Making Australian golf great again: Herbert goes bananas to upstage Smith at NSW Open

Lucas Herbert says Cam Smith is a mentor. The student leads his teacher after two blistering rounds at the NSW Open.

Lucas Herbert tees off during round 2 of the 2024 NSW Open at Murray Downs. Photo: NSW Golf / Scott Campbell

Lucas Herbert stuffs his bright yellow yardage book into his back pocket. HERBZ is printed on the cover. He takes a swing at a short par three. The ball departs his club like an episode of Yellowstone. Veers in an unexpected direction. HERBZ rolls his eyes and kicks the red dirt and declares, “Oh, Lucas. You’re an absolute clown.”

Here’s what I know after watching HERBZ play his first 36 holes of the NSW Open. He’s no clown. Laughing all the way to the bank after signing with LIV Golf for a seven-figure fee he refuses to disclose. Maybe it was eight figures? Probably not quite the nine figures of Cam Smith’s guffawing $140m deal but HERBZ definitely received enough to afford all the schooners and chicken schnitzels he wants any time he returns to his home town of dear old Bendigo.

He’s a strapping lad. The 188cm, 91kg, 28-year-old is carting around the sort of physique otherwise witnessed in the back row of an NRL forward pack. HERBZ monsters drives a good 50m past Smith as the LIV stablemates take by the scruff of the neck the NSW Open at the bush wonderland that is the Murray Downs Golf and Country Club. Cows on the next paddock are oohing and ahhing at HERBZ’s power from the tee. If there was a party hole here, they’d be playing Slim Dusty. The setting is raw and rugged and the total opposite to the glitz and glamour of golf’s great LIV lollipop.

Thousands of us going marching up the fairways with Herbert and Smith for round two on Friday. No ropes keeping spectators away. You literally walk the course with the players, nearly arm-in-arm, almost hand-in-hand. This is what Arnie Palmer’s Army must have felt like. You know when fans are allowed onto the field after big AFL games? It’s like that. An extraordinarily intimate experience. The only nuisance is the world’s noisiest drone camera. One of the local farmers should have been enlisted to shoot it out of the sky.

HERBZ goes bananas to card a second consecutive six-under-par 65 and reach minus-12 for the tournament. Smith isn’t the only bloke in town with a mullet and a moustache, but he’s the only one on 11-under after Friday’s 68 left him two strokes adrift of HERBZ, who calls the British Open champion something of a mentor alongside his senior Ripper GC teammates Marc Leishman and Matt Jones.

HERBZ says of Smith: “There’s lots of little things I’ve picked up that I couldn’t even explain to you. It’d take me an hour and wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Sometimes he’s a mentor and sometimes he wants to give me plenty of shit. I think it’s a good relationship. I’m 100 per cent a better pro than I was a year ago and he’s got a lot to do with that. Whether I win or lose here I’ll learn a helluva lot and we’ll have a helluva lot of fun.”

Smith says of HERBZ: “He’s improved a lot as a professional, if that makes sense. At the start of the year he was a really good player but just didn’t have the little things really good professionals do. Better choices, better decisions out on the golf course and in life. He’s always had that gritty personality and drive … he’s like a sponge. He asks a lot of good questions. There’s no silly stuff. He really takes everything in.”

Cameron Smith is in second position on the leaderboard, two shots behind Lucas Herbert. Photo: Golf NSW

The $800,000 NSW Open ain’t the most prestigious nor most lucrative event of their deliciously rich lives but HERBZ says: “You can call it smaller from a prize purse perspective but it’s comfortably in the top half of events for my year crowd-wise,” HERBZ says. “It depends how you want to measure whether events are big or not. For Cam and I, playing events in Australia and winning some of these local tournaments potentially might mean more than winning some of the obscure ones overseas. I wouldn’t go as far as saying it’s a smaller event. It’s obviously unique compared to what we’re used to for the rest of the year in LIV – 54 holes, shotgun starts. It’s a lot quieter here. A bit different but it’s nice to get a taste of what you would call traditional professional golf.”

HERBZ and Smith are living up to their headline billing. There’s been no clowning around. Gum and eucalyptus trees up and down the Murray are high-fiving; bull ants are gathering round the marquee pairing; it won’t surprise if someone parks a ute behind the 18th green patrons will come from all parts of this sepia-toned region for the weekend shootout. “For my own professional standards, you don’t want to go out there and play poorly in front of a crowd,” HERBZ says. “I guess when you frame it like that, and say we were the two drawcards for the event, and for us to be one and two on the leaderboard at the moment, it’s pretty nice. It feels right in a way. It feels like we did our job. That’s quite pleasing.”

HERBZ was a 21-year-old trying to make ends meet when he came second in the 2017 NSW Open at Twin Creeks. He was crawling all the way to the bank in those days. His runner-up finish preceded top-ten results at the Australian PGA and Australian Open. “I remember being a bit of a moment in my career where I probably took a next step up,” he says. “The following two weeks I played with Jason Day at the Aussie Open on the weekend and Sergio Garcia at the PGA. Within my team, we talk about the fact I probably grew up two years in those three weekends.”

I’m unsure where HERBZ is staying this week. Yet I suspect his lodgings compare favourably to his accommodation for the 2017 NSW Open. “There was about five of us all staying in an apartment above a garage where you take your car in to get a service, sort of thing,” he says. “All sorts of noises going on through the night. I reckon someone slept on a couch, but it was back when that was fun. Everyone will tell you those early years on tour when you’re doing that sort of stuff are some of your fondest memories. I’ve got a lot of good memories from those three weeks in 2017 … but in particular the NSW Open.”

The absence of gallery ropes allows a thousand-odd fans to circle the greens when HERBZ and Smith are chipping and putting. You get the vibe of sitting on the floor for an acoustic music session. The two things you need to play well at Murray Downs are a reliable wedge and can of Aerogard. There’s ten flies to every human but HERBZ and Smith haven’t flinched. They’re doing their bit for the sport like Greg Norman in the 1980s. Making Australian golf great again.