Tracing Elvis Smylie’s wild ride from teenage prodigy to 2024 BMW Australian PGA champion. Is an encore coming at Royal Queensland?
A year in professional golf can provide a lifetime’s worth of learning experiences. Elvis Smylie discovered as much during his rookie season in Europe as a member of the DP World Tour courtesy of his 2024 BMW Australian PGA Championship victory.
An example of which occurred in the Alps near Mozart’s childhood home of Salzburg during the Austrian Open. Smylie was suffering from a sinus/ear infection that week and missed the cut by three strokes. Yet it was a minor miracle he managed to complete 36 holes. On the Friday night, Smylie went to check himself into an Austrian hospital. Problem was he didn’t have a car for the week, so he was relying on alternative transport.
“There were no Ubers in the area, so I ended up hailing a mini-van that had an Austrian family in there. I met this Austrian couple I’ve never seen in my life before and they gave me a lift to the hospital [where] I had things shoved up my nose…
“The day after that I was meant to fly to the next tournament. But the fact I had the ear-and-sinus infection, I couldn’t fly. So I ended up having to take a 13-hour train [back to the UK]. That was brutal. There were four trains involved in that 13 hours as well. It was an absolute nightmare. Not fun.”
Smylie reckons he could write a book from the travel stories accumulated while living out of a suitcase during his rookie season in Europe. It’s a quantum leap from 12 months ago when Australia’s summer of golf drastically altered his career path. A career that appeared destined for success from an early age, stalled by COVID, derailed by a debilitating back injury and resurrected by Australia’s most acclaimed golf coach.
SPRINGBOARD TO EUROPE
In October 2024, Smylie broke through for his maiden professional victory at the WA Open in a playoff against Jak Carter at Mandurah Country Club. Battling weather delays, high winds and intermittent rain, Smylie closed out the tournament on the first extra hole by stiffing an approach shot with a 50-degree wedge to two feet.
Five weeks later at Royal Queensland, Smylie stared down his mentor, the former Open champion Cam Smith, and fellow LIV star Marc Leishman to win a weather-shortened BMW Australian PGA Championship by two strokes. Co-sanctioned with the DP World Tour, the victory presented Smylie with a cheque for $323,000 along with winner’s category membership of the European circuit.
In 2019 Smylie had been awarded the Cameron Smith Scholarship, which afforded him an all-expenses trip to Jacksonville, Florida, to spend a week with his fellow Queenslander and see how he practises and prepares for tournaments. Playing alongside Smith in the final round at RQ, Smylie refused to be overwhelmed by the occasion and wanted to use it as a great opportunity to beat Smith. He was excited to show him how much he’d improved. And he did so with four front-nine birdies and by sinking a bunch of clutch par putts in a bogey-free 67 to claim the Joe Kirkwood Cup.
“I was able to handle all the emotions and whatever was thrown at me. I did a really good job of being able to deal with it,” Smylie says. “My game held up under pressure, which is the most important and most satisfying thing you can have as a professional golfer. You want to be able to know that your game’s good enough coming down the stretch on Sundays in big tournaments.”
Smylie contended again the next week at the ISPS Handa Australian Open at Kingston Heath and Victoria golf clubs where he tied for fifth behind Ryggs Johnston. By season’s end he had topped the 2024-2025 Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia Order of Merit, which provided major invitations to both the PGA Championship and The Open.
REALITY BITES FOR TEEN PRODIGY
Smylie grew up on Queensland’s Gold Coast as one of three children to tennis professionals Peter and Elizabeth Smylie. Liz won four Grand Slam titles (one in women’s doubles and three in mixed doubles). However, she acquired wider fame as the face of Extra chewing gum. (“It’s the great taste that really lasts.”)
Elvis Smylie gravitated towards golf because he didn’t think tennis suited his type of attitude. Growing up in a residential-golf community at The Glades, he would frequent the practice range before school. Incidentally, his parents used to live in the Bay Hill community in Orlando, Florida, where their neighbours included Ian Baker-Finch and Wayne Grady.
Smylie’s formative years were spent at Southport Country Club, which he joined before the age of 10. His game also flourished under the tutelage of Brisbane teacher Ian Triggs, the coach of Rachel Hetherington, Karrie Webb and John Senden. He showed early promise by winning a Queensland Schoolboys Championship in primary school by 20 strokes.
A competitive drive and ambition were evident from an early age, according to a tale told by Peter Smylie to Australian Golf Digest. As a 16-year-old, Elvis finished second by one shot at the 2018 Aaron Baddeley International in America where the winner received an invitation into the Australian Open. Devastated by the result, he phoned his parents in tears afterwards, vowing to win the Australian Boys’ Amateur the next year, which also awarded the winner a start in the Australian Open.
Smylie achieved his goal. He won the 2019 Australian Boys’ by five strokes on home turf at Southport, adding his name to a distinguished list of former champions that includes Brett Ogle, Robert Allenby, Stuart Appleby, Adam Scott, Jason Day and Smith.
Playing the 2019 Australian Open alongside former Masters champion Mike Weir, Smylie opened with rounds of 70-67 to be five shots from the lead at The Australian Golf Club in Sydney. He would settle for a share of 33rd, but the experience further whetted his appetite to compete with the best.
Having attained a plus-6 handicap by 2020, Smylie was demolishing elite amateur fields in open-age competition. He successfully defended the Keperra Bowl by 13 strokes and cruised to a nine-stroke victory at the Queensland Stroke Play Championship.
Competing as an amateur on the 2021 Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia, Smylie finished outright second in The Players Series Victoria at Rosebud Country Club. That performance convinced Smylie and his team to turn professional at the tender age of 18.
“Now is absolutely the right time for me to make this jump – my game is in a great place and I’m full of confidence,” Smylie announced at the time.
The next month in his first appearance as a pro, Smylie tied for third at TPS Sydney around Bonnie Doon Golf Club. Three weeks later, Smylie tied for second in the NSW Open at Sydney’s Concord Golf Club.
However it was a false dawn. The COVID pandemic forced the world into lockdown and professional golfers suffered as a result. Smylie would play just three more times for the rest of 2021, missing the cut in those three events in Europe where he played the DP World Tour on sponsor invites.
In 2022, Smylie couldn’t muster a single top-10 result in 19 tournaments. They included five more missed cuts on the DP World Tour where his form suffered as a result of “a minor disc bulge in my L5 S1 whilst I was over in Europe playing on sponsor exemptions”.
“That was the first time that I had a scare like that,” Smylie says.
Through the first half of 2023, Smylie played seven tournaments at home where his best results were a tie for second at TPS Victoria and third at The National Tournament. In a lone appearance in Europe at the BMW International Open in Munich, Germany, Smylie carded rounds of 77-82 and returned home to deal with what was becoming a worsening lower-back injury.
At that point Smylie’s team, led by father Peter, was searching for answers. Through an intermediary, they sounded out golf whisperer Ritchie Smith, the West Australian coach of Minjee Lee, Min Woo Lee and Hannah Green. Smylie had met Smith as a 16-year-old member of the Australian team that travelled to Japan for the 2018 Toyota Junior Golf World Cup. They hadn’t spoken since, but Smylie had remembered and enjoyed the trip.
Smith took some time to consider whether Smylie was an appropriate fit for his stable of thoroughbreds at the ‘Fremantle Golf Factory’. They officially started working together the week of the 2023 Australian PGA.
The first objective was to get Smylie injury-free. Forgoing a rehabilitation program based on stretching, Smith implemented a strength-based training regime for his tyro’s 6-foot-2-inch frame (188 centimetres).
“We just put a really good plan together of how to actually get him back to where he should have been. He was really injured,” Smith recalls. “We moved it to a strength-based – and size-based – training regime where we wanted to add a lot of weight on. He hasn’t felt really any pain since. Obviously you get a little bit of pain in the initial stages, but I was never worried about him getting injured again.”
As part of a new entourage, Smylie is surrounded by a wealth of experience with good people in his quarter: physiotherapist Martin McInnes, strength-and-conditioning trainer Luke Mackey and psychologist Michael Lloyd.
“A lot of the stuff that I had to change technically with Ritchie, I had to get stronger in the gym to do so,” Smylie says. “So that was obviously like the king-and-queen effect. You can’t have one without the other.
“It’s progressed and it’s blossomed over the past couple of years. I’ve still got the exact same people around me like I did at the start with Ritchie. We’re always in constant communication. Touch wood, everything’s going really well with the body.”
ELVIS HAS ENTERED THE BUILDING
Since that unforgettable Australian summer of golf in 2024-2025, Smylie has now played a full schedule on a major tour for the first time in his professional career. The highlight of which was a runner-up finish at the French Open in Paris, which was his third top-10 result of the year to rise to 12th on the European tour’s Race to Dubai Rankings.
Smylie recently added a highly successful caddie in Brad Beecher to his team. Beecher used to carry the bag for Minjee Lee and before her seven-time major champion and Olympic gold medallist Inbee Park of Korea. Beecher was on Smylie’s bag at the French Open and appeared to provide a calming presence when he fired a bogey-free final round of 65 alongside eventual winner Michael Kim.
A healthy Smylie also caught the attention of Excel Sports Management. He recently signed with the world’s fourth-most valuable sports agency that manages Tiger Woods through his long-time agent Mark Steinberg.
We’ll never know to what extent Smylie’s development was stunted by injury and turning professional at such an early age. In hindsight, Smylie admits the step up to professional golf is greater than envisaged.
“Looking back at that period of time,” Smylie says, “I believe I was too young to turn pro. Even though I did have good success on the Aussie tour straight away, I hadn’t had that international experience a whole lot as an amateur. I’d played a few events as an amateur overseas.
“The transition from being a pro in Australia to being a pro in Europe is completely different. Because you’re away from home. You’re living out of a suitcase. You’re in environments that you’ve never been in before. Your routines and processes all change. I think it just took me a long time to be able to adapt to that.
“I think it’s been a blessing in disguise, though. The tough moments that I’ve had in Europe when I was a pro early on has almost shaped me into the golfer that I am today. I don’t have any regrets with it.”
One of the goals when Smylie first started working with Smith was top 50 in the world so as to qualify for all four majors. Which was a long way from his Official World Golf Ranking of 1,119 prior to last summer. But not so far from his No.128 ranking after the French Open.
Coach Smith is bullish about Smylie’s trajectory. He is at pains to point out Smylie has very little competitive endurance. Before this year, Smylie had never played more than seven events in Europe (including qualifying-school tournaments). In fact, Smylie missed his first 11 cuts on the DP World Tour. Prior to 2025, he had made just two cuts anywhere in the world outside Australia/New Zealand (2024 Farmfood Scottish Challenge and 2024 Nedbank Golf Challenge in South Africa).
“He’s very young. You can’t understate how young he is. Unworldly is probably the way I would describe it. He’s just got a lot of growing up to do,” Smith says.
“I think he’s right on the fringe of being a PGA Tour player. I think he’s really good. It’s just a lot of things he’s got to learn. But they’re not hard things to learn. He needs experience. He needs to believe that he’s actually good enough. Which he is.
“Think of it this way. He’s never played more than [eight] events in a year [on a major tour]. And now he’s playing 22 to 24. He’s never really left Australia. And he’s a bit of a homebody. So that in itself is a big adjustment. But that’s what happens if you want to really truly be in this industry. Well, get used to it because that’s the way life is.”
One thing is for certain. Elvis Smylie is a lot more experienced as he prepares to defend his BMW Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland Golf Club.
“He’s been injured, but now look at him go,” Smith says. “He’s doing a great job. He’s just really improving quickly.”
Photography by Warren Little/getty images, Patrick Hamilton, Andrew Redington/getty images,
David Davies, Darrian Traynor/getty images
