And so to Cypress Lakes Resort in New South Wales’s Hunter Valley for the Jack Newton Celebrity Classic, a three-day palooza of golf and good times with famous people that is fun like a barrel of rum full of crack-crazed spider monkeys.
Crack monkeys? Rum-crazed crack monkeys? It’s not that much fun. How could anything be that much fun? How could you have more fun than a legion of spider monkeys, on crack, gambolling about in a vat full of rum? You could not. You flat out could not.
But it’s still good fun,“The Jack”. Top fun.
“The Jack” is what they call it, along with “Schoolies for Adults” and “the world’s greatest Christmas party bar none in the world”. It runs for three days and three nights and raises millions for diabetes research and junior golf by gathering like-minded golf hounds and party people into the purpose-built party palace that is Cypress Lakes Resort. Good times.
Jack Newton? One of Australia’s great golfers. Nearly won the 1975 British Open at Carnoustie, losing in a play-off to five-time winner Tom Watson who rolled in a 20-foot bomb on 18. In 1980 he tied for second in the US Masters at Augusta, going down to 23-year-old Seve Ballesteros by four shots. He won the Open championships of Australia, Holland and Nigeria, and in 1976 was “Cock of the North” in Zambia. Whatever that is, you’d take it, and put it on a business card.
And then, on the verge of challenging Greg Norman for all-Australian hairy-chested global golf manliness, he wandered into a small plane’s propeller and lost an arm, an eye and nearly the whole job lot.
He spent months in hospital, looking out the window at a pub across the road. When he got out he went straight in for a beer. And he’s been laughing about it since. When you nearly die you come out with a different perception of what’s important. You don’t sweat small stuff. You celebrate life. And the Celebrity Classic is nothing if not a celebration.
Of what? Life, damn you, have you read nothing? What are we here for? Good time or a long time? We’re all but one fleeting beeping blip on the great heart monitor of the universe. No-one gets out alive, not Tony Abbott, not the 14th Dalai Lama, not all the ayatollahs of Iran. No matter how hard you beseech your god to grant you ever-lasting existence plucking harp-strings or making love with virgins or bowling Viv Richards on the last ball of the day at the Melbourne Cricket Ground, forever, when blood stops servicing your brain, then that’s it. That’s you. You are inanimate. You’re an ex-parrot. And maybe that’s a bummer and not a little frightening. But, you know. There it is.
Well. Didn’t that go on a tangent fast.
The first “Jack” was in 1979 in Tewantin Noosa, and there’s been one a year since. It was held on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast until 2005 until Penrith player Craig Gower got “as full as Santa’s toy sack on Christmas Eve,” according the Sunshine Coast Daily. And thus in the pre-Christmas slow news month, other newspaper people rolled about like nude people in money, detailing Gower’s various excesses. So much so that Novotel Twin Waters, host of the party and accommodation bits, decided they didn’t like the “bad PR” and brushed the event.
So our Jack, bless him, in his all-Australian, gravel-throated, John Elliott on Rubbery Figures saying “pig’s arse” sort of way took the event to his own patch in the Hunter. And here it’s been since: a giant golf-party for charity.
What happens is this: you lob on the Monday, check in, sign in, say hello and have a yarn with Judy and Jackie and Susan, and effectively take up conversation you left the year before. And that’s also part of the allure of “The Jack”; people are firm friends for three days a year.
So you hook up with your pals and head out for a hit in the practice round on Cypress Lakes which is all red clay and kangaroos and fairways which wind between vineyards like fat velvet snakes slinking through the backyard of Bacchus, Roman god of wine. Something like it. But it’s a fine enough golf track, and perfect for our needs given we cruise about in golf carts enjoying a locally-brewed beer called Arvo. And if there’s a better way to spend a Monday arvo then you could sell it, perhaps to rich people from China.
My golf mates today are Blackie and BJ and Donnie “Big Donnie” McKinnon, the former rugby league man known as “The Terror Bear” because it’s a scary name, and because when you played against him on the flinty hard cricket pitch patch of North Sydney Oval, chances are Big Donnie would be running at you, all knees and hard bones and a well-known motto of “don’t tackle high and you won’t get the elbow”. Good times, and Donnie played 183 games for North Sydney Bears and six for Manly Sea Eagles, and once for Australia and NSW in State of Origin, and is remembered for having a wee at Lang Park on the telly. As they say: just one goat. And he’s not a bad golfer who was a copper with Blackie and takes the money off BJ and me.
So there you go.
And so we putt out and shake hands, and pitch into the outdoor Welcome Barbecue where everyone’s dressed in football jumpers, it’s a Thing. And for the Australian sports and television-watching punter - and we are legion - it’s a like a wax museum with a pulse. Everywhere you look there’s a footballer, a golfer, and that guy from that show, you know the one, shot in St Kilda, a crime show, maybe, or something about young doctors in love.
I actually don’t recognise many of the TV people because they’re on shows I’d rather eat my own thongs than watch, but actors on the telly “who you might remember from such shows shows as …” include: Rhys Muldoon, Gyton Grantley and Brad Cranfield from The Block. Lincoln Lewis is on Home & Away, and the next day I play golf with his dad …
… Wally Lewis! Yes, The King! We are not worthy, we are not worthy, all that. The great man, up there with Dennis Lillee, Greg Norman, Rod “The Rocket” Reddy and Mark Ella in my personal Aussie sports hero pantheon. Indeed at The Jack, The King’s up there with the patron (Bob Hawke) and the host (Jack Newton). He’s only missed two events in 36 years. And everywhere he goes people, in that slightly piss-takey Australian way, address him as “sire” and “your highness” and “King”. Don’t go changin’, country, you funny big old lug.
We play with a pro from Wyong called Luke Whitbread who hits the ball purer than Jesus drinking Pure Blonde, and a happy old digger called Karl, a local engineer. Each four-ball has a celebrity, a pro golfer, a sponsor and an amateur.
And so we golf and have a yarn, and discuss with His Majesty important matters of golf and wine and rugby league, and that he plays left-handed despite kicking a footy with his right foot. And if you’re a footy and golf nerdo - and I can say unequivocally that I am, oh yes - it’s a grand way to spend a morning, especially with the fine golf and wine-tasting on the 14th hole.
And so into the dress-up cocktail party where we sing Waltzing Matilda that would have been sung by the great RJ Hawke but isn’t because he came over a little crook. The man’s 85. When his doctor says take it easy, champion, he says okay. And so we eat lamb shanks and drink velvet red and celebrate life. And next day we do it again.
Kram from Spiderbait rips off a fine solo of “Black Betty”. Auction items raise tens of thousands for diabetes research, a disease which kills people. People think diabetes is like something fatties get because they ate too many Twisties as kids. But - cue that noise poker machines make when you’re wrong, Bump-bow - that would be wrong. Diabetes is a global pandemic. It can just get you. And The Jack’s raised $3.5m trying to find a cure because government funding is hampered by miners and rich people not wanting to pay tax.
Oops, off on a tangent again.
Anyway.
And so there is dancing as a three-piece rock-n-roll outfit belt out some tunes, and people leap into the pool because they’ve won various stuff (another Thing), and there is talk of golf as famous TV types pair off with hottie golf pros. And one thinks, wouldn’t mind being a 25-year-old person on the telly, you could make love heaps.
And then around 1am you toddle off home because nothing good happens after midnight for the old. Plus they’re shutting off the taps soon anyway. Once upon a time, the drink ran all night and all day, and men would go from the bar to the first tee, and splat the ball about like rum-soaked crack monkeys. Today, in these more enlightened, more sensible, slightly more closeted Times when we must think of the children, there’s drinking and dancing and a bubbling, happy hubbub. And precisely zero overt drunken cavorting. Good times.
Really good times.
