The South Course at Torrey Pines, where the Farmers Insurance Open will wrap up this weekend, plays 7,765 yards from the championship tees. That’s a hefty distance by almost any measure.
But it’s no more than a pitch-and-putt in Alf Caputo’s world.
A marketing wiz from Western Australia with a thick mustache and a sense of mischief, Caputo, 73, is not much of a golfer. But he cuts an outsize profile in the game through the course he helped create. He is the manager and co-developer of the Nullarbor Links, the longest layout in the world.
On its rugged path through the Australian outback, the course extends for 1,365 kilometers (some 850 miles), spilling through the Nullarbor Plains, an arid region that lives up to the Latin roots of its name: nullas arbor, meaning no trees. There aren’t many people in the Nullarbor, either. It is one of the most sparsely populated places on earth.
The region’s sheer remoteness is part of its stark beauty. It is also a source of economic struggle, as it is hard to earn a living when there’s no one around.
Caputo has long been attuned to this issue. One evening, roughly 25 years ago, he got together with his buddy Bob Bongiorno, another entrepreneurial outbacker, and the two began brainstorming. How could they draw more tourists to the Nullarbor?
As inspiration, they recalled the story of the Nullarbor Nymph, an outlandish tale, concocted by a journalist in the 1970s, that centered on the exploits of a half-naked woman who cavorted on the outback with kangaroos. Absurdist as it was, the yarn — a kind of sexualized Sasquatch story — made international headlines and attracted hordes of travelers to the treeless plain.
That’s what they needed, Caputo and Bongiorno realized: a new tabloid sensation. A few bottles of red wine into their evening, the idea for the world’s longest course was born.
Building the layout involved more effort. But some nine years later, in 2008, with help from government grants and design input from a British golf pro who roughed out a routing by studying the outback on Google Maps, the Nullarbor Links was good to go.
From its starting point in Ceduna, a small fishing town in South Australia, the course runs west across the Nullarbor to the mining city of Kalgoolrie, though you can also play it in the opposite direction. Either way, the green fees is $70 (plus an $8 maintenance fee) and the holes you come upon are a hodgepodge, most with Astroturf tees, some with sand greens, and nearly all positioned alongside small-town roadhouses, barebones oases that offer rustic accommodations and hearty sustenance such as meat pies and kangaroo stew.
This isn’t cart golf. It’s car golf. Some holes are 50 miles apart. Driving, the course requires three days to complete. And yet not everybody relies on motorized transport. People have ridden bicycles and rickshaws. A small handful of lunatics have walked, playing the course over the span of months.
From an architectural standpoint, the design was not intended to impress the snobs. But like many of the world’s finest layouts, it has a distinctive sense of place. Take the 4th hole. It’s called Wombat, in honor of the local marsupial inhabitants (an estimated 2.5 million of them), who make up what is said to be the world’s largest population of Hairy Nosed Wombats. Or the 12th hole: Skylab, named for the famously doomed space probe, which crash-landed nearby in 1979. The local roadhouse has a Skylab museum.
Over the past 16 years, Caputo says that about 20,000 people have paid to play the Nullarbor Links; many others have played it without paying. But the largest outings have come in April, when the Nullarbor Links hosts a tournament called Chasing the Sun, which is less a competition than it is a friendly group excursion that doubles as an endurance test.
This year marks the 13th playing of the event, which will get underway April 6 at sunrise in Ceduna and conclude seven days and 850 miles later with a post-round cocktail party in Kalgoolrie. Though it won’t make much different, participants are free to play from the forward tees. More information can be found here.