PAUL GOW PRO AND CONS
Television presenter and golfer Paul Gow has a nightmare road trip to match the best of them. As an aspiring golf pro on the US tour he once hitched a ride with a caddy he’d just hired for his next tournament. Half an hour into their eight-hour trip from New Jersey to Pennsylvania, his driver pulled a handgun from under the passenger seat and placed it on the centre console “for protection”.
“I sacked him the following week – he scared me,” Gow says.
The gun wasn’t Gow’s first brush with danger on the road. As the youngest of six he remembers sitting between his parents in the front seat with his feet up on the dash in lieu of a seat belt. “If there was ever a front-on collision I was going to be first gone,” he says.
He continued to flirt with danger when he got his licence, buying a V8 Commodore with “way too much power”. “I only had it four days and fishtailed into a side rail,” he says.
Worse was to come. “I had a girlfriend and I was out the front of her house. The road was wet, I started fishtailing down the road and I lost control and took out five Otto bins outside my girlfriend’s next-door neighbours,” he says.
Chastened, he traded the Commodore for something tamer in the form of a Honda Accord, before upsizing to a huge Cadillac Escalade when he arrived in the US.
“It was the best car I’d ever had at that point. We even named our dog Caddy,” he says.
The Caddy also paved the way for his first drive in a supercar.
Fellow pro Peter Lonard owned an AstonMartin DB9 and asked to swap it for Gow’s Escalade as he had visitors coming and needed the extra seats.
“He was only out of the driveway about three seconds and I was in the Aston Martin,” he says.
He had trouble releasing the handbrake but, satisfied he’d done the job, he set sail for a freeway joyride.
“I pull back into my garage, get out of the car and all I can smell is brakes,” he says.
“Lonard comes back a couple of days later and I said: ‘mate, I’ve got a hypothetical question. If you drive a high-performance car with the handbrake on at about 60 or 70 miles an hour, what happens?”
Despite his brief taste of the high life, these days he’s content with a more sedate set of wheels in the form of a Genesis sedan courtesy of a sponsorship deal with Hyundai.
He rates the seat cooling as his favourite feature.
“If you’ve had a hot, tough day at golf you come in and you put on the cooling seats and your butt feels so much better,” he says.
He’s also a fan of the Genesis’s puddle lamps, which display the logo on the road when you open the door at night.
“I think they’re fantastic, they’re gold. I show them off to all my mates,” he says.