Indoor golf is giving Kiwis a chance to get out for a round despite the cold and wet weather around Aotearoa currently but, for a trio of flatmates in Christchurch, it’s also led to a trip to Australia to battle for the title of the Pacific’s best.
Aaron Torrie, Jack Kincaid and Lochie Earland are headed for Geelong this weekend to compete in the X-League Championship by X-Golf, pitting them against the best indoor golfers from across Australia. It’s an opportunity they can’t quite believe has presented itself.
After all, they only discovered indoor golf while looking for something to do.
“I actually saw it on a Facebook ad,” Torrie told 1News.
“I just asked the boys if it was something to do on a Wednesday night. Like, we had nothing on so let’s just go down, have a wee hit during the winter especially, the weather can be quite terrible. We decided to do that and then, yeah, somehow just managed to make our way through to Australia.”
Having grown up together in Winton, a small Southland town 30 minutes north of Invercargill, golf was just one of the ways they got along.
“There’s not much to do [in Winton],” Kincaid said.
“There was a golf course there. We played throughout high school a bit every now and again. it was something to do [but] definitely our friendship stemmed from sports … We all played all sports — hockey, rugby, cricket, just everything.”
With two of the boys moving across to the Garden City for tertiary studies, a flat was soon found and, with it, a newfound interest in X-Golf at the Avonhead Tavern.
“When we first went in for a handicapping round, we went in just to get our rank order. After playing a few weeks in there we started getting momentum,” Torrie said.
Their previous dabbles with golf in Winton paid off.
“It’s definitely still golf,” Earland said. “The basic mechanics of what you’re doing and swinging and hitting the ball is all the same. It’s just it’s an opportunity to play golf when you wouldn’t have been able to in the past, with weather being bad or not enough time after work and stuff like that.
“So I’d say it’s still definitely sport. It’s still definitely golf. It’s just a variation and it’s just opening up the world of sport to more people.”
Their newfound interest led to the creation of the Chunky Monkeys — their team name in the Wednesday evening league at the tavern, where they take on other teams of three.
“We’re based on handicaps ourselves and we play stroke play against them based on our handicaps and it’s best two out of three win through nine holes,” Kincaid explained.
“As the competition went on we just got better and better and made it to the finals,” Torrie added.
‘Doing it together’
The finals was where the ticket to Australia came into view but winning it was no easy feat — the qualifier featured 26 other Kiwi teams all vying for the trip but despite some nerves, the Winton boys stayed rooted in why they were there.
“Throughout the whole comp it was more just fun and we just enjoyed doing it together, doing something that we really enjoy,” Earland said.
“But when we got to those later stages, our competitive side really came out and we started to get our head down and go to work.”
And that’s exactly what they did, reaching the semi-finals where Kincaid had a taste of how intense things can get.
“It was pretty exciting, especially in the semis when I had to do the playoff. The whole pub was basically there watching and I ended up sticking a chip two metres out and that was very exciting. That’s when I knew we could actually win this.”
And that’s what they did.
The Chunky Monkeys fly out for Geelong tonight.
“I think we do have a good shot at winning,” Torrie said. ” It just depends how we play on the day really. It’s a lot of golf being played — one whole day, four or five games probably, it’ll be a long day.”
He’s hoping not to get “golfed out”.
