My Masters gift exchange at an Australian golf course in the middle of nowhere

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.”