For the past 30 years Gungahlin Lakes PGA Professional Murray Blair has been at the cutting edge of golf and innovation. Here he reflects on tech start-ups, becoming a TV presenter in Malaysia and his big hope for Big Hole Golf.
I did my traineeship at Royal Canberra Golf Club, played pro-ams for a bit and then a mate of mine, Col Swatton, rang me. He’d gone with another guy from Canberra to Singapore and Malaysia and was coaching. He said, “Why don’t you come up here, you’ll have a job.” So I set up a golf academy with him at a new golf club in Malaysia.
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A couple of years later Andrew Argus and I got appointed as joint national coaches for the Malaysian national amateur team. I particularly enjoyed working with Andrew because he’s a very knowledgeable person. He is an integral part of Col being a great coach. At one stage I was approached to write golf tips for a couple of magazines and a newspaper which I did on a weekly basis for a number of years.
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I approached some production companies and suggested that we do a golf show for Malaysia. I told them how it was done in Australia and other places and the basic format for a golf show. I got backing to do it and we got a contract with a government station in Malaysia to do a season of a Malaysian golf show.
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The production company who did the TV show with me, they were Dutch-based but also had their office in Malaysia. They were getting right into the dot-com industry with games and gambling and all sorts of websites all over the world. They wanted to package up a company to list on the stock exchange in Malaysia. And one of the small, small companies was the golf. They wanted to do a massive golf portal for Asia so all of a sudden I’d been asked to get involved in setting up a major golf portal for business.
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I was tasked with a budget and 12 months to come up with a genuine business plan that we can seek for funding as a subsidiary of the listed company. We were like company number 10 of the holding company that was going to be publicly listed. All of a sudden I’m going to an office with a shirt and tie on. And I’ve got these computer programmers in one room and I’m coming up with ideas of what would work for a web portal, per se, as far business-to-business, business-to-consumer, content and everything else.
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The vision was that there’d be no other website you’d want to go to for golf. It’d be the portal you go to for tips, news, reviews, book green fees, buy golf equipment, shops would engage with suppliers like an Ali Baba type thing. It was massive.
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I went through the whole listing process which was eye-opening, sitting in board rooms with Ernst and Young people and directors of 10 companies having discussions; I’m the little 1 per cent guy down the end of the whole thing. The plan was for the company to list in March 2000. And the world went pear shaped in February when the dot-com bubble burst, so we never got there. We were one month away from getting millions of dollars and going from six staff to probably 50.
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My wife and I came back to Australia and I set up an off-course store for a while and then was asked to come and run Gungahlin Lakes pro shop. I was observing golf being pretty stale for a long period of time. People were calling out and saying ‘Why aren’t we growing? Why aren’t people getting into golf?’ I saw that there were a lot of attributes that people weren’t excited by playing golf anymore. The world moved at a much faster pace but golf hadn’t.
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T20 was booming in cricket so everyone was looking for a modified version that was faster and more exciting. The idea behind Big Hole Golf was that people would one-putt more, people would chip in or hole out more often and it would be a great scoring concept to watch on TV. I didn’t think I was a rocket scientist; just go bigger. It’s a great format because when you stand over a chip shot or a putt, you just get so much aggression about you. I’m not trying to get up and down like I’ve done forever, I’m trying to hole it.
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The next step would be to have events. Selling the kit to golf courses is OK but the plan would be to have a national or international event. I wrote a business plan to do that. We put a proposal forward to Keith Pelley from the European Tour to replace pro-am day for tournaments with a Big Hole Golf day. When they presented to Keith, he was only in his second week in the job. He wasn’t going to make a big change like that to their corporate engagement only two weeks in.
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There’s lots of opportunity in golf. It’s a wonderful industry and there’s plenty that can still be done. It’s just trying to break through the layers and come up with the right contacts and the right people to help drive it.
