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.
The Great Australian Golf Getaway, Part I: Mornington Peninsula
“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 Aussie Rules Football 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 in his eyes. 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 Michael, 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.”