As I awake from my reverie and revert to my usual game, Don inches his way back into the match. I find myself one up going to the eighteenth hole—an uphill par four. No amount of Metro roll could make this one anything but a brute. A gargantuan bunker protects the front left of the two-tiered green, making the approach, a long iron at best, a far more attractive prospect from the right half of the fairway, which is bordered, quite correctly, with more bunkers. Not for the faint of heart. After two surprisingly good hits and an awfully weak putt, I have five feet left for a par, a half, and the match. The ball goes in. The monkey is off my back, and Don is off to work (apparently he sells software). For me, it’s a meet-up for lunch with “Clayts.”
Born and raised in the suburbs of Melbourne, Michael Clayton played the Australian and European tours from 1982 until 2000, winning the prestigious Heineken Trophy in 1994. The next year he started his own course-design company. It’s done well, the highlight to date being Clayton’s codesign with Tom Doak at Barnbougle Dunes in Tasmania. Clayton is also retained by Kingston Heath, Victoria and several other Sandbelt clubs, and is widely considered to be the preeminent authority on these courses. With an eye on entering the Senior British Open in a few months, Clayts wanted to brush up on his game, and I want to tag along and pester him.
He’s also a member at Metro, so I ask him what exactly it was that MacKenzie did there. “I don’t think anybody really can point to anything specific,” he says. “He was very complimentary about the course. The real influence of MacKenzie was to alter the way people thought about the game—and that it wasn’t about punishing every bad shot.”
After lunch we head to Victoria Golf Club, where in 1954 the trophy cabinet displayed both the Claret Jug and the British Amateur trophy, after Peter Thomson and Doug Bachli brought them home. It has maintained its reputation as the local players’ club—2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy is the current star member. It is a burly, man-size course with a clubhouse to match and, bordering Royal Melbourne, its terrain is similar to that of the West Course.
By 1995, however, much was amiss. What had been a wild, exhilarating challenge for its first forty years had been systematically tamed. Against the advice of Thomson, trees had been planted and they had slowly choked the course of its indigenous heath and bracken, its width and, ultimately, its identity. Further “beautification” undermined the design intent and the course’s integrity. To restore this lost character, Clayton’s company was brought in. His team set about rebuilding the dramatic MacKenzie/Morcom bunkers to the original specs—vast and brutal. Waste areas were reinstated, rough was replaced by short grass, and trees were removed—not enough of them, if you ask Clayton, but it was still progress.
Playing with the resident architect is entertaining, illuminating—and difficult. An inch or so over six feet and solidly built, Clayton looks comfortable in his own ruddy skin, as if he’s been outdoors in a V-neck sweater most of his life. Which he has. He plays from the tip of the tips and sometimes even beyond them, from where he tells me the tee should be. A true golf obsessive, not even slightly jaded, he remains in awe of great design and freely fires off endearingly salty tirades against those who subvert it. His enthusiasm is infectious. Ogilvy, for one, is now a keen student of golf architecture, crediting his interest to rounds played with Clayts. That makes sense to me: After just a few hours on the course with him, I feel as if I’ve attended a seminar more valuable than all of the design books I’ve pored over. But I’m not overwhelmed. He keeps it simple and trusts his instincts; I’d call his design philosophy “pragmatic minimalism.” He emphasizes the importance of routing and green complexes and believes that if these make the best use of, and blend in with, existing contours, then there will be less need to bulldoze. Works for me.
Clayts hits it only a club or two longer than I do, but his score is rather more than one or two better. What I learn is that good players don’t need the bombed drive or the forty-yard cut shot, because they almost never put themselves in a spot that calls for heroics. It’s a baby draw most of the time, or a hint of a fade if the wind, the angle or the green demands it. It’s strategic golf, and you need that around here, but it’s not nuclear physics. What’s the secret of Victoria’s great new first hole?“Hit it down the left,” Clayton says. “Unless the pin is left, then hit it down the right.” Not much to that, is there?But it’s a darned sight more interesting than the hole’s previous stratagem: Bomb one into the bunker guarding the green.
The restoration here is gradual, definitely a work in progress, but the improvement is already huge. Clayton might call my praise premature, but I’ll go on the record: Victoria is a great course again. And his work is not going unnoticed. Rival clubs that only recently dismissed him as more of a deforester than a designer now seek his advice. Sandbelt golf was already great, no doubt. Thanks to Michael Clayton, it’s getting better.
