Australian Open golf: Mitchell Brown aims to honour dad’s last wish

Mitchell Brown takes a seat in the media centre and oscillates between the past and the present.

Mitchell Brown takes a seat in the media centre and oscillates between the past and the present.

Any day now, his partner ­Reiner Patterson is due to give birth to the couple’s first child. Brown wants to be there, but he also wants to honour the dying wish of his father Jeff, who passed away at the end of September.

As he lay on his deathbed, his body ravaged by cancer, Jeff asked his son to win the Stonehaven Cup. Brown carried that memory with him as he walked Royal ­Sydney yesterday, a course close to his heart but even closer after events of recent months.

“My dad passed away in late September and he said not long before he passed away that I have to win the Australian Open for him,” Brown recalled.

“I said I don’t know about that but I will try. It was pretty sad right at the end. Everyone moves on and that’s how it is. He will probably be up there helping.

“I might get a few putts that go in that shouldn’t. Dad was always involved in golf. I grew up in Sydney my whole life — I have only just moved to Melbourne in the past two years.

“Dad was a member at Bankstown Golf Club and my coach Alex Mercer was the pro here (at Royal Sydney) for 50 years. I know the course pretty well. I think that’s why Dad may have said it.

“A lot of things were probably going through his mind the last week and he thought Royal Sydney, Alex Mercer, could be. You never know. I am playing really well. I have had a solid week in Australia.

“If you don’t give yourself a hope you wouldn’t be here. Either way, it’s going to be a good week.”

Brown can say that because of what is unfolding in Melbourne.

“She is due tomorrow,” he said of his partner.

“But it’s our first so they say it will be late. I am on call. It’s a hard one. If I am playing well I will have a decision to make. You kind of have nothing to lose.

“It’s going to be a good week anyway. She is a golfer so she knows what it is like. Knowing her, she will want me to stay. I will want to go. I will just make the ­decision as it goes.”

Brown’s mind should be elsewhere, but somehow he has kept his focus on the course.

“Golf has this funny thing of taking a lot of stuff off your mind,” he said. “It is hard enough as it is. When Dad died it was a struggle. The last month I have been really good. This week I might be a little emotional.

“Trying to hit my ball then finding it would be taking a lot off my mind.”

Not everything though. Brown knows he will have plenty to weigh up should Reiner go into ­labour.

“If it was the second or third (child), it would be fine,” he said.

“But just the first one, you would love to be there. I think I would have to be playing really, really well not to leave. There are plenty more Australian Opens.”