My rare exchange of gifts on an Australian golf course in the middle of nowhere

I stuck in the ball marker by chance.

It was the 2023 masters week, and I was preparing for a golf round on a course near Augusta, GA., When I got a shoulder tap.

“Here, get one of these,” the man said, lighting a white and green button in my direction that holds an incomprehensible logo: Golf National Club Augusta, Masters Tournament House.

Yeardo, Masters sells millions of dollars in goods from his country’s operation, all holding the iconic yellow logo of the tournament with the letters “Masters” underneath. If that logo represents the white whale of golf goods, the logo on the ball mark represented the wool mom. I would be donated a ball sign with Augusta National member Logo

The form looked the same – the same sketch of the United States map, the same script letters underneath – but this logo was green, and the letters read “Augusta National”. I thanked the beginner for the gift and pulled it carefully into my golf bag, where it remained intact for almost 12 months.

One day, I would find a good use for that ball sign, and when I found it, I would know.

I didn’t expect I would participate in a gift exchange in Warnambool. To be right, I didn’t even know where Warnambool was – involved during most of the time I spent in it.

I can tell you now that Warnambool is an Australian beach town in the state of Victoria, about one -third of the road from Melbourne to Adelaide. Think the type of place that someone from my part of the world – New York – goes to visit when they are trying hard to escape. Giant pine pine, perfectly symmetrically frames the main crawling in the city, while a long trail stroll along the ocean. The air depends heavy with the dew from the sea, and a quiet pleasure sits just below the surface of those staying in the city and its wilder suburbs.

We would spend two weeks strolling through Melbourne on the biggest journey of our lives, but as we returned for the stretch of the house and left for the country, we quickly learned that our journey was about to change. Some of them were the golf, which we had heard received a Scottish fragrance in the village. Some of them were the setting: a single -lane coastal highway, called “The The The The route of the Great Ocean”

Like the Big Sur or the road to Hannah, the Big Ocean Road is one of them ”Travel is the destination ” Places, displaying 150 miles of idyllic coastal cities (on the right) and completely perfect coastline (on the left). Unlike Big Sur and the Hana road, the Great Ocean Road welcomes golf in a more egalitarian sensitivity. The courses are trapped at the exit of the land extended above the ocean, kept in careful condition – but hardly cosmopolitan – and owned by the honors and “suggested” fees of the greens. If the golf in Melburn is for those with champagne taste, golf along the big ocean road is for those with an appetite for meat and potatoes.

Some golf courses are absolutely worth visiting along this road – Apolon Bay AND Peterborough Counting as two – but our arrangements left room for only a whole time, in a place called Port Fairy Golf Club.

We drew the course on Google Maps as we started our car on the Great Ocean Road and joyfully mocked. It was ripe, on the border with coffee, filled with pot bunkers and overlooking the ocean.

It was time to send our journey into a flame of glory.

“Hey,” Peter half called in a tone that made it difficult to distinguish his seriousness.

“Do you have any dinner plans?”

We didn’t. But this was the type of information we might have liked to hold from Peter, an honest stranger to God we would meet only 10 minutes ago. We would have been paired with Peter in the first hole in the Port Fairy Golf Club, a golf course in the middle of nowhere … on an island in the middle of nowhere. We were in a part of the city where roads were mainly made of dirt and locals warned to drive at night for fear of reaching someone’s car in a kangaroo.

We were in the place of the place where the recently broken body could be strangely buried along the coastline and left undisturbed for many decades. We were, in other words, not looking to make friends.

But Peter was not ready to hear “no”. He was so sharp, so sure of his ability and willingness to help that he was ready to attract our dinner plans over the proverbial line, if that is what he received. And as we expect the group to clear the second road of the road, that’s just what Peter did.

“Hello. Look, I have these two great gentlemen here from America, and they are hoping to enter your restaurant for dinner tonight,” Peter said on his cellphone. “They’re really good strokes, and they know that it will be hard to squeeze them, but I wanted to call and ask if it would be fine?”

It was unclear what inspired Peter in this random act of goodness, but to this point on our journey through Australia, we would learn not to question it. Aussies were the most surprising friendly people we had ever met, the type of people who seemed, would receive great joy when lying in a polluted basin in the middle of a crucifixion if it meant holding clean shoes. Peter was turned from a stranger to a personal goalkeeper in approximately eight minutes, and we would barely notice.

It was a holiday weekend in Warnambool, and as such, the restaurants were booked, but Peter was ignorant. He spent the best part of his first four holes calling restaurants until he settled in what he liked and was willing to reduce us.

We tried to thank him for his help as he and his brother-in-law left us in the 9th green, but Peter refused.

“It was nothing, really,” he said, smiling. “Pay it forward.”

We met Eve And James just a few moments later. The sister-in-law’s brothers were staying in the 10th box of Tee as we offered Peter a last Adieu, and as we turned back to the Golf Course, they interrupted us.

“You fellas looking to play?” they asked.

Evin and James were quick friends. They lived again in Melbourne, but they were out for the holidays that visited the family on Warnambool, and with women enjoying an afternoon on the beach, they would escape the Golf Course.

Evin and James were cut off from the central throw in the demonstration of the young boy’s young player. James, a wide shoulder boy in the late 20s, was a golf escape. A young father and man, he was not a serious player, but he was a serious fan. He would travel across the country for a liv event in Adelaide and dreamed of turning his farm out of Melbourne into a moving range.

Evin, on the other hand, was an obsessive golf. In the mid -20s and sporting a runner, he would go into golf as a Covid conversion. In the years after that, he would promote YouTube and full strength of the will to recover from a hacker in a 10ish handicap. He consumed golf shamelessly, and while we played, he asked the kind of questions I would find by asking my associates just a few years ago.

“Do you think about Bryson?”

“What is the most delightful tour you’ve ever covered?”

“How was the Ryder Cup?”

We marched to the sunset at Port Fairy with James and Eve on our part, light conversation and breeze light. The course had tried to be a right gem – completely different from wherever we would play in Australia to that point.

In a way, we would not return home that he finally joined the pieces.

“Wait, will you cover the blocks Masters?!? “

I and I was laughing. Yes, we were. Our trips would bring us to Augusta within just days.

Evin’s eyes almost fell from his head.

“Are you Serious?! ”

I and I sean again. Yes, we were.

I have spent some last holes telling Evin everything about the April tradition on the other side of the world. As the golf course is exactly just as beautiful as it looks on TV but ORDER hill. Why did I find the overestimated Pimento cheese (sharp, like cream cheese) and the georgia peach ice cream sandwich (soft, like a pillow). And how the mobile phone policy, in fact, is strictly implemented.

As we reached the 18th Green, I felt that Evin would continue to ask us questions about Augusta National all night if time was allowed. I knew the feeling – it wasn’t long ago that I felt the same.

Unfortunately, time would not allow. Our round was close to the end, and within a day, we would leave for good.

“I have decent To do it there, “Evin said, annoyed in his unexpected physical thinking with masters.” I don’t know how. “

As we left the 18th green, I thought about my strange golf life. The sport had brought me very far from my wildest dreams. Hell, would bring me here, On the biggest journey of my life, in the Golf Course on the other side of the world with the quartet of strangers who would have taken me for dinner reservations and become quick friends. If someone were to know about the value of a well -set golf dream, I was me.

Our round is over, and in some moments we would go our separate ways, probably forever. But before that happened, I arrived in my golf bag and threw a ball marker.

“Hey, Evin,” I said. “I have a gift to you.”

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