I am up before 6 a.m. the next morning to take a taxi to Clayton’s house, and from there he drives us to the Peninsula Country Golf Club. The name is quite a mouthful, but the club lives up to its moniker, boasting as it does four hundred acres of grass tennis courts and bowling and croquet lawns along with thirty-six holes of golf. Mike’s complete redesign of both courses has transformed Peninsula from an also-ran to a frontrunner that can now claim, along with Royal Melbourne, perhaps the most authentic and ideally contoured golf grounds in the region.
The North has grown in over the last few years and continues to garner praise. Work on the South has only just been completed. It was over this longer, tougher eighteen that we ventured forth. Peninsula South is a course that puts your manhood to the test, and given that my golf today is barely preteen, I get beaten up pretty badly. But I get to watch Clayton make it look simple enough. The course offers up all the usual Sandbelt suspects: great turf, devilish bunkering and a real variety of green complexes, from the simple to the roller-coaster. The fairways offer plenty of width, but precision and shot-shaping are prerequisites for scoring, notably on the reachable par fives, where a drawn ball can be fed onto the putting surface by the contouring of the surrounds but any misjudged shot will stop short or find one of the bunkers.
That afternoon, Clayton drops me off at Kingston Heath Golf Club, where I’m joined by my Internet buddy, Rich. We “met” at an online golf forum, so I know he knows his architecture, but as for his game, I have no idea—we’re meeting in person for the first time. I’m one of those people who believes you can tell a lot about an unfamiliar playing partner by looking at the clubs in his bag. Rich’s are new, high-tech and very clean. If he had used iron covers I would have suggested a wager right then and there. He addresses his first tee shot looking stiff and tense. His backswing is overly long and his right elbow flies out, but somehow he returns the clubhead to the ball with considerable force and precision, sending it some three hundred yards down the middle. My weak, heeled fade is barely within sight of it. “We should have a match, don’t you think?” I squeak. “What’s your handicap?”
I can’t think of another instance in which a one-handicap golfer so fully deserved to be called a sandbagger—or a bandit, which is the term we prefer in the British Commonwealth. Rich shot an easy sixty-nine, and the generous six shots I received were not nearly enough. Nevertheless, Kingston Heath is a course that can beat you without precipitating tears. It is simply a joy to play.
When MacKenzie came to Kingston Heath, he saw the genius of the existing routing and was smart enough to leave it well alone. He bunkered the course—famously, beautifully—and this does provide the primary defense to scoring. He added only one original hole: the fifteenth, an uphill par three over a sea of bunkers to a treacherous reverse-L-shaped green. It’s only a mid-iron, but the wind is always a factor, and the seemingly safe play from the tee leaves the player above the hole, on a green where one simply can’t afford to be there. Only a perfect shot is rewarded and, against all odds, that’s just what I hit. Our match being already over, I was playing for pride, and I cut a choked-down five-iron into the wind and watched it finish ten feet from the cup. Of course I missed the putt—my stroke was long gone by then. The fifteenth may be the only world-class hole on the course, but it is the consistent quality and strategic challenge of the other seventeen that make the Heath one of the best courses on the planet. Whereas the West Course at Royal Melbourne will bowl you over with its beauty, floor you with roundhouse after roundhouse, Kingston Heath gradually seduces you—by its grace, its elegance and its sophistication—into a submission equally inevitable.
The club couldn’t be friendlier, the white brick clubhouse charming in a way no modern structure seems able to be (I’m sorry, modernists, it’s true), and there is an inclusive atmosphere that I wish the grand British clubs could emulate: Casual attire seems equally as acceptable as formal wear. Furthermore the bar serves Coopers Red. If and when my wife agrees that we should move to Melbourne, this is where I’d like to be a member.
Back at my hotel, exhausted, I start packing. I know I’ll be in no state to do a decent job of it after dinner at the Press Club. Modern Greek is not a cuisine that one hears much about, but in Melbourne, which has the largest Greek-speaking population outside of Athens, it is all the rage.
We’re seven tonight: Don and his fiancée; Clayton and his wife; and two other friends, Helen and Susan. The mood is festive. It’s goodbye to me, but I’m not going out with a whimper. The options are overwhelming us, so we agree to share a tasting kerasma menu—a Greek word that means, we’re told, “to treat.” Wave after wave of delicacies arrive, filled with surprises. The meal culminates with the roast meats, the pig sending Helen into paroxysms of pleasure reminiscent of Meg Ryan at Katz’s. When the feast ends, we can barely move. Still, we manage the short walk to a favorite dive, Cherry Bar, for a nightcap. Clayts and I look like pathetic undercover cops, but we don’t care. After a couple of Maker’s Marks and twenty minutes of unsuccessfully trying to have a conversation over the jukebox, we concede defeat and the old folks are off to bed.
