Golf Vic Vol 60 No 2 2019

social interaction and, perhaps most importantly, the comradeship. Even when he’s been unable to play, Reg drives from his home in Murrumbeena to Rosanna, just to stay in touch with his golfing mates and have a beer with them. And they love to see him. “When he walks into the clubhouse, without fail every table will call out, ‘g’day Reg, hi Reg’,” Rosanna Golf Club president Rod Hughes said. “Everybody loves him; around here we call him the ‘legend’.” Hughes described it as remarkable that Reg was still playing, and playing a pretty handy game at that. “You can just about bet he’ll win the C-Grade comp at least once every two or three months.” Three years ago the club decided to make Reg a permanent fixture. It commissioned a portrait of him and it comes as no surprise that on the night it was unveiled, the clubhouse was packed, as was the case again this year at a club dinner acknowledging his centenary. Despite his years, Reg still holds the bearing of a military man – deeply tanned, shoulders back, clipped moustache – so it’s easy to envisage him being among those who defied the might of Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps for six months at Tobruk in the northern summer of 1941. It’s harder to imagine him whacking balata-covered golf balls with hickory shafted clubs around makeshift holes on a property near Harrow, in far western Victoria, in the late 1920s, but right from the start, the game struck a chord with him. “My parents leased a small property up there back in the 1920s, and Dad built a little nine-hole course through the paddocks. I was only six or seven, and had a cut-down hickory club – I think it “When he walks into the clubhouse, without fail every table will call out, ‘g’day Reg, hi Reg’. Everybody loves him; around here we call him the ‘legend’.” Photography: Daniel Pockett Golf Victoria 33