[Photo: The Open]
“Golf,” wrote the great golf course architect Alister MacKenzie in 1930, “in New Zealand, unlike Australia, is dead. In fact, it has never been alive.”
MacKenzie’s point was aimed specifically at the country’s golf courses and committees failing to “realise the game is played for pleasure”.
More specifically, he was railing against the use of long grass as a hazard and golfers enduring the annoyance of looking for lost golf balls.
The Scotsman’s contribution of enlivening the game in the land of the long, white cloud was to lay out a new course in Auckland and Titirangi has long been a wonderfully fun expression of the way he thought the game should be enjoyed.
He noted: “The construction of the holes appeared to be good, judging from the photographs they sent me.”
That he never saw the course is testament to his whirlwind career in architecture where he was a huge part of changing the game in both Australia and the United States.
Then, just after the Second World War, MacKenzie’s Australian partner, Alex Russell made the Paraparaumu Beach links near Wellington.
For the longest time, it was the country’s only course ranked in the world’s top 100 and unquestionably another important step towards bringing golf ‘to life’ in New Zealand.
The next was Bob Charles emerging from life as an aspiring 18-year-old bank teller to winning the New Zealand Open as an amateur a few years after Paraparaumu opened for business.
Charles, Peter Thomson and Kel Nagle kept professional golf in New Zealand alive in the 1960s and 1970s but Charles winning the 1963 Open Championship was another brick in the wall.
‘Charlie-Bob’ was a brilliant putter and a quiet, modest person, a characteristic exemplified by the major champions to come – Michael Campbell, Lydia Ko and now Ryan Fox.
Campbell’s career after he won the 2005 US Open never again reached the same heights but him beating peak-of-his-powers Tiger Woods at Pinehurst was an unforgettable day.
I watched the final round in a clubhouse somewhere near Wellington and when he made the final putt, an entire roomful of people fell silent for what seemed like minutes – no cheering, no clapping. Just tears.
Ko, a Korean-born immigrant continues to play her part as arguably her country’s greatest player. She’s been a star since winning the Canadian Open as a 15-year-old. Fifteen.
Ryan Fox didn’t even play a golf tournament until he was 18.
The next important step for New Zealand golf was American billionaires Julian Robertson and Ric Kaine investing in world-class modern golf at Cape Kidnappers, Tara Iti and Te Arai.
There have been millions of dollars invested in largely disappointing new courses – where golf was primarily used as a vehicle for selling houses – but the very best of them have been hugely significant and of a standard MacKenzie would have no doubt approved.
In the same week the universally admired Sam Neil died Ryan Fox did something extraordinary at Royal Birkdale to both lift the spirits of his homeland and ensure he’s a legend on the level of ‘Charlie-Bob’, ‘Cambo’ and Dame Lydia.
Fox’s equanimity over the final quartet of holes will be long remembered as he faced his moment. In the century since MacKenzie left Auckland by boat for America has any Kiwi made a better bogey than the one Fox made at the short 15th where his almost perfect tee shot finished cruelly jammed up under the back lip of a pot bunker?
Then he finished it all by making what will, in time, come to be seem as one of the greatest-ever birdies to win a major championship.
Maybe the best.
And, with Paraparaumu Beach back as a tournament venue on the PGA Tour of Australasia and Dame Lydia signed on to welcome the return of the NZ Women’s Open in March, if MacKenzie came back now, not only would he be delighted at the pace of Fox’s play – and equally horrified at the pace of the tortoises – he’d acknowledge golf in New Zealand is not only well and truly alive, but a century of evolution has never seen it in a better place.
