We need more proper Open events where the best players – young and old – meet and play against each other. In part, this country has always produced good players because those who came before passed down the knowledge. It started with Norman Von Nida helping a young Peter Thomson and he was probably the most generous of all. Mind you, I asked a good young player a couple of years ago if he knew of Peter Thomson. “Yeah – he’s the golf course designer, isn’t he?”