Our man Matt Cleary gets out amongst a marquee group for LIV Adelaide's Pro-Am at the Grange, and finds that even superstar sportsmen who've performed in heaving cauldrons of humanity can be cowed once inside the ropes with the Bison.
Pro-Ams, for the professional golfer, can be terrible, terrible things.
Out there in the heat for five hours with an assortment of half-cut tradies and corporate poseurs, choppers of all denominations, golf swings of the antichrist, some who might play golf once a year in a charity day Ambrose, and they hack and gouge and slaughter their way around, and you can almost forgive the former professional who, the apocryphal story goes, said to his partners on the first tee, Look, boys, sorry, but I’m not going to talk to you today.
Indeed, for some professionals, it would be best if they averted their eyes from their playing partners in a Pro-Am, lest their hideous golf actions inveigle muscle memory.
LIV Golf, though, seems to have the Pro-Am format right – or at least as right as it can be. The pros play nine holes then swap with a pal. The amateurs play modified Ambrose and take their best ball off the tee, then play individually from there. Only the team score counts. Pick up, move on, tell your story walkin'.
We’re on the par-3 sixth green and knocking about with the 10:20 group of James Tedesco, Mat Rogers, Damien Fleming and Paul Casey of the Crushers. It’s an eclectic enough quartet.
Tedesco, captain and fullback for the Roosters, 13 Tests for Australia, has brought a crew, even an entourage. There’s a photographer, a media type and someone from a car maker. A former team-mate at the Roosters, Luke Keary, is on the bag, while another one, Mitch Aubusson, is hanging around with a footy; his role unclear outside playing passings with Casey.
Fleming, as was revealed in these e-pages in an excellent piece of journalism by a promising young sports writer, is a garden variety golf addict, who swings it harder than Matt Hayden, but compresses the ball pretty tidily, as someone one off 5.7 would. There would be worse modified Ambrose partners.
Rogers, meanwhile, is the pick of the litter – a scratch marker at Southport on the Gold Coast, he’s just turned 50 and is fit as a trout, smacking it off the tee like it’s hit out a cannon. His drive on the eighth is a high and drawing and beautiful bit of kit, huggin the dog-leg left and soaring over some high trees, maybe 280 metres on the wind.
So good is he that on the middle of the ninth fairway, Casey teases him in that way of men for laying up with his second shot. To be fair, it would’ve been a miracle-hero shot to reach the green over so much sand, and Rogers isn’t a 0 marker because he takes crazy risks.
When Tedesco rolls in a downhill 8-footer to get up and down for par on nine, caddie Keary leads the golf-clapping. There’s a fist-bump with Casey and convivial handshakes of hail fellow well met. And it’s clear the quartet have enjoyed their time with one another.
And then, between the ninth green and the 10th tee, there is a change in atmosphere. The crowd of spectators grows, true story, 8000 percent. For there cometh a phenomenon to the tee – the great Bison, Bryson DeChambeau, the Big Show, whose entourage includes muscular security types, assorted content creators, and a management figure in the golf tournament uniform of lanyard, high pants and tucked-in purple polo.
And then he smashes one off the tee like Napoleon launching bombs at the British. My god, he can hit the golf ball. It’s so cool to watch. You gasp at it. The power off the tee box.
@bowlologist @livgolfadelaide Pro-Am: At the @grangegolfclub @Make Me Good At Golf AC/DC ‘Back in Black’ drops, WWE intro hits… then I nailed the drive right into the driveway of demolition. 🤘💥⛳️ #BackInBlack #LIVGolf ♬ original sound - Bowlologist
And then a funny thing happens. Our sportsmen, all of whom have great experience in rugby and cricket Test matches, in State of Origin, who have played in front of teeming multitudes in heaving, sold-out cauldrons such as the Melbourne Cricket Ground, Suncorp Stadium, Twickenham, Wembley and Leichhardt Oval, they, well ... their golf games go to shit.
Something about playing in front of the Great Bison of America turns these athletes into the rank choppers mentioned in paragraph two. Tedesco worm-burns one for 150 metres, Rogers pull-hooks over a Mexican food caravan and Fleming’s ball balloons high and right into the tundra to be forever lost to humanity.
Such is the presence of The Bison. These fine sportsmen, who’d played pretty fine golf for nine holes with the convivial Englishman, now had to perform in front of a Great Performer, a razzle-dazzle man, a genuine Big Yin.
Or maybe they just played like crap.
Regardless, DeChambeau’s second shot on 10 zips hard and low and long, barely above head height for 250 metres before it ends up pin-high in the trees right. It's very cool to watch up close. He takes another one for fun and sizzles it hard, drawing, up to the green a long way down-town. Watching up close is better entertainment than The Empire Strikes Back.
Onto 11 and Tedesco unleashes his stock shot off the tee – a crowd-killing low duck hook, I genuinely feared for spectators’ lives. Fleming went right, again, as did Rogers, but far enough downtown they could play a nice chip to the green. There followed four pars, of sorts.
Onto the party hole at 12 and there’s more play on the tee with the Steeden football, DeChambeau showing that he chose sports wisely. Later, Tedesco gives him a Roosters jumper that, if there is any justice in this godforsaken world, DeChambeau will wear in a video on Insta.
And that is where we leave these people, these golf hounds of various inclinations, to return to the big tent to type up this gibber-jabber, thankyou for your attention so very far into this piece.
Peace be with you.
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