Meet Australia’s friendly Golf’s most friendly club

A good part of the trip eventually descends to understand the local rules of alcohol consumption.

And around 11am Wednesday morning at a golf club around the world, alcohol consumption rules are quite simple: begin.

It is difficult to understand the tonal difference between the parking lot and the grill room on Wednesday morning at Metropolitan club -The club based on Melbourne and a lot of time Australian Open Host. Not if you have danced a bridge with a bungee cord tied on your back, plunging out of the polite world, cosmopolitan and sandbor in the heartbeat of local golf culture at terminal speeds.

The first drink of the day is beer. Cold. Refreshing light. Torn by a bar filled with five depths with members of all ages, served in a half-schooner glass and foolish for those who failed to prepare properly for breakfast activities-with a second handful of hoods. It does not take much time to learn that beer will be the first of some liquid courses served all day, which will also include two meals and 18 golf holes. In the subway, beer is a lunch entertainment, which is in itself an entertainment for golf, which is just a fun-bouche for dinner, which tonight will display a special kind of celebration. What you drink during the steady crescent of the day depends on you, but if there is a fact on which all It agrees, is that Wednesday is not the day for noise … or the stove.

Despite the scene in Grill’s room, Wednesday morning is not a holiday. On the contrary, it is the beginning of something much better: the first act of WAG weekly meeting, or Wednesday afternoon players, a legendary competition of members of origin dating back to decades. In a 10-mile plot that features six of the best golf courses in the world, Wags serve as perhaps the most strict difference between Metro and its neighbors Sandbelt. Some golf clubs are golf clubs, and some golf clubs are communities. The metropolitan is proudly the latter, and the WAG is their chairman. Mostly, this means that Wags are FUNAnd if fun just happens to include the body AND Blood, well, who are we to judge?

If served properly, the first round of alcohol and caffeine provides a brief relief from those annoying laws of physics, throwing a gravitational attraction towards the white table in the center of the room, where two gray gentlemen sit on a table containing shelves of a small local coin. They are also members, but on Wednesday morning, they are books sanctioned by the Metropolitan Club, offering chances and gathering side speakers with afternoon celebrations.

Exchanges the real money, but a fair amount of bets seems to include throwing big short bets against safe friends to look for under the pressure of the tournament. Most members spend their time around the creators of the books by sworn in the powerlessness of their game in a badly disguised attempt to move their chances, which, to my extraordinary surprise, make the entrances with those who run the white table. It is not until later to learn betting revenue helping to finance the club tab, which significantly facilitates my concerns about the worst betting activities. Fortunately, the actions are quite low that even the wildest Grandstander, a man named Bill Shelton, gives up after a little collision in his chances.

“And who are you? “He says, turning a bright blue eye in my direction.

Bill is 89, and he has been a member of the club for six decades, making him one of Wags’ VIPs. Bill is a giant-and I want to say that mostly figuratively, though he stands a six-foot-two imposes and was a popular Aussie player adjusts the player in a past life. Mr. Shelton is greater than life, his spirit by exploding with equal portions of radiant warmth and pure wrongdoing in a way that almost immediately makes him one of my favorite people I have ever met. His voice commands the room in a deep baritone that releases the walls, and his eyes are electrified with the simple suggestion of wrong behavior.

Like when we do it in the dining room for lunch just before noon, and Shelton raises an eyebrow.

“Are you happy to have wine?” He says, annoying as it draws the lid from the Shirazi of the club’s private self-tatts. “Are you happy to have red? We don’t seem to have any white. “

“>>

He pours me a glass of red. And then another. And then another. And then suddenly numerous bottles are open on the table in front of us. Before lunch is over, and I’m walking in the first box of tee with a belly full of liquid confidence with private label.

Golf in the metropolitan is Sandbelt’s standard style, which means it is Golf with the contrast turned 11. The ground rotates in green curves polished from the Tee box to the Fairway in Green, but the risks are cut at the edge of a knife, blocking bad shots in all ways. Metro is no longer visually or challenging the gang strategic, but more than holds its weight in the neighborhood, which means the same can be said about how the club ranks against courses in any other golf neighborhood in the world.

The story of the Golf Metropolitan Club is the story of so many excellent clubs – one of the dedicated membership and the close friendship of the healthy debate and the progress of the ban. Club captain Campbell Mackintosh has run the course of the course in the modern era with a renovation of club and the remaining course. After our round, he tells the story of the most painful renovation effort: an attempt to remove three pines abroad from the center of the 17th Street that Greg Norman is suspected of calling “Memec in Australia”. Mackintosh is the kind of obsessive golf that fills every table in the subway: embedded in history, filled with reverence and really wants the best for his club. However, his well -intended attempt to remove the trees was fruitless. The club’s membership, especially its longest skillful members, were loved by Pines Funny. They refused his movement to remove the trees.

“I’m very sure I’m right,” he says with a rage. “But for some of our members, those trees be Metropolitan ”.

The subsector is clear: the trees in the middle of the road could be a bad idea. They can STILL I’m but somewhere along the way, they became no less part of the subway than the club’s and Wag logo. Losing the trees would be to lose part of what every member holds the most beloved of metropolitan: tradition. This, Mackintosh understands, is the really unique gift of his home club; Not world -class golf or Wednesday extravagant exits, but people who believe in something bigger than themselves.

“There is so many good golf in this city,” I say Campbell, seeing Wag. “How will you be so lucky THIS … Here? ”

Mackintosh light me a wise smile.

“Because Melbourne is the best city in the whole world.”

For Wags, dinner is a special type of social engagement-a matter of shirt and shirt during which competitors will learn the winners and losers of the day’s competition (the latter is much more convincing). This would be bad news for a group of Americans with just shirts on their backs, but Mackintosh has organized a surprise. In a way, the club has managed to track four used coats, one for each member of our visiting group, to participate in dinner in the right dress.

A happy shower and hour happy follow, and just as I’m ready to go back to the main dining room for dinner, I feel a sleeve pull.

“James,” says Bill Shelton, the 89-year-old member of six decades. “Would you think to meet my wife?“

I agree, and his eyes dance back into life.

“Heart,” he says. “Meet my new friend.”

A brief speech with some rounds of applause joins dinner, and then is the time for daytime trophies, which include a seemingly torn modern sculpture from a nearby warehouse (for the winner) and a really bad bright-blue jacket that should be worn at any time inside the club property (for the loser). As the loser’s name is announced, he comes out of the white coverings of the dining room with a terrified view in his eyes. The room bursts into dizzying laughter. Serve more wine.

The latest activity of the day is a question session and answers with legendary architect Aussie Golfer and Golf Course Golf Michael Clayton. With gray hair around his shoulders and a high school teacher’s tolerance, Clayton is at home in this group of iconoclasts. He shares thoughts without fear or favor (and sometimes without warning), and wants nothing as deep as he loves golf.

As Clayton begins his Q-and-a with Wags, I find myself dreaming of all ways to paint this strange day in Oz. How do you properly explain the depth of warmth in this room? Personality vibration? The sincerity of generosity, connection and friendship?

I am so lost in that opinion that I almost miss one of the latest questions to Clayton, which turns out to be a harsh. Do you do Michael, a man who dedicated his golf life, makes the constant quarrel between PGA Tour and Liv?

“Will they ever find peace?” The man asks.

“Why do you care?” Clayton asks again.

The room falls smooth for a second. Wags are speechless for the first time throughout the day.

“This is not what has to do with golf,” he says. “No, this is not true Golf at all ”.

He laughs and points to the crowd.

“This is”