We’re on the driving the range at Royal Queensland ahead of the Australian PGA Championship, and as Banjo Paterson would have it, the cracks have gathered to the fray.
There’s Lucas Herbert in light-green pastel doing some sort of plyometrics. There’s Min Woo Lee, there’s nothing of him, the 43rd best player in the world, spanking 3-woods, pure.
Jhonattan Vegas of Venezuala is in the house, yapping in Spanish with his caddy. He does some perfunctory stretching, a bit more yapping. He hits balls for 20 minutes and leaves. No flies on Jonny Vegas.
There’s a giant man, like two Greg Ritchies, with the swing of Ernie Els. Maybe not Ernie Els. But it’s a big, powerful and languid bit of kit and the man – Jack Murdoch of Victoria – smotes the Titleist into the ether.
And there, at end of the range, is Adam Scott, showing off to kids in a clinic, swinging driver like a beautiful machine. It’s an impossibly perfect golf swing. It’s the Statue of David of golf swings. It is actual art.
Yet at the opposite end of the range - and aesthetic - the eye is drawn to a man in a bright yellow bucket hat above a moustache similar to that once sported by Dennis Lillee in 1975. And he’s swinging the golf club like a pitcher in the major leagues slinging underarm heat. They call them ‘side-winders’ – and this guy is slinging in heaters.
It’s cool to watch. Almost hypnotic. He takes the club back slowly, it looks like way inside, then snap, he’s slinging it out there, around his body, throwing it out like a whip as his hips clear and his left foot skids hard left. It’s like he loads up, then parties, and boom, the ball whistles out, pure, long, drawing off a bollard on the Sir Leo Hielscher Bridges while planes appear from woolly low cloud like wraiths.
He moves to the middle and sets up two aiming sticks, 20cm apart, maybe three metres in front of him. And then he whacks balls through them. Time and again. Drawing. Long. It’s very cool, the shape of it.
Next to him is Englishman Laurie Canter and his caddy, veteran looper Gary Tilson. In a break from what they’re doing they take a drink and watch the guy hitting balls. They are expressionless. But they watch him hit two, three through the sticks, their heads turned by the singular man-action.
The golf swing belongs to Daniel Gale of Castle Hill in Sydney’s north-western district of hills. Gale tells Golf Australia magazine that the swing's "always been a little bit unique.”
“I tried to work as a youngster to develop that picture-perfect Adam Scott swing that everyone dreams about. But through trial-and-error I worked out that that’s not me. I know what works for me. And when I hit them how I want to I get that baby draw."
Gale, 27, says he’s “not too much of a technical person - as the swing probably shows”.
“I do work on the fundamentals but if I can get it back to a position that I need to, hip-height going into impact and then obviously through impact, hip-height the other way, that’s pretty much all you need.
“The more technical I get the worse it gets. The swing produces decent power. I’m not the longest out there but when I want to amp it up I can and I feel like I have that control… and yeah, I love it. It’s my swing. And if I didn’t then, I dunno, I’d be doing something else!”

Gale says his form has been solid leading into the first of Australia’s major golf tournaments despite popping a rib during training. He won the Northern Territory PGA this year and late last year shot 11-under in a NSW Open qualifier at Mollymook.
More virally impressive again was shooting 60 at Victory Lakes in Minnesota to again Monday-qualify for the PGA Tour event the 3M Open in Minnesota. A video of Gale hitting the flag-stick on the par-4 18 at head-height before the ball dunked into the hole for eagle – which gave him a back-nine score of 28 - became, and remains, a thing on the internet.
As for those excellent facial mutton-chops, Gale says it’s been a five week project following a clean shave and that the handlebars have sprouted in "legit three weeks".
“I thought, it’s Movember, everyone can grow the mo. But not everyone can grow this baby.
“I like to stand out,” Gale says.
Related Articles

Big rewards as Smylie wins Aussie golf's order of merit

Good Luck: Curtis makes ace on PGA Party Hole
