Geoff Ogilvy interview - The family guy

Geoff Ogilvy wasn't happy. In fact, he was seething. Big sister Sally and her mates were out on their bikes and five-year old Geoff was feeling more than a little left out. It was time, he decided, to learn how to ride his own bike.

“I can’t tell you how many times he over-balanced,” recalls mum Judy. “He took some awful falls. I can still vividly remember the blood on his hands and knees. But there was just no stopping him. The frustration levels got higher and higher throughout the day, but he stuck it out for hours, only coming back inside when compelled to by his ‘mean’ mother.

“The next morning I looked out of the bedroom window and there he was again, still trying. By mid-morning he was completely mobile. Not only was he experiencing the freedom of having wheels for the first time, he had the pleasure of knowing he had achieved a goal. And he has always displayed that same sort of determination when confronted with a situation that captures his imagination.”

Looking back now, Ogilvy smiles at the memory of that childhood tale. And he doesn’t deny that the obstinacy described remains part of his character.

“It’s still there,” he admits. “I remember being able to go three yards, then five yards, then ten. I can’t say I recall all the pain and suffering that went with it. But I can’t deny that it is an episode that speaks to my character; I can still be just as stubborn.”

Not as much as he used to though. As part of his development into one of the game’s leading players – only Tiger Woods has won more World Golf Championships – the 2006 US Open champion has had to learn how to learn from repeated mistakes.

Alistair ‘Squirrel’ Mathieson, who has carried the Ogilvy bag for most of the last decade, tells the tale of a now long forgotten event where his man had taken a triple-bogey on a par-five.

“Geoff came off the course and was just livid,” he says. “He went straight to the range and started smashing drivers. Dale Lynch [his coach] just stood there and watched. Eventually Geoff turned to Dale and asked, ‘why do I take so many eights on par-fives?’ ‘Because you never chip out,’ came the pointed – and accurate – reply.”

Such displays of what was once a wicked and self-destructive temper are now things of the past. In common with so many great players – Bobby Jones springs to mind – Ogilvy has learned to harness his emotions, especially in times of great stress. Take his US Open win at Winged Foot in 2006. While the illustrious group all around him – Mickelson, Montgomerie, Harrington and Furyk – hacked, slashed, gouged and three-putted their way to ultimate defeat, the young Aussie was the only man in contention able to make pars at each of the last two holes. Under pressure, and without hitting either green in regulation, he kept getting back on the bike and came through to lift the title.

It is, however, the pitch to the 18th green that lives on in his memory. Off a bare lie maybe ten feet below the level of the putting surface, Ogilvy clipped the ball to four feet and holed for what proved to be victory. “That shot was probably the best of my life,” he says. “It was certainly better than the one I holed on the previous green.”

Since his maiden victory in a major championship, Ogilvy has continued to distinguish himself in golf’s high-profile events. His is a game and temperament seemingly made for the biggest occasions.

“As far as I’m concerned, Geoff is in that elite group at the top of the game,” says American Stewart Cink. “I would kill for his short game, the pressure putts he makes. He hits the fairways when he needs to. He’s got it all. He’s just got a very quiet, lethal kind of game.”

He isn’t always quiet, though. Only last year, a leading American magazine acclaimed Ogilvy “the best interview in golf”. If not the case, he is certainly in the top-three. The 31-year old Australian has distinguished himself as one of golf’s most articulate and thought provoking representatives, in stark contrast to the banalities and middle-of-the-road blandness foisted on the press and public by so many of his colleagues. Look up the transcript of any sleep-inducing Tiger “it is what it is” Woods press conference for confirmation of that increasing depressing trend.

Ogilvy is particularly lucid and animated when it comes to the esoteric subjects of golf course architecture and set-up (see sidebar opposite). The often-controversial topic of modern equipment and its effects on the sharp end of the sport in the 21st century hasn’t escaped his attention either. Which is hardly surprising. Brought up within walking distance of Royal Melbourne – surely the best course in the southern hemisphere – the young golf nut had, right in front of him, the ultimate classroom in the Alister Mackenzie- designed lay-out.

“I was blessed by the fact that I lived so close to the only course in Australia that had a golf tournament every year – from 1983 until the mid-’90s anyway,” he says. “I saw Tom Watson win the Australian Open there. I watched [Greg] Norman win, too. So I got to see the best golfers in the world on arguably one of the best courses in the world. All the time and right on my doorstep.”

He learned well, too. Blessed with the sort of curious mind top level golf seems to be almost bereft of these days, Ogilvy took the time a couple of years ago, along with former European Tour players Bob Shearer and Mike Clayton, to play Royal Melbourne with ten-year old balls and wooden headed clubs.

“It was a whole new level of fun,” he says, smiling at the memory. “You had to hit it well for the ball to go anywhere. The difference between a good hit and a bad one with a driver was about 40 yards. With a modern driver you can hit the ball anywhere on the face really. The difference is only about five yards. Only afterwards, when I had thought about it more, did I get depressed by all of that.”

Indeed, the direction in which the modern game in general is headed has long been a concern for Ogilvy. Despite the flashy Puma gear he is contracted to wear on the course, underneath the logos beats the heart of an unabashed traditionalist.

“It tends to be the older guys who share my views,” he sighs. “Ben Crenshaw is a perfect example. He is immersed in golf and loves everything about it. He, like his contemporaries, knew a different golf than the game we play today on tour and thinks that the old way was better. “I have to agree that it was. And I have to think that, if you asked every player one question – in hindsight, rather than letting the ball get out of control, wouldn’t it have been better to just change one rule for the professionals so that we didn’t have to spend millions of dollars making golf courses longer and tougher? – most of them would agree that, theoretically at least, such a proposition is attractive.”

Such thought-provoking opinions, unheard of from those apparently able to endure in public silence the numbing sameness of the PGA Tour, are the happy confluence of Ogilvy’s upbringing, his enquiring mind and the fact that he came into contact with Clayton early on in his career. The former Australian amateur champion, now a well-established and much-respected course architect in his homeland, has had a profound effect on his fellow Melburnian.

“When I was still an amateur, Mike invited me to play a practice round with him before the Australian Open,” recalls Ogilvy. “On the way round, I noticed how – between the inevitable expletives following his less than satisfactory shots – he would stop halfway to his ball and start yelling at a bunker. ‘What are you doing there?’ he’d shout, as if it was going to move. Then he’d hit a tree with a drive, but get angry at the tree rather than the shot. ‘What’s this fucking thing doing here?’ he would ask. ‘This is fucking bullshit.’

“All of which would get me thinking. And I quickly came to the conclusion that he was always right. I’d look at his abused trees and realise that the hole would be better if it wasn’t there. Then you could see where you wanted to go. And that trend has continued to this day. The way I look at golf courses has everything to do with Mike and his continuing influence on my thinking. He has made me aware of what could be there rather than what is there at any given moment. Because of him, I ‘see’ golf holes as they could be rather than the way they are. In effect, he showed me what to look for.”

Also on Ogilvy’s professional agenda, of course, is further success on the course. His has been a steady progress to a point where he is firmly established as one of the world’s ten best players. Winner of three World Golf Championships, as well as the US Open, he has made his way through Europe to Scottsdale in Arizona, where he lives today with wife Juli and their two children, Phoebe and Jasper. On and off the course his life is calmness personified, a far cry from those days when his temper threatened to derail his obvious talent.

“When I go out and play with someone who loses it, I don’t think the guy is a bad player, I just think he looks like a bit of an idiot,” he says now. “So that was what I looked like. And when I realised that, it provided plenty of motivation for me to stop doing it. “Don’t get me wrong. I still walk a bit faster between shots if I’m annoyed. But it’s pretty harmless really. Negativity is the biggest killer there is in golf. I have traded anger for mumbling under my breath. I tell myself I’m ‘useless’ a lot.”

Perhaps his biggest victory, therefore, has been eliminating the ‘red mist moments’ that once plagued his play. Indeed, given his outwardly calm demeanour these days, it is hard to believe that Ogilvy was once a bit of a wildman on the course. Steve Bann, Lynch’s teaching partner, is another who has watched Ogilvy mature as a person as well as player. “I’m not saying it’s manufactured, but Geoff knows he has to stay in that calm space with the slow walk or the beast will come out,” says Bann. So, there you have it. Geoff Ogilvy: a beast with a brain – a formidable combination indeed.

WHERE GOLF GETS IT WRONG

Ogilvy on Augusta National
“I’ve read a few of Bobby Jones’ books. I don’t think he’d be that flustered by the addition of length at Augusta. I think he’d have done the same, given the neglect of equipment by the USGA and the R&A. But there is no way he’d have grown rough. He’d have kept it 100 yards from trees to trees. And every blade of grass on the course would have been cut short. “I mean, with the greens they have there, you don’t need rough. They are always going to be firm. Which is what Jones wanted. His philosophy was, ‘OK, you have 100 yards to hit into, you tell me where you want to go.’ Move the pin ten feet and the other side of the fairway becomes the place to be. That’s the aspect that has been lost. And if Augusta misses the point, what hope has golf got?”

...on the 2005 Open Championship at St Andrews
“My mind keeps going back to the Road Hole. It’s the most fearsome hole in golf and yet they had to grow all that silly rough up the right hand side (as experienced at first hand by Italy’s Eduardo Milinari below). If they hadn’t we would have been hitting chip shots to the green. Symbolically, they could not allow that. So they had to do it. That golf hole is the reason the golf ball needs to be changed. It’s no fun with the modern ball. I was hitting a 4-iron off the tee at the Road Hole! Are you kidding me?”

...on Pinehurst No. 2 and the ’05 US Open
“All of the bunkers were in the rough. In fact, not one of them was within ten yards of the fairway. And all the best angles were taken away by the USGA growing long grass in the spots where the best drives should have been allowed to finish. It was a mess.”

...on the ’07 US Open at Oakmont
“The members there take a perverse pride in how difficult that course is, so significant change to the norm was probably impossible. They are so rigid there and the wildly sloping greens are so crazy, that it is hard to set that course up to be fun. The members at Oakmont baffle me. I mean, why would you want the best 100 professionals in the world leaving your course saying they never want to come back because they have just had the least fun they have ever had on any golf course? They seem to enjoy that, but I don’t get the motivation behind it. “Were I a member at Oakmont – or anywhere for that matter – I’d want the best players to walk away thinking how much fun that had been. I’d want them saying how the course had tested them all week, how it had been a challenge and how they can’t wait to come back; in fact, can we play tomorrow? I bet not many would have ticked that box if you’d asked how many wanted to play on the Monday after the tournament. I certainly wouldn’t have.”

Ogilvy on the modern game
“Two important aspects of golf have gone in completely the wrong direction. Most things are fine. Greens are generally better, for example. But the whole point of golf has been lost. Ben Hogan said it best. His thing was that you don’t measure a good drive by how far it goes; you analyse its quality by its position relative to the next target. That doesn’t exist in golf any more. The biggest problem today is tournament organisers trying to create a winning score. When did low scores become bad? At what point did the quality of your course become dependent on its difficulty? That was when golf lost the plot. The winning score should be dictated by the weather. The other thing is course set-up. Especially in America, there is too much rough and greens are way too soft. Then, when low scores become commonplace, they think how to make courses harder. So they grow even more long grass. But that misses the point. There is no real defence against a soft green. Today’s players with today’s wedges can stop the ball from anywhere. The angle of attack and the shape of the shot mean nothing. It doesn’t matter where you hit it as long as it is between the out-of-bounds stakes or between the trees. And so the game becomes a one-dimensional test of execution, time after time after time.”