Kia ora.
Greetings golf people of the world, Matt Cleary here, special guest blogging today for this tired pair of Kiwis who are travelling the world playing golf every single day of this year of our lord Dennis Lillee 2010. Greatest golf trip in history? Unless Donald Trump does it for a year with golden Mizunos and the Olsen twins as caddy, then I would suggest that yes: this is the greatest golf trip in the history of golf and of man.
Who are these people? Jamie Patton and Michael Goldstein are their names, and so long have they been playing golf that they are dinkum looking like numbats that the cat dragged in. I??ve seen healthier road-kill. Michael??s hands are shaking and he has the golf tan of Tiger Woods in a solarium; Jamie has the haunted eyes of a prison camp survivor. They are so chafed and wind-burned they look radiated.
And subsequently despite playing at venerable Royal Melbourne against myself and Aussie cricket fellow Brad Hodge, and doing it in the deciding Game III of our little Bledisloe Cup fandaglio, they were soundly beaten and the Bledisloe returned to its spiritual home of Hodgey??s place.
Yes, sports fans, on a hot and even humid Melbourne Friday (unusual conditions for the city, in that it wasn??t raining and sunny and cold and hot at the same time, but rather just hot, and a bit humid) Messrs Hodge and Cleary just about stuffed Patton and Goldstein on the sticky black greens of RM West. That??s right: stuffed. We smashed them. Smashed them. In the second-ball counts match-play scenario, Team Patton and Goldstein were routed 3-and-1 by Cleary and Hodge, and there was much rejoicing.
Actually there wasn??t much rejoicing, because golfing around RMGC ?? venerable, storied host of the President??s Cup of 2011 ?? is already joyous a thing.
B.Hodge, for those that do not know, played six Tests for Australia and batted at an average of 58 and was dropped after scoring a double-hundred, (for American readers worry not ?? but it??s a bit like someone had didn??t pick Derek Jeter in an All-Star game) and is considered the ??unluckiest? Australian cricketer of the last 15 years because the Australian Test cricket selectors are a pack of gibbering buffoons. That's right: stuffed. And gibbering buffoons.
So today Hodgey just plays one-dayers and Twenty-20s and smashes them all over the shop for the Kolkata Knight Riders (an unlikely name for a cricket team, but there you go), and plays a bit of golf at Victoria GC which hosted the Australian Masters that Stuart Appleby won. Nice fellah.
And also a Massive Massive Burglar playing off 14 handicap, and so am I (off 12), it must be said, and that??s probably the reason we won the Bledisloe Cup, but such are the rules of golf and what are you going to do about them, quibble?
The Kiwis did, and often, muttering about ??scandals?, though it comes out as ??skendells? or something, who knows what the golf-crazed gibberers are talking about, particularly the half-Scottish one he??s got an accent like a drunken bagpipe having sex with a goanna. Ha.
Royal Melbourne? Well. It??s Royal Melbourne, ranked 20th in the world or thereabouts, top-3 in Australia for a generation, it??s a prime PRIME chunk of golfing real estate in the best few square kilometres of golfing goodness on the Earth. We played the East Course which is a beautiful thing, with holes they combine with the West Course to form a Composite Course. We played a hole by mistake. Top stuff.
The boys had the television cameras following them around again and will be on One HD??s golf show called The Pro Shop, I dunno when it??s gonna be on but know this: it will be. Ask the Kiwis. Or write to Channel Ten, and ask. They would probably know.
Today these radiated Kiwi kids are playing the Moonah Course at The National (ranked 15th in Oz, and designed by Greg ??The Great White Shark? Norman you may have heard of him, it??s got three courses in the Australian Top-50 gee it??s good. Next day they play Cosmopolitan or something like it (Corporation? Combination?, another of the sand-belters anyway), and then maybe Hodgey??s Victoria to finish their Oz Odyssey #2. And then they??ll be on the Home Run in the Home Country, the fine country of New Zealand, or as the locals say ??New Zealand?.
And goodbye for now.
(It??s called Metropolitan, not Cosmopolitan. But it??s a ripper, and if you get a chance go down to Melbourne and play the Sandbelt, you bloody should. Take the Olsen Twins. They are hot.)
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