Elkontheloose

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEWS STEVE ELKINGTON & BEST-SELLING AUTHOR MATTHEW REILLY

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DUSTIN JOHNSON

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INTERVIEW

ELK LOOSE ON THE

STEVE ELKINGTON HAILS FROM COUNTRY NEW SOUTH WALES BUT HAS CALLED TEXAS HOME FOR THE BEST PART OF 30 YEARS. HE’S CURRENTLY FILMING THE FIRST SEASON OF A NEW GOLF REALITY SHOW, ‘THE RURAL GOLFER’. THE 51-YEAR-OLD TALKS ABOUT THE SHOW PRODUCED WITH HIS ‘SECRET IN THE DIRT’ TEAM. THE ALWAYS OUTSPOKEN ELK ALSO DISCUSSES WHY HE DIDN’T COMPETE IN AUSTRALIA DURING HIS PRIME, TWITTER CONTROVERSIES AND HIS NEW CAREER ON THE CHAMPIONS TOUR. WORDS: GARRETT JOHNSTON

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PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES

Elkington keeps a sense of humour about his golf and his non-golf activities, despite his humour not always pleasing everyone.

Golf Australia: How did The Rural Golfer come about?

Elkington: We’ve had the Secret in the Dirt company for three years, which is a social learning platform for golf. We’ve built a social network over there. But mainly we’re shooting a lot of content led by Jackie Burke Jnr (the 1956 Masters and PGA champion).

We were at the Mitsubishi Classic in Hawaii and during the pro-am we played with some of the guys from the RFD-TV station in Omaha, Nebraska – Randy Bernard. We got to talking about their show, their channel. They have a channel much like Discovery Channel. They have a bunch of rural shows. Things like equine shows, a farmers market show and all these shows related to rural people, and that’s where it started.

Because we’ve had so many lessons that we’ve filmed, we thought, being from Australia growing up in Wagga Wagga, that some of the most interesting people that we find are at places that you have never heard of. And that was our goal for the show … to go out and find these passionate people, because we already had thousands of videos within our vault so we were able to track attention to a different format.

GA: So finding the passion in golfers … that would be the thesis of season one and its first 26 episodes?

Elkington: Yes, the thesis of season one is finding the passion of the golfer and trying to shine the spotlight on them. Our second episode was in Alma, Georgia, with a guy named Ted Murray who went down there and bought his own course and built a nice place for everyone.

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There’s always a really top player with an interesting background when you go to a club.

No matter where you walk in to, whether it’s in New Zealand or Australia.

He just loves golf and he’s helped the community out a lot. There’s a lot of characters involved in these kinds of stories. For our third episode we went to FarmLinks in Alabama. I consider myself ‘in the know’ for golf and I didn’t know that FarmLinks was an experimental dirt farm that’s a living and breathing golf course visited by all the (major) superintendents like Augusta National, Pebble Beach, and Oakmont.

They all go down there to use all the new equipment that’s coming out each year and that was a really interesting show for me just being down there. I learned more on that show because I consider myself a turf guy or a horticultural guy so that was pretty interesting for me.

GA: How much does the camaraderie of golf factor into the show?

Elkington: Well the fellowship is probably the most important thing. I remember when I was a little kid growing up, my dad was working at the bank and he got transferred to Wagga and I remember my brother and I, that’s where we learned how to play. We were so sad that we had to leave all of these characters who were at the club. One of these guys was nicknamed ‘The Butcher’ and all these characters, and my dad said, “Son, don’t worry about it. There’s going to be more characters, there’s going to be the same kind of guys at the next club.” And there was. And that’s proven to be true at most clubs. There’s always a really top player with an interesting background as well when you go to a club. No matter where you walk in to, whether it’s in New Zealand or Australia.

There’s a lot of parallel lines between what I’m doing with Rural Golfer and where I grew up.

GA: Speaking of where you grew up, do you have regrets about not playing more in Australia during the peak of your career?

Elkington: I’ve never really had much regret about it. It’s always hard for me and my career when I was playing my best because you play all summer and then you’d go home and have more summer. Having two children at the time, right in the middle of the ’90s, very small, they would want to go to the snow. “Dad, we want to go skiing.” So it wasn’t easy for me being away all year to say, “No, we’re going to Australia and more summer.” But I did win the Australian Open in ’92 when my mother and grandmother were there. That was a big deal to me at the time. I watch our players – Adam Scott, a lot of our top players – and it’s not easy for any of those guys to get down there as much.

In reality, schedules are tricky, especially when you throw in kids and an American wife, etc.

GA: With The Rural Golfer/Secret in the Dirt team, how rewarding is it to get more exposure for them?

Elkington: The thing that drives me is that those guys are all poor. I want them to do really well.

I saw Mike Maves on YouTube. He was back hitting balls into Lake Ontario. That’s kind of a Rural Golfer move. Then of course he wrote a book called Secret in the Dirt and that’s how we met because he was explaining a move. He believed what Hogan was all about when he put that extra spike in his right foot. We talked about that in episode one.

Secret In The Dirt, the e-book, has sold more than 50,000 copies. So the genesis of our company was based around me finding a guy hitting balls into a lake.

GA: For The Rural Golfer audience, do you worry at all that any of your recent comments on Twitter will have an affect on viewership?

Elkington: No, I don’t because the Rural TV Network has 61 million

STEVE ELKINGTON

In his youth, his prime and now on the over-50s circuits, Elkington has long possessed one of the most envied actions in golf.

STEVE ELKINGTON

ELKINGTON TURNED PRO: 1985

FACT S FIGU& RES

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PGA TOUR ME MBER: 1990 to 2011

Career wins: 17 .

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AUSTRALIAN W INS: One,

Australian Op en.

MAJOR VICTOR IES:

Championship .

1992

One, 1995 PG A

MAJOR AP

PEARANCES: 57 starts, ten top-ten fini shes.

AWARDS: 1995 PGA Tour Vard on Trophy.

TEAM

S: Presidents Cup (1994, ’9 6, ’98 & 2000); W orld Cup (199 4); Alfred Dunhill Cup (1994, ’9 5, ’96, ’97 & ’98).

WORLD RANK ING:

Spent 57 week in top-ten betw s een 1995 and ’98.

Elkington made a spirited run at a second PGA crown in 2010, tieing for the lead before bogeying the last two holes to share fifth place.

viewers. The hardest part about our audience, there’s kind of three parts to it. There’s one that’s sort of the rural people, there’s the people that don’t get RFD-TV and are in the cities and don’t know Secret in the Dirt and don’t know RFD-TV, and then there’s New Zealand and Australia and the rest of the world that don’t get either so they’ve got to go online. So it’s just different forms of people and I just think that good golf content is good golf content. That’s just what it is.

GA: Do you have any regret over your controversial tweets in the past couple of years?

Elkington: No, I’ve already been through all that. I went through it.

Whatever’s happened has happened. Everyone just has to move on.

Everyone knows I was suspended by the Tour. I said it on national radio.

How much tale do you want?

The Tour said that they didn’t like what I did on that one tweet so they suspended me for two weeks on the Tour. So I took the suspension, told them I was wrong, and now I’ve served it. I just don’t know how much people ... once you get out of jail, so what do you want me to do?

GA: What does it take to win a major?

Elkington: I think it takes a certain amount of maturity to win it. First of all, and the reason I think why Adam Scott won the (2013) Masters to a certain degree, was his failure to win at the British (in 2012). He learned so much from that, the pain of not winning The Open. All of the sudden he realised what we all realise, that this could be over like that and I might not ever have another chance. I think Adam Scott really seized that moment there at Augusta, he seized and took it as Phil Mickelson did at the British Open (2013). Whereas at the 2012 British he just let that one slip away and I think the maturity level changed in him. I think

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the game teaches you really some harsh lessons.

GA: What do you make of Tiger’s major chase?

Elkington: Tiger’s quest is different. It’s not difficult for him to knock off those big numbers, like winning 70 and 80 tournaments. But it’s obviously gotten harder for him to win the majors. There’s been so much talk that he can’t do this and he can’t do that. Everyone that says those things have never really played with him. He has the most smash and the biggest balls of anyone out there. So to say that he can’t win is completely ludicrous. I think now the playing field is different because he was so far down the Nicklaus chase for so long. Then all of a sudden now he’s on 14 majors and the lights turned on. Everyone is watching.

Maybe the pressure-meter flipped the other way on him. He’s always had tons of pressure but now he’s got double that.

GA: Speaking of majors, what do you take away from your last great opportunity to win one on the regular tour, at the 2010 US PGA at Whistling Straits?

Elkington: Well, that was cruel. A cruel ending for me there. All majors are different. In that case I was kind of the older guy trying to win. It was different for me trying to win that one. It was kind of like Tom Watson when he almost won the British. I just had a really good shot at it. I was really gunning for it and I didn’t really feel the nerves like I’d felt before in this case. The day before, when I played with Tiger on Saturday, I shot 67. That, right there, sort of prepared me mentally for major Sunday. I had just carved up the best player out there easily on Saturday and I shot a good round that gave me the confidence that week to get it in there and it just didn’t work out. That was a good experience, that could have gone my way pretty easily.

crocsoncourse.com.au

STEVE ELKINGTON

The shining light in a distinguished career that made him a fixture on leaderboards throughout the 1990s was Elkington’s triumph in a play-off over Colin Montgomerie at the 1995 PGA Championship at Riviera.

GA: You won the US PGA Championship right after finishing two shots out of the play-off at the ’95 Open Championship. How did you do it?

Elkington: I didn’t think I’d ever be able to do it again. And I won the very next major. I just knew that if I was going to do it, there’s a certain amount of ‘let’s see what happens’ feel. Maybe in a football game like you’re leading, then there’s another side that says take this on and go full-bore and see if you can take this one, see if this crashes.

You’re always giving it your all but sometimes you’re laser-focused and other times you’re watching what others are doing. When I won,

I shot a 64 the last day and birdied the first play-off hole. So there couldn’t be any more let-go or ‘let’s see what happens’ than that.

GA: What do you make of the Champions Tour, as you near the end of your second year?

Elkington: These are all the specialists out here, who maybe didn’t get all their best golf out of themselves when they played on the regular Tour. But they’re doing better now. Peter Senior, Jay Don Blake, Michael Allen. I think it’s cool, I think they’re good stories.

The bottom line is we’ve just got to get after it. Everyone’s at different parts of their lives with what they’re doing. Some people are broke, some people are rich, some people are divorced, some are restarting.

There’s all kinds of life stories out here.

GA: How does it compare to the PGA Tour?

Elkington: There’s no drop-off out here. I’d like to see some of those young guys come out here and see how they go.

THE TWITTER CONTROVERSIES In July 2013, Elkington was spoken to by the European Tour after a series of tweets during the Senior Open Championship at Royal Birkdale where he referred to an incident where some caddies were rolled “by some Pakkis”. He later apologised, saying he was unware the term was offensive.

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Six months later, Elkington was widely condemned for remarks he made on Twitter after a fatal helicopter crash in Glasgow’s Clutha pub. He wrote: “Helicopter crashes into Scottish pub … locals report no beer was spilled.” The tweet was quickly deleted but not before going viral and sparking a huge public backlash.

In February this year, Elkington remarked on Twitter that openly gay football player Michael Sam was “leading the handbag throw” at the NFL Combine, which was widely branded across social media and mainstream media as being homophobic.