2016

The internet has a knack for turning even the simplest ideas into something divisive virality or mildly dangerous. No matter how edible Tide Pods might look. But the recent trend of sharing your digital footprint from ten years ago is one I can get behind. Mostly because it arrived at exactly the right moment.

Looking back at 2016 now, with a decade of distance, it becomes clear how much of what followed was quietly shaped that year. The sacrifices, the half-formed ideas, the chance conversations. At the time it all felt loose and temporary. In hindsight, it was anything but.

In 2016 I had been out of school for a few years and was working as a caddie at the exclusive and infamous Capital Golf Club. I had been looping there on and off for about six years, drifting without long-term commitments or a defined plan. I was looping ‘Australia’s Shadow Creek’, chauffeuring wealthy locals and international high rollers, trying to stay useful and invisible at the same time.

I roped in friends, family, and eventually my girlfriend to work there too. No arm twisting required. My girlfriend at the time, Lillie, was studying an environmental degree and juggling four jobs. We lived with two other girls, also studying, in a knock-over weatherboard house in Oakleigh South that is somehow still standing. Our neighbours were the local primary school, Metropolitan, and Huntingdale Golf Clubs. Hopefully the statute of limitations has passed, but we had what might have been the toughest par three on the Sandbelt playing from our driveway. Only one par was ever recorded. It was disputed.

The founding members of the (redacted) Street Golf Club. Home to the hardest Par 3 on the Sandbelt.

I was making good money for someone in their early twenties and had the kind of freedom that makes you reckless in the best way. Enough independence to chase curiosity wherever it wandered. At night, I fed that creative energy into music, working out of a spare room that barely qualified as a studio. In 2016 alone I made somewhere between five to six hundred music files. That included a full album produced exclusively for Lillie’s twenty-first birthday, featuring her friends absolutely destroying the vocals of her favourite songs with enthusiasm and very little accuracy.

Most days were indistinguishable from one another. Work hard, play hard, repeat. I had no degree, no real investments, unless you count a small and poorly timed crypto portfolio. What I did have was time, and a growing sense that the world was bigger than the loops I was walking. I would recommend that phase to anyone. Just not forever.

By 2016, Lillie could see it too. That my time drifting in the sun was nearing its end. We talked about long-term investments, mostly in yourself. Saving money. Learning your craft. Taking the thing you love seriously enough to risk it failing. Maybe, if you were lucky, turning it into a life.

I loved golf. But more than that, I had developed a rough, unpolished obsession with golf course architecture. It felt like a career from another era, something that disappeared along with milk deliveries and corner butchers. Except it had not. There were still a small number of people doing this work, shaping land with intent and restraint, and I was quietly convinced I could belong among them. It promised creativity, travel, and rewards that were directly tied to effort. The problem was obvious. How do you even begin?

The answer, it turns out, was not through a grand plan.

From the back tee on the 8th hole Par 3 at Capital Golf Club

At Capital, it was common for me to be on standby whenever the course owner, Lloyd Williams, decided to appear for a casual nine or eighteen. In 2016 there was a stretch where he frequently played with David Evans. Their rounds were filled with conversations about golf, but more specifically, about construction, maintenance, and the invisible work that makes great courses endure.

David owned a property past the Black Spur, winding its way toward Lake Eildon. His ambition was to build a course that belonged entirely to the Victorian landscape. That place would become Cathedral Lodge. Over weeks and months, David would provide updates to Lloyd as they walked Capital’s fairways.

They did not need a caddie. They certainly did not need me. But Lloyd knew about my primitive fascination with golf architecture and allowed me to hang around. I stayed quiet. I listened. I learned. Walking alongside those two men became one of the most influential classrooms of my life, whether any of us recognised it at the time or not.

Looking back at the 17th Green at the Cathedral Lodge, roughly 10 years ago.

Once Cathedral Lodge was built, I began caddying there on the odd occasion. For David, for members, for guests. On one of those days, Cathedral hosted a match against the newly opened Tara Iti. Walking those fairways was Tara Iti’s newly appointed superintendent, Brian Palmer.

We spoke about golf architecture with the enthusiasm of people who probably should have been paying attention to something else. Brian made the mistake of giving me his contact details. For nearly the next decade, I would make full use of them. Questions, ideas, observations, all fired his way. He became one of my most important and unofficial mentors, whether he agreed to the title or not.

That meeting with Brian would not have happened without the chance to caddy for David. That opportunity would not have existed without Lloyd Williams. And none of it would have happened if I had not been caddying at Capital in 2016, aimless but curious.

In 2026, it is easier to understand how fragile and random those moments were. How easily they could have been missed. One different roster. One skipped shift. One moment of choosing convenience over curiosity.

So when I think about 2036, I try to remember that lesson. That the most important doors rarely announce themselves. They arrive disguised as small talk, shared walks, borrowed time, and chance encounters that feel insignificant until they are not.

I have not yet achieved anything of note in the field of golf course architecture. But I am ready. I am paying attention. And I know now that the next decade will be shaped less by grand plans and more by showing up, staying curious, and recognising the quiet moments that might one day change everything.

Because that is what 2016 taught me.

Sun setting on the 18th hole at the Capital Golf Club.

Season One: 7 Mile Beach Review

The anticipation to play 7 Mile Beach had been simmering for years. Like waiting for a new HBO prestige series that teases with glimpses of drama and cliffhangers, but never confirms the premiere date. Some people have been waiting nearly a decade. Matty Goggin has been waiting his entire life. My own anticipation began in 2020 when I was approached to help with the branding. Suddenly, it felt like stepping onto a carefully lit set, each dune and fairway waiting for its scene.

Goggin is the producer, the Hobart native with a vision too big to be contained. The director is Mike DeVries, who loves getting his hands dirty on set, framing every shot and shaping the action. Beside him is co-creator Mike Clayton, acting as the seasoned show runner. While DeVries manages the technical production, Clayton focuses on the narrative arc, ensuring the pacing is right and that every scene flows logically into the next. Lukas Michel, the script supervisor, working within the margins to ensure continuity, subtly nudging the production back on course whenever the plot threatens to drift.

Episode One opens like a slow tracking shot over a quiet dune. The fairway introduces the cast and characters but saves its best action for the final reveal. The green unfolds like a secret location revealed at the climax of a scene. Elegant, refined, and deceptive in its simplicity. You only notice the subtleties after stepping off, the contours and movements whispering, the ball rolling with a life of its own. It is a green that sets the tone, a promise that the story will reward those paying attention.

Episode Two is a par 3, a tight and dramatic bottle episode with a panoramic reveal. The green sits high and halfway up a dune overlooking Tiger Head Bay. The wind tugs at your clothing, smells of salt and grass drift together, and the horizon stretches like the opening credits of a sprawling saga. You sense the vastness of the course in that single view, the world that you’re embarking on and the drama of the season waiting to unfold across every hole.

Episodes Three and Four toss in plot twists that feel designed by writers who enjoy toying with their audience. Episode Five is a marketing dream. The poster shot. The still frame that sells the whole series. Then the run from Eight to Fourteen begins and the show stops caring about your emotions. It simply hits its stride and gushes creativity. These holes feel alive. They feel like the late night binge watch when you promise yourself you will stop at one more episode before bed but then find yourself three episodes deeper and fully hypnotised.

The Double Header Monster 8th

The middle stretch from Episodes Eight through to Fourteen is pure cinema. Twists and turns, subtle tricks, moments that feel like the true realisation of the 7 Mile Experience. A hypnotic montage of brilliant and surprising moments. The fairways roll, sand brushes against shoes, the ball teeters unpredictably. Gusts of wind whip across the dunes, carrying the scent of wildflowers and salt, each hole a minor drama building toward a crescendo. Episode Thirteen is my personal favorite. A sequence so unique it could exist nowhere else. The kind of episode that leaves you breathless, the ball a tiny actor in a grand production.

The finale, Episode Eighteen, is cinematic in every sense. A long par 5 that feels like the closing act of a season finale. A giant central bunker sits ahead like a prophecy carved into sand. It looks fatal. It looks final. You think the scene will claim a beloved character, a last-minute heartbreak. Then the illusion breaks. There is still 150 yards of story left to play. The bunker is a teasing interlude, the green a wild and jagged stage, nothing like the elegant opening of the first hole. Sunlight catches the slopes, wind rustles the dunes, and every step, every putt feels like a final shot in a beautifully directed scene. Some players will embrace the chaos. Others will drift into their own fan fiction, imagining the practice green perched higher on the dune as the true finale. Great prestige television teaches us that endings provoke debate, and 7 Mile Beach delivers with confidence, leaving you with the want of replaying the television series again and again.

The tasteful artwork placed within the halfway house/shelter, wonderfully showcases local talent and compliments the art that exists over the 18 holes of golf. A nice touch.

What lifts the entire production into something distinctly Australian is the world surrounding the course. The halfway house refuses clichés. No gaudy images of fairways plastered on walls. Instead, walls are adorned with genuine Australian art. The smell of freshly baked meat pies fills the air, local pastries and produce reminding you that this is home. The merchandise celebrates Australian makers and identity. No imported gloss, no awkward imitation of overseas luxury. The entire experience feels grounded, authentic, and distinctly Australian.

The best scene of the day, however, was unscripted. As we left for Hobart, a handful of schoolgirls hopped out of a car with clubs over their shoulders, ready for a twilight round. The future of junior golf in Tasmania glimmered at that moment. Young Australians taking ownership of a space built for them, a quiet but compelling post-credit scene hinting at what the next season could hold.

Season One of 7 Mile Beach is a triumph. A uniquely Australian story told with ambition, courage, and flair. DeVries delivers a compelling narrative with tension and character. Goggin has willed a dream into existence. Australia now has a new series to celebrate. Something grand. Something alive. Something with enough cliffhangers, twists, and cinematic moments to keep you hooked until the next season arrives.

Happy Golfing

The Bayonne Burger

Picture a Wall Street worker. His eyes are glued to the Hudson from the 40th floor. His brain has been melted by markets, deals, and endless numbers. He is starving for something simple, indulgent, and immediate. He wants a burger from Hamburger America on the way home to his West Village apartment. He wants a round of golf. The craving is urgent and unpretentious. Bayonne Golf Club is that ferry ride, the wrapper in his hand, the sizzle on the grill, the quick bite that satisfies without demanding contemplation.

The course coils and twists like a boa constrictor’s stomach. Fairways squeeze, angles tighten, and approaches close in like a digestive muscle around prey that has nowhere to run. You feel it pressing, constricting, shaping your shots without ceremony. It is not elegant. It is not refined. It is alive in the bluntest, most immediate way, demanding your attention.

The Bayonne-Constrictor

The borrowed landscape does most of the heavy lifting. Factories rise like sentinels, churches spire skyward, and the Statue of Liberty appears off in the distance. These are foreign ingredients in a strange recipe, points of aim that turn mundane shots into moments of unexpected delight. Watching them is like perching on a stool at the bar of Hamburger America. You see the line of cooks at work, taking basic elements and somehow making something worth enjoying. The water flashes silver, the mounds rise and fall, and suddenly the ordinary site has rhythm, choreography, and a sly grin hidden in the details.

Bayonne does not ask for reverence. It does not pretend to be Noma. Each hole is flavorful enough to make you nod in approval, fun enough to leave you smiling, but none are revolutionary. The satisfaction is immediate. You bite into it, chew, swallow, and move on. The taste lingers for a moment, enough to remember, but not enough to redefine your standards. It delivers what it promises, and it does not promise more than it can give.

Playing here feels good. It scratches that craving like a burger in the late afternoon. It fills the moment with pleasure, indulgence, and a touch of cunning. The fairways, the skyline, the twists of land all combine to create something lively and spirited. You walk away content. You enjoyed it. That is the experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

Bayonne Golf Club is a burger. Savory, indulgent, slightly messy, and clever in ways you might not expect. It is not world-class. It is not transformational. It is exactly the kind of thing you want when the craving hits. And sometimes, that is more than enough.

Happy Golfing

Quintessentially American

Well, I’m having trouble knowing where to begin with Sleepy Hollow. Just as much trouble, in fact, as knowing where to end. I could save us both some time by summing it up in a single line: Sleepy Hollow is the most quintessential American golf course. There. Done. No elaboration required. Move on with your life.

But maybe I need to sleep on that notion. It is October after all, and my brain may be swimming in a pumpkin-spiced fog. The leaves on the deciduous trees are in full retreat, our tee time was delayed by autumn frost, and here we are, playing golf on what feels like Halloween’s home turf. Maybe I’m just under the influence of a holiday that I have always tied closely to this country.

It could be the way the course looks over the Hudson River, that wide tidal estuary that once carried the economic lifeblood of a nation inland, linking canals and tributaries that pushed America’s industrial heart westward. It pulled the centre of gravity away from the colonial ports of Boston and Philadelphia and into a new era.

Or maybe it is the Gilded Age history baked into the property. This land once belonged to Colonel Shepard and Margaret Vanderbilt, who envisioned a manor of unapologetic opulence. Then came the titans: Rockefeller, Vanderbilt, Astor, Vanderlip, Harriman, Macy, Choate and Colgate. Their vision was to reshape and reprogram the land with golf, and for that they summoned Charles Blair Macdonald, the godfather of American golf architecture. Macdonald’s fingerprints are all over the nation’s early great courses, his designs setting a blueprint for what American golf would become.

The focal lone tree located central to the course.

Not long after, Albert Warren Tillinghast added his own eccentric brilliance. He was a man who designed as though possessed, free, unfiltered and untethered by modern constraint. The early twentieth century was golf architecture’s golden age, and Sleepy Hollow stands as a living, breathing artifact of that time.

Standing on the property, looking across the broad, sweeping landscape, my tiny brain struggled to make sense of it all. The place is enormous. The beauty, almost theatrical. The course matches nature’s energy with grand, deliberate gestures. At times it drapes itself elegantly over the terrain, flowing down hollows and across rocky shoulders. At others, it thrusts greens high into the air, connected by ornate footbridges that seem as if they have always belonged.

That is what I love about the Macdonald, Raynor and Banks style. They did not simply blend their work into the environment. They formalised it. They celebrated it. They took the drama of nature and set it to a template, like a jazz musician riffing on a familiar tune. It is not subtle. It does not need to be. The course wants to be part of the story, like a mascot on the sidelines, waving its arms and urging the crowd to join in.

Sleepy Hollow is Halloween, Gilded Age grandeur and American golf mythology all rolled into one. It is a love letter written in stone, soil and template greens. Like any great American story, it is part history, part theatre, part self-mythologising, and entirely unforgettable.

Walking off the 18th green and you don’t need to be a golfing savant to know that you’ve completed a special round of golf. A round of golf that perfectly encapsulates golf in America.

Happy Golfing

The Point of it All

The famous fog that blankets the West Coast in the summer was lifting around the  Monterey Peninsula. The air was still, and the sound of our group’s quiet conversation carried across the fairways. A family of deer played in the unusually long grass, left to grow for the upcoming Walker Cup, the seals were sunbathing on the warm rocks and the sea otters were playing with one of my golf balls that I had donated into the Pacific Ocean. Four holes in, I caught myself thinking that Cypress Point feels less like your everyday golf course and more like a dream state. It is a feeling that seems to stretch all the way back to the people who first imagined the potential of this corner of the coast, to Marion Hollins and Samuel Finley Brown Morse. Two incredibly successful individuals that zagged away from the social perils of New York during the gilded age and found themselves a part of the exotic coastal nature and Spanish colonial homes of the Monterey Peninsula.

Now, I should admit from the outset, I am no authority on Cypress Point or on Dr. Alister MacKenzie’s written works. I certainly cannot quote him verbatim, nor have I ticked off every course of his around the world. I only have the perspective of a visiting golfer, and one who is prone to interpreting things through his own lens. With that caveat in mind, what I felt here was less about conventional wisdom of the ‘Good Doctor’ that tends to permeate through his existing work. The golf course at Cypress Point, is one that has an undercurrent of joy. And for that, I think we may have Marion Hollins to thank.

Photo By Julian P. Graham/Loon Hill Studios

Morse, the developer, provided the capital and the confidence to shape this stretch of coastline. Hollins, though, gave it its character. She was supremely talented and lived a life that might have been lifted from the pages of The Great Gatsby. Officially, she was employed as ‘Athletic Director’ of Del Monte Properties. Her remit was to create and implement sporting programmes for a prosperous clientele, the sort of people who had succeeded in the American Dream and wanted a suitable playground in which to spend it. That was the job description in black and white. The reality was far more interesting. Hollins was, in every sense, the region’s director of fun.

She had an eye for adventure, a talent for sport and an energy that seemed to bend people to her vision. Where others might have seen an inhospitable coastline of dunes, pines and rocky outcrops, she saw possibility. She was the one who persuaded MacKenzie to take on Cypress Point, ensuring that the course would carry both his strategic brilliance and her sense of playfulness. The result is a course that tests and thrills in equal measure. There are moments when the golf is serious, demanding and even daunting, yet there is always a thread of delight that runs through it. That, to me, feels like Hollins’ lasting imprint.

Playing Cypress Point today, especially on the eve of the Walker Cup, is to feel that legacy alive. It is impossible not to be caught up in the rhythm of it all, the variety, the sheer beauty of each hole, and the way the course invites courage without ever losing its smile. Hollins may not be the household name mentioned this week, credited for its current state, but her influence is everywhere on this dreamscape.

Which brings me back to the point of it all! If Marion Hollins were alive in 2025, what would she make of what Cypress Point has become? I cannot answer with authority, but my hunch is that she should be proud. Proud of the vision, proud of the joy and proud that fun still lives at the very centre of this extraordinary place.

Happy Golfing

Oakmont: The Ultra Major

The 2025 U.S. Open at Oakmont Country Club has come to its brutal and brilliant conclusion, with J.J. Spaun etching their name into the sport’s most unforgiving chapter. This was not a celebration of beautiful golf. It was an exhibition of survival. Four days of relentless challenge, where every hole asked for everything and gave nothing in return.

Watching it unfold felt less like a golf tournament and more like a spiritual cousin to one of the world’s most punishing endurance races: the Barkley Marathons in Frozen Head State Park, Tennessee. That ultramarathon, designed by Gary “Lazarus Lake” Cantrell, was built on the idea that success should be rare, even accidental. Each time a runner manages to finish, the course is made harder the next year. There is no ideal strategy, no steady rhythm. Only suffering, instinct, and a willingness to keep going when everything says stop.

Oakmont shares this DNA.

The Barkley Marathons, 2014 Documentary. A must watch.

The Fownes family, who built the course, were not trying to create beauty. They were trying to create discomfort. If a player found a solution to a hole one year, they might return to find a bunker in its path the next. Oakmont evolves constantly, its defenses shaped over time to meet the growing strength of modern professionals. Like the Barkley, it is designed not to be solved, but endured.

This year’s U.S. Open felt like a blindfolded trek through a forest with no trail markers, just instinct and grit to guide the way. There were no rhythm holes, no safe landings, no breathers. Balls spun off crowned greens, drives chased into bunkers like magnets, and lies buried themselves in the rough like secrets. Shane Lowry picked up his ball without marking it, a moment of confusion that summed up the mental toll. Adam Scott fought terrain more than opponents. And the weather played its part too, shifting momentum on a whim, rewarding some, betraying others. Oakmont was less a course, more a labyrinth and only one player found the way out.

Week in and week out, the PGA Tour is designed to showcase talent. It gives players the stage to create. Oakmont takes that stage away. It doesn’t ask who can play the best golf. It asks who can keep playing golf when the game has been stripped bare.

By Sunday evening, when the final putt dropped and the final breath was taken, there was no great crescendo. Just the quiet relief of completion. The winner did not conquer Oakmont. They simply survived it longer than everyone else.

This wasn’t just a U.S. Open. It was the Ultra Major. And Oakmont, like the Barkley, reminded us that the most profound tests in sport are not those that seek perfection, but those that make it impossible.

Congratulation J.J.

Happy Golfing