Australian Open: What the members do when the stars take over

When the Australian Open takes over one of the country’s most privileged establishments, where do all the members go?

Royal Sydney chief marshal Marnie Westgarth, left, with marshals Richard Michaels and Jan Kehoe. Picture: John Feder.

They love the club. The history. The mystique. They love the view and the predicament presented by the 1st tee. Short par-four. Driver or iron? They love the scene from the 18th fairway, the clubhouse in the background. They love the privacy of it all. The familiarity. The exclusivity.

But for the next eight days, members of the Royal Sydney Golf Club will be forced off their own tees, unable to take their good walks, spoiled or otherwise, while hundreds of players and thousands of spectators make themselves at home for the national championship. When the Australian Open takes over one of the country’s most privileged establishments, where do all the members go?

“People here are aware that having it here is great,” Royal Sydney member Marnie Westgarth told The Australian. “It’s great for golf. It’s great for the club. We’re proud of the club. We want to show it off.

“I think the outside world doesn’t quite understand that it’s a very friendly and great club. It buzzes when the tournament is on. We’re jam-packed for the whole four days. We want a lot of people to come here, we want people to enjoy themselves, we want to do everything we can to make that happen.”

Royal Sydney’s final pre-Open members competition was held last Friday. More than 200 players turned up. Parts of the normally pristine course looked and sounded like a construction site. The members have lost their course until next Tuesday while their 123-year-old layout hosts the 112-year-old championship.

Where do they go? A few will be camped at the bar, no doubt, but hundreds of them have joined the 450-strong army of volunteers who will marshal the crowds from Thursday, politely encouraging spectators to put a sock in it at the appropriate moments, spotting the balls off the tee, finding the balls in the rough, carrying the mobile scoreboards with each group, radioing through the scores and statistics, doing all the mostly invisible jobs that must be done by someone, voluntarily, for an event of this scale to be staged.

Westgarth has donated large divots of her own time to be the chief marshal overseeing the volunteers with her deputy marshals, fellow club members Richard Michaels and Jan Kehoe. They’ve worked since February on the program that will kick into action from 5am on Thursday.

Without club members like these, there’s no Australian Open. When the sun is rising on Thursday morning, the volunteers will be dispatched to all corners of the course, most of them working when they would normally be playing. They’re a rare breed, the volunteers at professional golf tournaments, putting themselves though long shifts in the rain, sun or wind for the love of the game — and perhaps the chance to grab the best seats in the house.

“You do have to gently remind the marshals, don’t get too caught up in it,” Westgarth grins. “Don’t start pumping your fists if you see a putt go in.”

Jobs have been assigned to the shuttle drivers, the people giving the caddies their bibs, the roving marshals and zone marshals, the hole captains, the media helpers, the welcome team for visitors needing to know where the nearest lavatory or decent player is, the scoreboard carriers for each group, the leaderboard attendants and the most visible job of all, those people on the tees, fairways and greens trying valiantly to handle the crowds and/or holding up the signs encouraging everyone to shut up for a second while a player is having a swing.

“We had two zone marshals in 2013 who were onto the course early one morning,” Westgarth says of the last time Royal Sydney hosted the Open. “They thought they’d just hide behind a tree while the guys were hitting off the 1st tee. It was clear the players were trying for the green. They were sitting in their cart, they heard a bang, the ball went into their cart and stopped right under the accelerator. It was a bit of a reminder that anything can happen, anywhere on the course, at any time.

“There’s a lot of small things that have to be done — you need someone to be taking wardrobe notes for the players, for instance. If it’s a wet day, you’ve got to go up to the player and say, um, excuse me, what are you wearing under your wet-weather clothes? You need that to be recorded for when they take off their rain jackets.

“Even for the walker-scorers, there’s a lot to take in there. There’s three players in a group, you can think, ‘Oh there’a a good shot,’ your thoughts can wander off — you’ve got to be very focused on what you’re doing. It’s great fun, it really is, but we’re very conscious of the fact that the jobs are extremely important.”

The planning is as meticulous as possible for a sport that is inherently unpredictable. For the par-four 1st, Michaels says: “We have our spotters on the tee, signalling whether the tee shot has gone left or right. We have two more people on the tee to make sure people are quiet. Our clubhouse opens onto the tee — we have what we call clubhouse marshals, making sure the doors don’t fling open and blast all the noise outside. That’s been a problem in the past.

“We have a tight course here, so we have three marshals down below the 1st tee because that’s a real choke point for us for the crowds. We’ve got more marshals at the spectator crossing further down the fairway. There’s another spotter looking for the signals from the tee marshals. The first signal is a flag waving that the players are on the tee and the crossing needs to be closed. The players hit and the spotters are watching for where the ball is going. Then we’ve got three more marshals around the green to keep the crowd quiet again. That’s the sort of structure we have.”

Westgarth said the first morning of the tournament was like the first morning of school when the volunteers arrived en masse. They grabbed their maps of the course, their teas or coffees, their sunscreen and marched off to their designated part of the 6344m layout.

You never knew when a John Daly might snatch a spectator’s camera and hurl it against a tree, as he did in 2008. You never knew when the crowd numbers might explode to near-breaking point, as they did when Adam Scott and Rory McIlroy went head-to-head in the final round three years ago. You never knew when unruly spectators might give the volunteers a rough time. You never knew when the hospitality tent on the 18th fairway might need its own marshal.

Regardless, the volunteers signed up because they sought to be actively involved in making the Open a pleasurable viewing and playing experience, to feel the camaraderie that culminates with their Sunday-evening barbecue and visit from the champion, and to watch players shoot in the 60s when they might find it impossible to break 80, 90 or 100 themselves.

“What they (the players) do doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to how I play the course,” Kehoe laughed before Michaels recalled McIlroy finding trouble off the 1st tee in 2013, hooking one down near Royal Sydney’s tennis courts.

“You get an appreciation of what great golfers they really are,” Michaels said. “But every now and then, they can surprise you and show you that golf is never truly predictable. Rory was in the Moreton Bays with a wayward drive down the 1st and that looked like pretty familiar territory to me.”