Five years after almost quitting for good, Cameron John will fulfil his destiny at this month’s Open Championship at Royal Birkdale.
Being barked at all day as he lugged timber across a construction site gave Cameron John a sudden slap in the face. A child prodigy who had developed into one of Victorian golf’s most exciting junior talents and spent time in national squads with the likes of Hannah Green, Min Woo Lee and Cam Davis, John was on the verge of walking away.
The restrictions imposed in Melbourne in response to COVID-19 and a general malaise at the prospect of a life spent playing professional golf saw John explore his options. First was a short-lived carpentry apprenticeship in 2020 that provided a harsh reminder of the realities of starting from scratch. The lack of pressure and the more rugged nature of his colleagues was refreshing, but a young man who’d had a taste-test of life as his own boss found it challenging being told what to do.
“Being a first-year apprentice, I didn’t really get any of the respect that maybe just normally you would throw to anyone,” John recalls. “That kind of opened my eyes pretty quick to like, Oh, maybe this isn’t for me, either.”
By the end of 2020, John was exploring a return to golf, albeit through the PGA’s Membership Pathway Program where he was indentured to PGA professional Dylan Higgins at Beaconhills Golf Club. That too would last just six months before Higgins brought him in for a confronting conversation that would correct John’s wayward trajectory after he called in sick one Sunday only to play pennant golf for Commonwealth Golf Club hours later.
“It wasn’t a pleasant conversation, I’ll say that, but it happened and we’re pretty good for it now,” shares Higgins, now the general manager at Paraparaumu Beach Golf Club in New Zealand. “I don’t think he was far away from having a monumental meltdown, to be honest. He was lost. He didn’t know what to do. He was definitely a lost young man.”
Matias Sanchez has been competing against John since they were pitted against each other in a skills challenge for junior golfers at the Vic Open when they were just 6 years old. Also a winner on the Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia last season, Sanchez was also alarmed by where this can’t-miss-kid suddenly appeared to be.
“Higgins set up a mini-game to get a few guys playing again at Beaconhills and I hadn’t seen Cam for maybe a year,” Sanchez says. “I was like, Man, he doesn’t look good. He looks overweight. He doesn’t seem like he’s taken the right path here. What’s he doing?”
John’s brief stint working in the pro shop at Beaconhills would come to an end in June 2021. Six months later, in his first competitive outing in nine months, John shot 65 on Sunday to finish tied for third at the Victorian PGA Championship at Moonah Links.
‘HUNGRY, HUMBLE AND SMART’
Tim Wendel knew he had something to work with before an 11-year-old Cameron John reported for his first day at the Rowville Sports Academy in Melbourne’s south-east.
As director of golf coaching at Rowville and a long-time PGA professional, Wendel had seen countless kids with talent, but only a few with a genuine love for the game. When he saw John proudly wearing his Rowville Sports Academy uniform in a Golf Victoria junior event in the summer before he started, Wendel was excited by the possibilities.
“He really understood what going to a sports academy school was all about,” says Wendel, who has also coached Sanchez and former Asia-Pacific Amateur champion, Jasper Stubbs. “It wasn’t only that he didn’t have to sit in a classroom. He was coming to actually get to work. When you’re a coach, you think, S–t, I wish I had 30 of them, but in reality, I have had probably one in 20 years.”
John quickly displayed a voracious appetite for more. If Wendel asked him to get up-and-down from an almost impossible position in practice, John would grumble quietly that coach was being hard on him… and then set about finding a way. Every assignment that Wendel issued, every skill he challenged him to perfect, John would work diligently so that he could advance his education further at the next session.
“Players like Cam just had that simple hungry, humble and smart about them,” Wendel adds. “I don’t really have huge ego conversations with my players. There’s always work to do. If they really believe they’re going to get to their dream, we’ve got to get onto it. He was always really demanding and made me want to invest in him because he was a multiplier. You give Cam a lesson and he would come back saying, ‘I tried this, I tried that. I did it 10 times. I did this. I expanded it out. Now what can you tell me?’
“You think, What do you need as a coach? Oh, I need a Trackman. I need this. Well, you need really high-quality people, and I was fortunate one came past me.”
Four years after starting at Rowville, John was granted an invite to play in the 2015 Vic Open. He was three months shy of his 16th birthday with a slight frame and an excitable energy that Wendel, as caddie that week, found difficult to contain. “I just had to navigate him through and try to help him channel his energy properly,” Wendel recalls. “He’s just mad-keen full of enthusiasm.”
John would shoot 72-71 to make the cut in a professional event for the first time. Those who didn’t play the weekend included PGA Tour winners Peter Lonard, Mark Hensby and Nathan Green. Eleven years later, John would stage an improbable come-from-behind victory, pipping Sydney’s Nathan Barbieri in a playoff to win the Vic Open, one of three wins across the 2025-2026 Challenger PGA Tour of Australasia season that put the now-27-year-old on a path to the Open Championship.
‘TOTALLY COMMITTED AND FULLY DETACHED’
Sanchez is adamant that had Cameron John not made a triple-bogey in the first round of the LIV Golf Promotions event in Florida in January, he would have spent the past six months playing the LIV Golf circuit. He certainly would not have hopped on a plane and won the Vic Open at 13th Beach Golf Links on the Bellarine Peninsula nine days later.
Sanchez questioned whether subjecting himself to such an arduous travel schedule would be worth the effort yet sent John a departing text message that said: “You’re the best player there. Go out and win it.”
“Don’t worry, I will,” came the reply.
Sanchez shares this not to portray John as cocky, but to highlight a level of confidence they shared as juniors when not winning came as a genuine shock.
That Vic Open victory would be the second in John’s three-win season – wedged between the Queensland PGA and The National Tournament – a flex that John says was spawned by a forgettable Sunday in Queenstown in March 2025.
Shortly after starting to work with acclaimed coach Denis McDade, consecutive rounds of 66 in rounds two and three had John in a share of 16th entering the final round of the New Zealand Open at Millbrook Resort. A win from there was unlikely, but the manner in which he shot 74 to fall into a tie for 50th showed John the missing piece of the puzzle.
“I’d probably credit a bit of it to almost the mental breakdown that I had after the New Zealand Open last year,” John says of a seven-month run of form that has yielded three wins, two runner-up finishes, a world ranking rise of 789 spots to No.219 and an upcoming major-championship debut.
“I’ve travelled a lot with Braden Becker, and I’ve encouraged him to try new things and look for that next 1 percent. And from that week in New Zealand, I took it on board that there was something that wasn’t quite going right.”
His father-in-law provided an introduction to renowned leadership coach Ben Crowe, who gave John the tools to be satisfied with the process rather than fall foul of the outcome.
“I have a system of words in place that I use on a daily basis to remind me of when I’m playing my best golf, what that looks like, what those words are,” John adds. “My mantra – I write it on my glove before I play every single round – is totally committed and fully detached. Whether I’m thinking that or whether I’m not, on the first tee, it’s always a process that I go through just to get that somewhere in the back of my mind.”
That mantra was on John’s glove when he stepped onto the first tee in the last group for the final round of the Singapore Open in April. With a spot at The Open available for the top two players not otherwise exempt as part of the Open Qualifying Series, John was in second place and four strokes off the lead. He and caddie Matt Howell could feel the heightened anxiety. How do you go all-out to win a tournament when you know second can fulfil the dream you have harboured your entire life?
Turning in two-under and now trailing by two, John played spectacularly over the final nine holes. He and Korean Jeongwoo Ham went toe-to-toe to the point that they had separated themselves from the rest of the field. Even so, with three holes to play, John could not bring himself to say the words.
“We got to 16, got through those tough holes, and I said to Matty, ‘Oh, I’m about to say something,’” says John, who would push Ham to the 72nd hole before claiming second. “He’s like, ‘What?’ And I was like, ‘Nah, nah, never mind, never mind.’ I holed a good putt for par on 16 and as we stood on 17 tee, I was like, ‘Right, I’ll say it now. We’re going to the effing Open.’”
John hopes to have his pregnant wife Georgia by his side at Royal Birkdale where those who have witnessed his journey first-hand expected he was destined all along.
“There’s not many guys where I go, ‘Yeah, you’re incredible. You can do this way better than I can,’” Sanchez says. “Cam’s probably the only guy on the Aussie Tour where I’d be like, ‘That’s very incredible.’”
Adds Higgins: “I’ll never forget playing with him at Royal Melbourne and he hit this 4-iron 230 metres that went kilometres in the air and stopped about a foot from the hole. I just remember looking and saying, ‘I could stand there all day and never hit that shot.’ When he’s ready to really rock or he’s freewheeling it, he’s pretty much unstoppable. If he completely focuses on himself and what he’s got to do well and doesn’t worry about anyone else, he could easily be a top 50 player in the world.
“I’m just really proud of the young man he’s become and the world-class golfer that he is finally showing everyone he can be.”
“Most of the guys that play with him say he just has that innate ability that, if it’s on today, he’s going to make it happen,” Wendel says. “They don’t understand how he does it, but I do. I just know he can do it.”
Second coming
PGA Tour of Australasia Order of Merit winner Travis Smyth will have fond memories to draw upon for his second Open tilt.
Unlike his countryman Cameron John, Travis Smyth has already experienced an Open Championship – quite dramatically, in fact. Despite missing the cut on debut at Royal Liverpool Golf Club three years ago, Smyth departed Hoylake with something no one else managed that week: a ‘1’ on his scorecard.
The 31-year-old from the New South Wales South Coast, who now resides in Sydney, deciphered the tricky 17th hole at Hoylake with a single stroke en route to scores of 78 and 72. He’ll be back at golf’s oldest championship this month, having qualified by leading the PGA Tour of Australia’s Order of Merit for 2025-2026 (narrowly surpassing John on points).
Smyth is a more complete golfer today, having won twice on different circuits already this year. He claimed the inaugural ISPS Handa Japan–Australasia Championship in Auckland in early March then promptly won the Asian Tour’s International Series Japan event a month later. He’s also experienced a new major environment after being part of the field at the PGA Championship at Aronimink Golf Club. As you’ll read from our interview with Smyth, it’s a stage he feels he belongs on. – Steve Keipert
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Australian Golf Digest: There have now been two Opens played since you played at Royal Liverpool/Hoylake in 2023. After playing in it, did you begin to watch the championship from a different perspective?
Travis Smyth: To be honest, it kind of p–sed me off a little bit. Like, I felt like I was underachieving a little bit because I’ve been there before and then I wasn’t there for the previous two Opens. It lit a bit of fire in my stomach – I was a bit annoyed that I wasn’t there playing because I felt like I deserved to be there and I just hadn’t gotten myself there.
But to answer your question, I never really watch much golf. I feel like social media these days, they do such a good job of posting all the big moments, so I watch those. I get up to speed on that sort of stuff, but I don’t sit in front of the TV and watch. With the time zones it’s just too hard. I’d rather just play golf myself.
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I don’t know whether anyone has said this to you or how much of a course-architecture junkie you are, but Hoylake might be the ‘worst’ of the Open courses – which is a relative statement, of course. I bet you’re itching to get to Royal Birkdale this year.
Yeah, 100 percent. Look, Liverpool was an extremely hard test. It was really stretched out and long. [Brian] Harman obviously ran away with it, but he had one of the best putting performances in history to get to that score. If he hadn’t have had that, the winning score would’ve been, like, five-under. So it was extremely difficult. It’s a very flat course with a lot of trouble everywhere. It’s not overly exciting. It doesn’t give you the big sand dunes and the green complexes were all pretty basic.
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How often do you get asked about your hole-in-one at Hoylake?
It randomly comes up. It comes up at my golf club a little bit. Each time during The Open, it seems to come up on a lot of the members of my golf club’s mind. It seems like someone has a hole-in-one each year [at The Open], so people will bring it up again and be like, “Oh, it’s nothing compared a hole-in-one,” or whatever. But I don’t get it a ton.
It was a cool moment on such a difficult hole. I was lucky to hit a hole-in-one on one of the hardest little par 3s ever.
Photographs by getty images/Ashok kumar, jason butler, golf Australia, getty images/jason butler, gregory shamus
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