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The post Australia’s GolfBox brings True Spec fitting experience to Melbourne appeared first on Golf.

Australian golf superstore GolfBox, which offers the country’s most extensive selection of clubs, apparel, shoes and balls, is now providing Eastern Australia customers with a new amenity: the ability to book custom, brand-agnostic club fittings, courtesy of premium club-fitting company True Spec Golf.

GolfBox Custom Sandbelt, powered by True Spec Golf, opened earlier this month in the world-renowned Sandbelt region of Melbourne. The facility is the first of its kind to open in Eastern Australia, joining two other locations in Western Australia, Booragoon and Osborne Park, which opened in 2022.

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“Given how passionate Australians are about playing golf, we at True Spec are thrilled to be able to offer our expertise to help up their game,” said True Spec Golf president Scott Anderson in a release. “GolfBox shares so many of our ideals, which makes them the perfect partner to help us expand into the Melbourne market.”

Located less than five minutes from renowned Top-100 staples Victoria and Royal Melbourne, GolfBox Custom Sandbelt sets itself apart with a premium location, extensive product offering and a purpose-built facility that is specially designed to be an inviting and comfortable space where golfers can achieve their equipment goals in a relaxed and professional environment.

In addition to utilizing the latest fitting technology, like state-of-the-art Foresight GCQuad launch monitors for full swing analysis and Quintic Ball Roll technology for putter fittings, GolfBox Custom Sandbelt also takes care to customize every visit, gathering intel like equipment preferences, golf ball choice, playing history, scoring trends and even music preferences ahead of each player’s arrival. Every club-fitting is also conducted by a Master Fitter who has been trained and certified at True Spec’s Scottsdale, Ariz. headquarters. True Spec-trained and certified Master Builders then assemble each custom club order, providing a seamless transition from the studio to the course.

“We pride ourselves on presenting our customers with the best of everything the game has to offer,” said GolfBox Chief Commercial Officer Grant McPherson in the release. “Having True Spec on-site at our new Sandbelt location helps us fulfill our mission of providing a unique, world-class experience for golfers.”

Ready to upgrade your game in 2026? Find a fitting location near you at True Spec Golf. For more information on GolfBox Custom Sandbelt, click here.

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The post Your winter of Australian golf is coming. Here’s how to plan a trip appeared first on Golf.

The post Your winter of Australian golf is coming. Here’s how to plan a trip appeared first on Golf.

It is roughly the third question asked of any self-respecting golf writer, right after “Which pros do you love?” (I have my favorites!) and the always-popular follow-up, “Which pros do you hate?” (I have my favorites!)

The question in question? What’s the coolest place you’ve ever been for work?

I dislike this ask partially because it makes me feel like a blowhard, and partially because it forces me to face head-on the stupid good fortune of my work life. The truth is that I’ve been really lucky. I’ve seen an inordinate amount of “cool” places in the golf world, from the ancestral homelands of Scotland to the Irish countryside, and about a half-dozen other golf-loving countries in between. Still, there is leader in the clubhouse for “cool-est place” I’ve ever been — a place that might never be topped, no matter how long I write about golf. This place changed my view of the golf world … and also the world world — a location so remarkable and far-out, the first thing I did after leaving was vow to myself that I would return again before I perished.

The place was Oz. Australia. Specifically the state of Victoria, where I sampled the finest espresso, met the most sports-obsessed locals, and saw my life’s greatest and friendliest golf.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the golf world, you know that Australia is in the precipice of a moment many decades in the making. In December, Rory McIlroy will make a long-awaited visit to Australia for the latest playing of the Australian Open. The timing of McIlroy’s visit is no accident. It overlaps with the Aussie Open’s return to Royal Melbourne — which might be the finest course on the continent, if not the world — and with pro golf’s renewed emphasis in Australia, which LIV exposed as being astonishingly underexposed for pro golf.

McIlroy’s visit sets off what will be three years of golfing goodness in Oz, beginning with the Aussie Open in December and ending with the Presidents Cup’s return to Melbourne in 2028 at Kingston Heath. In that time, it is my estimation that American golf fans will witness what I already know to be true about the country: The people are remarkable, the experience is unthinkable, and the golf has no equal.

When American golf fans realize this, I presume they will do what you, dear reader, already are: Researching the best way to make the journey for yourself. And that’s a question (or a series of questions) I can answer without hesitation.

9 questions and answers about planning an Australian Golf Trip

1. How do I get there?

I suppose that question depends upon your location right now, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll assume you’re an American traveler. If that’s the case, the first thing you do is fly west. There are fewer direct flights from the states to Australia than there are to other international destinations, but there are still plenty. Los Angeles is the most popular launching-off point for the journey — it’s where major Australian carriers like Qantas have their U.S. headquarters — though flights can also be found from New York, Dallas, San Francisco, Vancouver and Honolulu.

If you aren’t from one of those locales, then I advise flying through LAX, where the journey from the States to Oz is shortest, and where you can sneak into one of several business class lounges. (I have never experienced such a plethora of all-you-can-eat food and self-service wine — and I have never stolen so many gummy bears — than I did in the Quantas lounge.)

I’ve heard the argument against airport lounge culture on TikTok in recent months (namely, that lounges are not “free” but baked in to the cost of business class tickets and flashy credit cards). Those arguments may have merit in many circumstances — just not this one. Freshening up in comfort before a very long flight is one important weapon in your traveling arsenal.

2. How long will it take me to get there?

The journey from LA to Oz will take you the better part of a day (16 hours, to be exact), which, thanks to the international dateline, will remove the better part of two days from your calendar (don’t worry, you’ll earn that “lost” day back on the way home!). Thankfully, claustrophobes (like yours truly) have less to worry about: Any plane making the journey is enormous and spacious. On Qantas, there was also considerable care for customer wellness on the flight, including regular reminders to stretch and a prolific selection of movies and TV shows (I caught up on some recent Oscar noms). Plus, flight schedules are set such that passengers are encouraged to get a full night’s rest on the flight over, easing the jetlag and also lessening the burden of the flight time.

It is still a long time to be on a plane, but I found my fears about the flight time were far greater than the reality of the experience. In many ways, the crew on my flight was my first exposure to the Aussie experience — which is to say it was filled with people friendly enough to melt even the deepest anxieties of my cold New York heart. I recommend you load up on snacks … and, for weight and balancing, encourage you to limit your book selection to three.

3. Should I splurge on business class?

If you can afford to do it, I say yes. It’s likely the longest flight you’ll take in your life, which is ample reason for added comfort. A lie-flat bed, a handful of five-star, Aussie-sourced meals, and a fresh set of PJs are decent ways to burn away the boredom of 16 hours in the air.

But if you can’t or don’t wish to pay, that’s okay, too. Try to get a row to yourself, book a seat next to a trusted travel partner, experiment with a more affordable “premium economy” class, or drink in that Aussie outlook and enter your flight ready to make friends. In any case, you’ll arrive in a good mood.

4. Where should I play golf?

There’s golf everywhere in Australia — including the furthest reaches of the Outback — but most of the “famous” golf in Australia belongs to the southern states of Victoria and Tasmania.

For tourists, Tasmania will be the most familiar experience, with welcoming resorts and “stay-and-play” packages. Tazzy is one of the most exotic golf destinations in the world, with resort courses like Barnbougle and Cape Wickham set over rolling terrain and stunning cliffs.

Victoria, though, is the location most worthy of golfing envy. It is home to several of GOLF’s Top 100 courses in the World, including an elite handful within a driver of one another in the Melbourne suburbs. These courses, part of the mythical Melbourne “Sandbelt,” are the ones you hear first when you talk about Aussie golf: Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath, Victoria, Peninsula Kingswood, Metropolitan, Commonwealth, and Yarra Yarra. They are known predominantly for their psychedelic visuals: razor-sharp edges; large, sloping swales; and bouncy sand turf.

Also worthy of a visit in Victoria? The Mornington Peninsula, a Napa-like wine country enclave south of the city that features scenic seaside courses like The National, The Dunes, St. Andrews Beach and Portsea. And also the Great Ocean Road, an aptly named, jaw-dropping one-lane highway attached to funky linksy classics like Port Fairy, Apollo Bay, and Peterborough.

5. How should I go about securing a tee time?

Many of the courses listed above are public access courses with their own tee time portals, but thankfully, even Australia’s most exclusive private clubs have adopted a more egalitarian approach to visitor play. Courses like Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath set aside a certain number of tee times each month for international visitors, who can apply for a time by submitting a letter from their local club. Be warned — the cost is extreme: Royal and Kingston Heath get away charging around $750 Australian (or around $500 USD) per person per round, but if you’re already halfway across the world on a golf trip, that might be worth the cost — especially with the help of a favorable exchange rate. What’s the price of a lifelong memory, anyway?

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6. How many days should I allot to travel?

I’d say two weeks is a safe amount of time to be sure you can see the country without feeling rushed. Anything less than 10 days is doable, but it’d feel like an awful lot of time in transit for such a short stay.

You could also happily stay a month. Or a few months. Or forever.

7. If I’m playing golf in Melbourne, where should I stay?

If you’re playing the Sandbelt, the South Yarra neighborhood is the perfect locale for journeying between the epic restaurants and cafes of the city and the even more epic golf of the suburbs.

8. What else should I do?

A drive down the Great Ocean Road to the Twelve Apostles (a UNESCO World Heritage site) is a great way to ensure you’ll spend at least a few minutes pondering the cost of real estate in Melbourne. An Aussie Rules Football game is an all-around incredible time. A visit to Sydney can help contextualize the New York-San Francisco comparisons you hear so often between Melbourne and Australia’s breathtaking capital. Oh, and if you set aside some time for surfing, do it at Bells Beach near Torquay, otherwise known as the founding location of Rip Curl, or on the legendary Gold Coast.

Or play more golf!! Check out Royal Sydney in New South Wales, or Brisbane, or, hop on a quick flight to New Zealand, where mythical-looking new courses seem to be opening every few weeks.

The only thing I recommend against is failing to connect with the locals. You will never find a friendlier or more enthusiastic culture for pushing your comfort zones. Lean into it!

9. What should I know about the journey home?

The jetlag will linger for a little while — for me it was the better part of five days until I felt fully myself again — but the real sting will be the return to reality. Even today, 18 months removed from my maiden voyage, I still feel a pang of melancholy as I write about my journey to Oz. It was not long after my return flight that I set email notifications for Qantas, hoping the allure of a great deal might encourage me to make an unreasonable financial decision.

I left a little bit of my soul behind in Australia, but that’s okay. I’ll be back some day soon to collect it.

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The post My Masters gift exchange at an Australian golf course in the middle of nowhere appeared first on Golf.

I stumbled into the ball marker by accident.

It was Masters week 2023, and I was readying for a round of golf at a course near Augusta, Ga., when I received a tap on the shoulder.

“Here, take one of these,” the man said, flashing a white-and-green button in my direction bearing an unmistakable logo: Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters tournament.

Every year, the Masters sells millions of dollars in merchandise out of its behemoth on-site operation, all bearing the tournament’s iconic yellow logo with script “MASTERS” lettering underneath. If that logo represents the white whale of golf merchandise, the logo on the ball mark represented the woolly mammoth. I’d been gifted a ball mark with the Augusta National members logo.

The shape looked the same — same outline of the United States map, same script lettering underneath — but this logo was green, and the lettering read “Augusta National.” I thanked the starter for the gift and tucked it away carefully in my golf bag, where it remained untouched for nearly 12 months.

Someday, I would find a good use for that ball mark, and when I found it, I’d know.

I DID NOT EXPECT I would participate in a gift exchange in Warrnambool. To be fair, I did not even know where Warrnambool was — including during much of the time I spent in it.

I can tell you now that Warrnambool is an Australian beach town in the state of Victoria, about a third of the way from Melbourne to Adelaide. It is the kind of place that someone from my side of the world — New York — goes to visit when they are trying very hard to escape. Giant, perfectly symmetrical pine trees frame the main drag into town, while a lengthy boardwalk traces along the ocean. The air hangs heavy with dew from the sea, and a quiet contentment sits just beneath the surface of those who linger in the town and its wilder outskirts.

We’d spent two weeks darting through Melbourne on the greatest trip of our lives, but as we turned for the home stretch and headed out into the country, we learned quickly that our journey was about to change. Some of that was the golf, which we had heard took on a Scottish flavor in the countryside. Some of it was the setting: a winding, one-lane seaside highway called “the Great Ocean Road.”

Like Big Sur or the Road to Hana, the Great Ocean Road is one of those “journey is the destination” places, featuring 150 miles of idyllic seaside towns (on the right) and utterly perfect coastline (on the left). Unlike Big Sur and the Road to Hana, the Great Ocean Road welcomes golf in a more egalitarian sensibility. Courses are jammed into outcroppings of land outstretched over the ocean, kept in careful — but hardly cosmopolitan — condition, and lorded over by honors boxes and “suggested” greens fees. If golf in Melbourne is for those with Champagne tastes, golf along the Great Ocean Road is for those with an appetite for meat and potatoes.

A few golf courses are absolutely worth visiting along this path — Apollo Bay and Peterborough counting as two — but our arrangements left room for only one tee time, at a place named Port Fairy Golf Club.

We pulled up the course on Google Maps as we began our drive down the Great Ocean Road and giggled gleefully. It was baked-out, bordering on brown, littered with pot bunkers and overlooking the ocean.

It was time to send our trip out in a blaze of glory.

“HEY,” Peter half-yelled in a tone that made it difficult to discern his seriousness.

“Do you blokes have any dinner plans?”

We did not. But that was the kind of information we might have liked to keep from Peter, an honest-to-god stranger we’d met only 10 minutes earlier. We’d been paired with Peter on the first hole at Port Fairy Golf Club, a golf course in the middle of the nowhere … on an island in the middle of nowhere. We were in a part of town where the roads were mostly made of dirt and the locals warned of driving at night for fear of totaling one’s car on a kangaroo.

We were in the kind of place where one’s recently cleaved body could be buried cozily along the coastline and left undisturbed for many decades. We were, in other words, not looking to make friends.

But Peter wasn’t willing to hear “no.” He was so gregarious, so certain of his capacity and willingness to help, that he was willing to drag our dinner plans over the proverbial finish line, if that’s what it took. And as we waited for the group to clear the second fairway, that’s just what Peter did.

“Hi, look, I’ve got these two fine gentlemen here from America, and they’re hoping to get into your restaurant for dinner tonight,” Peter said into his cell phone. “They’re really good blokes, and they know it’ll be hard to squeeze them in, but I wanted to call and ask if it’d be all right?”

It was unclear exactly what’d inspired Peter into this random act of kindness, but by this point in our journey through Australia, we’d learned not to question it. The Aussies were the most astonishingly friendly people we’d ever met, the kind of folks who, it seemed, would take great joy in lying down in a dirty puddle in the middle of an intersection if it meant keeping our shoes clean. Peter had transformed from stranger to personal concierge in roughly eight minutes, and we’d hardly blinked.

It was a holiday weekend in Warrnambool, and as such, the restaurants were booked up, but Peter was undeterred. He spent the better part of his first four holes calling restaurants until he settled on one he liked and was willing to seat us.

We tried to thank him for his help as he and his brother-in-law departed from us on the 9th green, but Peter refused.

“It was nothing, really,” he said, smiling. “Pay it forward.”

WE MET EVIN and James just a few moments later. The brothers-in-law were standing on the 10th tee box as we bid Peter one final adieu, and as we turned back toward the golf course, they interrupted us.

“You fellas looking to play?” they asked.

Evin and James were quick friends. They lived back in Melbourne, but they were out for the holiday visiting family in Warrnambool, and with the wives enjoying an afternoon on the beach, they’d escaped to the golf course.

Evin and James were cut from central casting in the Young Guy Golfer demo. James, a broad-shouldered guy in his late-20s, was a golf escapist. A young father and husband, he was not a serious player, but he was a serious fan. He’d traveled across the country for a LIV event in Adelaide, and dreamt of converting his farm outside of Melbourne into a driving range.

Evin, on the other hand, was a golf obsessive. In his mid-20s and sporting a rower’s build, he’d gotten into golf as a Covid convert. In the years since, he’d leveraged YouTube and sheer force of will to take himself from a hacker to a 10ish handicap. He consumed golf voraciously, and as we played, he asked the kind of questions I’d found myself asking my coworkers just a few years earlier.

“What do you guys think of Bryson?”

“What’s the coolest tournament you’ve ever covered?”

“What was the Ryder Cup like?”

We marched on into the sunset at Port Fairy with James and Evin by our side, the conversation easy and the breeze light. The course had proven to be a proper gem — totally unlike anywhere we’d played in Australia to that point.

Somehow, it wasn’t until we’d turned for home that Evin finally put the pieces together.

“Wait, are you blokes going to cover the Masters?!?”

Sean and I laughed. Yes, we were. Our travels would bring us to Augusta in just a few days.

Evin’s eyes nearly fell out of his head.

“Are you serious?!”

Sean and I laughed again. Yes, we were.

I spent the final few holes telling Evin all about the April tradition on the other side of the world. How the golf course is exactly as beautiful as it looks on TV, but way hillier. Why I found the Pimento Cheese overrated (sharp, like cream cheese) and the Georgia Peach Ice Cream Sandwich underrated (soft, like a pillow). And how the cell phone policy is, in fact, strictly enforced.

As we reached the 18th green, I sensed that Evin would keep asking us questions about Augusta National all night if time allowed. I knew the feeling — it wasn’t long ago that I had felt the same.

Unfortunately, time would not allow. Our round was nearing completion, and in a day, we’d be gone for good.

“I’ve got to make it there,” Evin said, grinning at the thought of his sudden physical proximity to the Masters. “I don’t know how.”

As we meandered off the 18th green, I thought about my strange life in golf. The sport had brought me far beyond my wildest dreams. Hell, it’d brought me here, on the greatest trip of my life, to the golf course on the other side of the world with the quartet of strangers who’d gotten me dinner reservations and become fast friends. If anyone knew about the value of a well-placed golf dream, it was me.

Our round was over, and in a few moments we would go our separate ways, likely forever. But before that happened, I reached into my golf bag and plucked out a ball marker.

“Hey, Evin,” I said. “I’ve got a gift for you.”

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The post WAGs, Red wine and Goodwill jackets: Meet Australia’s friendliest golf club appeared first on Golf.

A good deal of travel ultimately comes down to understanding the local rules of alcohol consumption.

And at about 11 a.m. on Wednesday mornings at a golf club on the other side of the world, the rules of alcohol consumption are fairly simple: start.

It is hard to fathom the tonal shift between the parking lot and the grill room on Wednesday mornings at Metropolitan Golf Club — the Melbourne-based club and multiple-time Australian Open host. It’s as if you’ve jumped off a bridge with a bungee cord strapped to your back, plunging from the Sandbelt’s polite, cosmopolitan world into the heartbeat of the local golf culture at terminal velocity.

The day’s first drink is beer. Cold. Light. Refreshing. Plucked from a bar packed five-deep with members of all ages, served in a half-schooner glass and taken — for those who failed to prepare properly for the morning’s activities — with a second fist of cappuccino. It does not take long to learn that beer will be the first of several liquid courses served throughout the day, which will also include two meals and 18 holes of golf. At Metro, beer is an amuse-bouche for lunch, which is itself an amuse-bouche for golf, which is merely an amuse-bouche for dinner, which tonight will feature a special kind of celebration. What you drink during the day’s steady crescendo is up to you, but if there is one fact upon which everybody agrees, it is that Wednesdays are not the day for bashfulness … or sobriety.

Contrary to the scene in the grill room, Wednesday morning is not a party. Rather, it is the beginning of something much better: The first act of the weekly meeting of the WAGs, or Wednesday Afternoon Golfers, a legendary members’ competition with origins dating back several decades. In a 10-mile plot featuring six of the best golf courses in the world, the WAGs serve as perhaps the starkest difference between Metro and its Sandbelt neighbors. Some Golf Clubs are Golf Clubs, and some Golf Clubs are communities. Metropolitan is proudly the latter, and the WAGs are their masthead. Mostly, that means the WAGs are fun, and if fun just so happens to include The Body and The Blood, well, who are we to judge?

If served properly, the first round of alcohol and caffeine provides a brief respite from those pesky laws of physics, casting a gravitational pull toward the whiteboard at the center of the room, where two graying gentlemen sit at a table containing stacks of a small fortune of the local currency. They are members too, but on Wednesday mornings, they are Metropolitan’s club-sanctioned bookies, offering odds and gleefully collecting side-wagers on the afternoon’s festivities.

Real money is exchanged, but a fair amount of the betting seems to involve casting heavy short bets against buddies certain to wilt under tournament pressure. Most members spend their time around the bookmakers swearing on their game’s impotence in a badly disguised effort to move their odds, which, to my tremendous surprise, makes inroads with those running the whiteboard. It isn’t until later that I learn the proceeds from the betting help fund the club’s bar tab, which considerably eases my concerns around more nefarious betting activities. Thankfully, the stakes are low enough that even the most gregarious grandstander, a man named Bill Shelton, gives up after a small bump in his odds.

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“And who are you?” He says, turning a bright blue eye in my direction.

Bill is 89 years old, and he has been a member of the club for six decades, making him one of the WAGs’ VIPs. Bill is a giant — and I mean that mostly figuratively, though he stands an imposing six-foot-two and was a popular Australian Football League player in a past life. Mr. Shelton is larger than life, his spirit bursting with equal parts radiant warmth and pure mischief in a way that almost immediately makes him one of my favorite people I’ve ever met. His voice commands the room in a deep baritone that bounces off the walls, and his eyes electrify at the mere suggestion of misbehavior.

Like when we make it into the dining room for lunch shortly before noon, and Shelton raises an eyebrow.

“Are you happy to have wine?” He says, grinning, as he pulls the cap off the club’s own private-label Shiraz. “Are you happy to have red? We don’t seem to have any white.”

He pours me one glass of red. And then another. And then another. And then suddenly multiple bottles are open on the table in front of us. Before long lunch is over, and I’m walking to the first tee box with a belly full of private-label liquid confidence.

Golf at Metropolitan is in the standard Sandbelt style, which is to say that it is golf with the contrast turned to 11. The land rolls in smooth green curves from tee box to fairway to green, but the hazards are cut on a knife’s edge, trapping bad shots with all manner of foul bounces. Metro is not the most visually distinct or strategically challenging of the bunch, but it more than holds its weight in the neighborhood, which means the same could be said for how the club ranks against the courses in any other golf neighborhood in the world.

The story of Metropolitan Golf Club is the story of so many great clubs — one of committed membership and close friendship, of healthy debate and halting progress. The club’s captain, Campbell MacKintosh, has stewarded the course’s transition into the modern age with a clubhouse-and-course renovation that remains underway. After our round, he tells the story of the renovation’s most pained endeavor: an effort to remove three out-of-place pine trees from the center of the 17th fairway that Greg Norman allegedly once called the “dumbest in Australia.” MacKintosh is the kind of golf obsessive who fills every table at Metro: Steeped in history, filled with reverence, and genuinely desiring the best for his club. Still, his well-intentioned effort to remove the trees was fruitless. The club’s membership, particularly its longest-tenured members, were affectionate for the funky pines. They rejected his motion to have the trees removed.

“I’m pretty sure I’m right,” he says with a grin. “But to some of our members, those trees are Metropolitan.”

The subtext is clear: The trees in the middle of the fairway might have been a bad idea. They might still be. But somewhere along the way, they became no less a part of Metro than the club logo and the WAGs. To lose the trees would be to lose part of what every member holds most dear about Metropolitan: the tradition. This, MacKintosh realizes, is the truly unique gift of his home club; not world-class golf or extravagant Wednesday outings, but people who believe in something bigger than themselves.

“There’s so much good golf in this city,” I say to Campbell, looking out at the WAGs. “How’d you get so lucky with this … here?”

MacKintosh flashes me a knowing smile.

“Because Melbourne is the best city in the entire world.”

For the WAGs, dinner is a special kind of social engagement — a shirt-and-tie-only affair during which the competitors will learn the winners and losers of the day’s competition (the latter is far more compelling). This would be bad news for a group of Americans with only the shirts on their back, but MacKintosh has organized a surprise. Somehow, the club has managed to track down four used coats, one for each member of our visiting group, to attend the dinner in proper attire.

A shower and short happy hour follow, and just as I’m about to head back into the main dining room for dinner, I feel a tug on my sleeve.

“James,” says Bill Shelton, the 89-year-old member of six decades. “Would you mind meeting my wife?“

I agree, and his eyes dance to life again.

“Honey,” he says. “Meet my new friend.”

A short speech with several rounds of applause joins dinner, and then it is time for the day’s trophies, which include a modernist sculpture seemingly plucked from a nearby dumpster (for the winner) and a truly hideous bright-blue jacket that must be worn at all times inside club property (for the loser). As the loser’s name is announced, he emerges from underneath the dining room’s white tablecloths with a terrified look. The room erupts into raucous laughter. More wine is served.

The day’s final activity is a question-and-answer session with legendary Aussie golfer and golf course architect Michael Clayton. With gray hair around his shoulders and the bullshit tolerance of a middle-school teacher, Clayton is at home in this group of iconoclasts. He shares opinions without fear or favor (and sometimes without warning), and loves nothing as deeply as he loves golf.

As Clayton begins his Q-and-A with the WAGs, I find myself dreaming of all the ways to punctuate this deliriously wondrous day in Oz. How does one properly explain the depth of the warmth in this room? The vibrance of the personality? The sincerity of the generosity, and the connection, and the friendship?

I’m so lost in that thought that I almost miss one of the last questions to Clayton, which turns out to be a toughie. What does Mike, a man who has dedicated his life to golf, make of the ongoing feud between the PGA Tour and LIV?

“Will they ever find peace?” the man asks.

“Why do you care?” Clayton asks back.

The room falls quiet for a second. The WAGs are speechless for the first time all day.

“That’s not what golf is about,” he says. “No, that’s not real golf at all.”

He laughs, and points toward the crowd.

“This is.”

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The post The Great Australian Golf Getaway, Part I: Mornington Peninsula appeared first on Golf.

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Within hours of touching down in Melbourne, Australia, for a blowout buddies’ trip, I’d yet to check whether toilets really flush in the opposite direction in the Southern Hemisphere. But I’d verified another law of physics: slices spin in the same Down Under as they do back home.

It was a sun-kissed afternoon, midweek, mid-March, and I’d just missed the middle of a fairway by a mile on the 3rd hole of the North Course at Peninsula Kingswood, a rustic beauty where straying from the short grass can be ruinous for many reasons, not all related to your score. Just before our start, a club representative had treated us to a pre-round speech worthy of Steve Irwin, telling us excitedly about the course and the venomous snakes that reside on it.

“If one of them gets you,” he said, grinning. “You’ve got about an hour.”

Maybe that accounted for my shaky play. Certainly, jet lag was not to blame.

On our 16-hour flight from Los Angeles, my colleagues — Darren, James and Sean — and I had been upgraded to Qantas business class, where the seats lay flat, pajamas were provided, and the time passed in a relative flash. We arrived the next morning at far end of the world, rested and ready to hit the ground running, with Sean, the most skilled of our foursome at driving on the wrong side of the road, piloting the rental car.

Like the most famous Melbourne-area courses — Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath and Victoria — Peninsula Kingswood is part of the Sandbelt and bears the hallmark features of layouts in the region, with firm, fast turf and steep-faced, sharp-edged bunkers. But the club sits farther south than its siblings at the gateway to the Mornington Peninsula, a boot-shaped protrusion below Melbourne that doubles as a draw for golfers, surfers and nearby city-dwellers on weekend getaways.

“It’s sort of like what Long Island is to Manhattan,” Mike Clayton, the acclaimed golf course architect and Melbourne native, told me.

As we motored south, though, admiring vineyards and bay views, other comparisons came to mind: the Mornington Peninsula was Northern California, minus the congestion; it was Scotland with nicer weather and better wine.

Analogies aside, it was not shabby spot to start our 10-day escape.

Peninsula Kingswood made a sensible first stop in part for its location, just less than an hour’s drive from the airport, but also for its pedigree. Formed by a merger of two clubs (Peninsula and Kingswood) with roots that reached back to the early 1900s, it occupies a rolling, sandy site and is home to two highly regarded courses —the North and the South — both of which were restored in recent years by the Aussie quartet of Clayton, U.S. Open winner Geoff Ogilvy, Mike Cocking and Ashley Mead.

Of the two layouts, the South is longer, flatter and — based on the course ratings — more difficult, but the North offers a more faithful introduction to Sandbelt golf in the style and scale of its sandy wastes and bunkers, as well as in its heathland vegetation. To say it’s easier than the South doesn’t mean it’s shy on strategic demands.

As our group learned quickly, being out of position brings all kind of non-reptilian problems to the fore (it’s worth noting that snakes, as our Aussie friend made clear in his pre-round pep talk, want even less to do with us than we do with them; just thump the turf with a club whenever you’re ball hawking and if they happen to be near, they’ll stay away). The real issue is angles. The North Course is all about them. A well-placed drive opens up a world of opportunity, while an errant tee ball, even if it finds the fairway, leaves you playing defense on your approach.

No matter the shot, taking dead aim at the flag isn’t often the wise choice. In quintessential Sandbelt fashion, the North Course is a bouncy celebration of the ground game, which is less a game of darts than it is a mogul run. And one of the great pleasures of playing it is anticipating the hops and rolls and trying to execute accordingly. Some randomness applies, of course. The rub of the green can work both ways.

This was apparent throughout our round, but nowhere more than on the par-5 17th hole, where Darren’s blade runner of a layup skipped and skirted before coming to rest in an ideal spot, some 70 yards from the pin. Good breaks are only good if you take advantage of them, and Darren’s next shot was pro-model, a perfect baby wedge that landed on a ridge at the front right of the green, then rolled and curled, as if GPS-guided, into a back-left cup for eagle — a fist-pump moment made even more euphoric by the fact that it was filmed by a drone that Darren had set hovering behind the hole.

This highlight of the round was also a focus of our post-round conversations. With the sun dipping low over Port Phillip Bay, we made the scenic drive through vine-latticed terrain to Pt. Leo Estate, one of many bright lights in a constellation of area wineries, where we sat for a spot-on farm-to-table dinner.

The Mornington Peninsula’s temperate, coastal climate is similar to that of Sonoma County, and the same grape varietals — including pinot noir and chardonnay — thrive in both locales. The cuisine, sustained by the seasonal and local, is reminiscent of California cooking, too. Over a feast of grilled lamb and roast vegetables at Pt. Leo’s glass-walled restaurant, we gazed out at a modern sculpture garden, backed in the distance by the bay, while reliving the day in the smack-talk language in which all golfers are fluent. Then we made our way to our accommodations and got ready to do it again.

Our place of stay was Moonah Links, and our place of play was the Open Course, one of the resort’s two 18-holers. True to its name, it was designed by five-time Open Championship winner Peter Thomson (the Tom Watson of Australia), as a cap tip to the links on which he had so much success. One of the longest layouts in the country, the Open Course, which stretches more than 7,400 yards and has hosted the Australian Open twice, is peppered with riveted pot bunkers, many hidden, links-like, in the folds of the fairways. And though not hard on the water, like most Open rota venues, it plays under the influence of coastal winds, which adds to both the challenge and the entertainment. None of us broke 80 but we all had a blast.

Where the fun might take us next was another matter. The peninsula is loaded with so many courses, we were forced to pick and choose within the two days we’d allotted for this portion of our tour. After some debate, we opted for the National Golf Club, a luxurious retreat where we faced another choice because the National has four courses, including designs by Greg Norman and Tom Doak.

With no way of going wrong, we wound up going with the Old Course, a late-1980s Robert Trent Jones Jr. layout that many architecture nerds regard among the finest efforts of his long career. The routing is a verdant roller coaster, built on a heaving canvas of dunes and tea trees, with daunting looks at fairways that are more forgiving than they appear to be off the tee. Compared to the two rounds we’d already played, this was a more target-y test, with lusher turf and more forced carries, and the adrenaline rush of do-or-die shots was enhanced by the spectacle of the ocean, photobombing in the backdrop.

It called for our attention from high points on the course, and captured it fully on the 7th hole, a short par 3 over a canyon to a green set on a bluff with an infinity of blue extending behind it. After a solid pin-high play and a routine two putt, Sean stood at the green’s edge, taking in the postcard vista, and half-jokingly suggested that we camp out where we were for the rest of the day.

It was not a bad idea, but it was good that we kept going. After 36 hours and nearly three rounds, we’d yet to come across a snake in Australia. But on the very next hole, an uphill par 5, we had our first encounter with a different native species: a troop of kangaroos, lazing and grazing astride the tilted green, as bored by us as we were thrilled by them.

Distracted, I three-jacked. Another bogie and another nugget for the memory banks, with more to come. Two days down, we still had eight to go in and around Melbourne, where my game seemed very similar to what it was back home, but the golf — our group had already come to realize — was unlike anything anywhere else.

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