Fantastic Foreshore
By The Handicapping Committee
The Great Maritime Salvage of 1995
On to the high seas and higher stakes of 1995, a year that began with fraternal triumph and very nearly ended in absolute administrative disgrace.
It was the year Chris Wilson achieved immortality, scaling the summit of Carrington Park to claim his maiden victory. In doing so, he struck a decisive blow in the endless, quiet ledger of sibling rivalry, beating his brother Peter to the honour by a solitary year. Chris, understandably, assumed this historic family milestone would be the enduring memory of the tournament. He was mistaken. For while history records the strokes taken on the fairway, the human heart prefers to remember the sheer panic that unfolded immediately afterward down on the foreshore.
The trouble belonged entirely to Leecey. Having won the previous year, Leecey had travelled around the curve of the bay from Lara to Rosebud with his mate Fogs, arriving with the easy confidence of a defending champion. It was only near the end of his eighteen holes, as the afternoon sun began to dip, that a terrible, icy realisation settled over him: the trophy was still sitting on a shelf back in Lara.
To the uninitiated, a forgotten piece of hardware is a minor logistical hiccup. To the veterans of the Bottles Open, it was a desecration of the sacred mysteries. The trophy belonged by absolute right to the reigning champion until the moment it was passed to the next, and failing to present it was an unpardonable sin against the order of the day.
Faced with this impending catastrophe, Leecey did not despair. He was possessed of a man-sized personality; the sort of character completely unsuited to small-minded panic. He weighed his options with the gravity of a general trapped on the wrong side of a river. This was 1995; the Queenscliff-to-Sorrento ferry did not yet exist to bridge the gap, and the overland journey around the bay—in the dark ages before CityLink, the Peninsula Freeway, and modern bypasses—was a gruelling three-to-four-hour trek through every bottleneck Victoria had to offer. By the time a car returned, the presentation would be a distant memory, and the beers long finished.
The solution arrived not from the tarmac, but from the tides.
With a resourcefulness that bordered on the military, Ron orchestrated a maritime extraction. The trophy was retrieved from his house in Lara, carried down to the water, and loaded onto a speedboat like the Crown Jewels fleeing a besieged kingdom. It roared across the whitecaps of Port Phillip Bay, defying the open water, before making landfall at the Rosebud pier just as the final groups were putting out. Golfers had spent years finding themselves in the water or in deep trouble, but until that afternoon, no one had ever thought to conquer the top of the bay in such formidable, high-speed fashion. The presentation was saved, the ledger was maintained, and the trophy arrived on the foreshore precisely in time to meet a bewildered Chris Wilson.
The Parable of Laura
Yet, for all the drama of the speedboat rescue, it had to compete in the tournament's collective memory with the great theatrical masterpiece delivered a few years prior by Greg McLaren.
The two events were forever linked in the minds of the field, if only because both occurred down on the Rosebud foreshore. For reasons lost to time and the caprices of local management, the golfers had been barred from their traditional sanctuary beneath the creaking old shelter shed at Carrington Park. Instead, the prize ceremony was relegated to a temporary structure down by the sand, open to the elements and the curious glances of passing holidaymakers.
This was the early 1990s, an era when Greg Norman—"The Great White Shark"—strutted across the global stage at the absolute zenith of his powers. The golfing world had not yet fully diagnosed the staggering depths of Norman's narcissism, but Greg McLaren had been watching closely. He had audited the Shark's post-match behaviour with the precision of a high-court judge.
Upon being declared the winner, Greg McLaren rose to give his victory speech. What followed was a performance of such raw, unbridled emotion that it froze the bottles in the hands of every man present.
With tears visibly welling in his eyes and a voice trembling with profound passion, Greg launched into an impassioned soliloquy dedicated entirely to the virtues, the grace, and the breathtaking beauty of his wife, Laura. He credited her—and only her—for the triumph, extolling her support in a display of effusive, operatic devotion that grew more intense by the syllable.
The gathered field looked on in a state of collective, paralysed confusion. It was not that the husbands of the Bottles Open did not love their wives; they loved them dearly, but their expressions of underlying emotion tended to favour quiet gratitude rather than public theatre. To witness a man weeping openly on the Rosebud foreshore over a golf tournament seemed a very strange piece of behaviour indeed.
It was only the socially perceptive among them who slowly began to notice the corners of Greg's mouth twitching through the tears. The realisation dawned like a late-afternoon breeze: he was delivering a flawless, line-for-line parody of Greg Norman's own grandiose, tearful post-championship speeches, right down to the dramatic invocations of "Laura."
By the time the speech concluded, the tears of solemn devotion had been replaced by tears of helpless laughter. The Bottles Open had seen many speeches—some short, some evasive, and many edited for present company—but it had never before seen the line between suburban golf and global narcissism blurred so brilliantly under a coastal shelter shed.
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