The five-time Australian PGA champion’s legend hasn’t faded, even if his desire to tee it up has
It’s funny how certain times of the year can trigger certain memories.
As Australia’s summer of golf swings round for another edition, one could be forgiven for getting Cam Smith vibes, or flashbacks to those blond locks of Greg Norman strutting our fairways.
For this scribe, however, I always think about a guy who I never had the pleasure of watching up close.
Bill Dunk was the first golfer I truly knew something about, courtesy of my father. Dad used to tell me all the time how good “Billy” was, how he’d shoot course records like he was shelling peas, and how Dad received his first-ever golf lesson from the man himself while he was a pro at Sydney’s Fox Hills Golf Club.
“I got him to fix my awful slice,” Dad told me. “My carpenter hands weren’t used to holding a golf club and consequently my grip was all over the place. Billy showed me how to swing properly.”
Dad would soon teach me how to swing it “the Dunk way”, and from that moment on I always felt this strange connection with the man Dad put on a pedestal.
Fast-forward 30-odd years and I found myself interviewing Dunk for a story in this magazine. I’d interviewed the likes of Nicklaus, Norman and Co. before, but chatting with Dunk hit differently. I felt like a kid again, like I was chatting with a rock star as he sat in his humble Gosford abode. I was chatting with a hero of my father – my hero’s hero – and the enormity of the moment hit me.
A renowned straight shooter on and off the course, to this day Dunk – now 84 – still comes up with some pearlers for print.
On setting so many course records: “Course records are a bunch of crap. They’re just incidentals along the way. You’ve got to win golf tournaments. They don’t pay you for course records.”
On wanting to go to America to play: “I had to guarantee that I had $10,000 in the bank, and I only had two. Those days the bank manager played golf so you made sure you played golf with him and I said to him, ‘Will you tell ’em that I’ve got 10?’ And he said, ‘I can’t do that.’ And I said, ‘Well, it’s the only bloody way I’m ever going to get there!’ He said, ‘Well, if I do, don’t you spend it!’ And there it was.”
On desperately wanting to add the Australian Open to his five Australian PGA Championship victories: “I kept running into the likes of Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player. I ran third in that.”
On what golf taught him: “I don’t really know whether golf taught me anything other than to just keep your nose to the grindstone. You don’t get anything unless you work for it. And try to keep a clear mind. My wife of 48 years was the best caddie I ever had; she kept my nose to the grindstone.”
I enjoyed reading another Dunk interview recently in The Senior newspaper. In it, I was shocked to learn he still hasn’t played a round of golf or even owned a set of clubs for more than 20 years – and he plans to keep it that way.
Dad would be shattered, and I now feel obligated to test Dunk’s resolve. I haven’t had a proper golf lesson in years. I just don’t play enough to justify the effort. Can I get the man who gave my dad his first-ever golf lesson, to give me, quite possibly, my last? There’s only one way to find out. Nose to the grindstone – the Dunk way.
