G’Days Down Under : Wayne Case Kept Getting Clubbed in U.S. Tournaments, but He Wound Up On Top on the Australian Mini-Tour

You hear professional golf and you think of Seve Ballesteros and Greg Norman and Jack Nicklaus. You think of Arnold Palmer piloting his million-dollar jet around the country. You think of luxury. You think of polyester pants.

An image that does not normally leap to mind is of a man careening wildly along a dusty road in Australia in a battered car, his clubs bouncing around in the back seat as he tries to get to the next tournament where he might earn $500, and, all of a sudden, finding a large kangaroo bouncing off his car’s hood and flipping pouch-over-snout onto the windshield.

But that, too, is professional golf.

Take the case of Wayne Case.

The former Thousand Oaks High, Westlake High, USC and Moorpark College golfer became a professional in 1985. He has not fared well, playing in a few American tournaments, including the Los Angeles Open, but always struggling just to make the 36-hole cut. So last summer, Case, who was usually over par and seldom under, packed his clubs and shoes and brought his entire game Down Under, to Australia, a vast land of few people but many, many critters.

“Driving from one tournament to another was such an adventure,” said Case, 26. “The animals just roam free. There are so few people to bother them, except on the roads. Everything runs across the road. Birds, little rodents, kangaroos, everything. It’s something I just wasn’t used to.

“In Los Angeles, you never see any wild animals. I guess we’ve already run them all over.”

Also near extinction was Case’s golf game. He did not do much better on the main Australian PGA tour than he had in the United States. In his first event, the Queensland Open in Brisbane, he finished 25th. It was, however, his first tournament in 2 1/2 months, since the day he made a headfirst slide into second base during a softball game in Westlake and broke his right thumb, a rather severe physical handicap for a golfer. There’s an adjective that best describes golfers with broken thumbs: hungry.

He entered the Queensland PGA and missed the cut by a stroke. Then it was the New South Wales Open and the Australian PGA. He finished 30th at New South Wales and 18th in the Australian PGA and his thumb was feeling better.

He also finished 18th the next week in Adelaide--a coastal city sandwiched between Kangaroo Island and the towns of Peebinga and Underbool--in the South Australian Open. He was in fifth place with nine holes left in the Western Australian Open in Perth a week later, but a poor final nine dropped him to 11th, which was not terrific, but was better than, let’s say, having a 5-foot emu pecking on your head.

But Case faltered in his next two tournaments, missing the cut in the Australian Open at the Royal Melbourne Golf Club and in the Air New Zealand Open. He rallied for a 15th-place finish in the New Zealand Open, and then it was Christmas and Case had a chance to rest.

During this brief rest, however, he heard from some Australian golfing mates about local mini-tournaments, one- and two-day affairs offering modest purses. But for Case, they were a chance to keep playing golf. So he entered one, a $40,000 pro-am event. And he won.

“Right after that, I decided I liked the mini-tour,” Case said.

A few days before the regular tour was scheduled to resume, Case entered another mini-tour event in the state of Victoria. And he won that tournament, too. Although he didn’t know it for a few hours.

“I had finished my round and had put my clubs in the car and was getting ready to take off,” he said. “Then I heard two guys in the locker room saying, ‘Who’s this Wayne Case guy?’ and I figured I better hang around for a while. I checked the leader board and I was on top of it.

“That tournament was against all the same guys I’d been playing against on the regular tour. Everyone was in it. My problem on the main tour was that I’d always have one bad round. I couldn’t put four good rounds together.”

The mini-tour events seemed to solve that problem. He only had to put one good round together in most of them. And he did. Playing in more than 50 of the events, often five or six of them a week, Case became known among his Aussie partners as the King of the Mini-Tour. He won six tournaments in the state of Victoria--most of them around Melbourne--won a total of $18,000 and the Victorian Golf Assn.’s Order of Merit as the best golfer on the local circuit.

He took his game to neighboring states and continued to win in New South Wales, South Australia and the island state of Tasmania. When the mini-tour ended, Case had piled up 10 victories.

Playing off his new-found confidence, Case will try in July to qualify for the British Open. Later that month he will leave for a tournament on the island of Fiji. Then he will return to Australia for more mini-tour events, as well as Australian PGA tournaments. In October, he plans to try for his European PGA card.

“But Australia is what I’m looking forward to,” he said. “Those tournaments were very good to me.”

Not everything in Australia was as fortunate as Case during his stay there. Which brings us back to the wildlife, which will be deeply saddened to learn of the return of Case and his American golfing and traveling partner, Carl Johnson of Hemet.

“Carl called me a few weeks ago and told me he wrecked our car on another kangaroo,” Case said. “He said it was a little one, luckily, but it still wrecked the right side of the car. He said he’s still driving it, but it’s all crushed in and has kangaroo stains all over it.”

And we all know how hard those are to get out.

“The last time I was driving to a tournament I hit three macaws. Big birds. They flew right into the windshield. We drove once from Melbourne to Brisbane, about 23 hours of driving, and we counted about 50 dead kangaroos along the road. Some real big ones, about 5 feet tall. Well, when we saw them they were about 5 feet long because they were dead and lying on the ground.”

And not all of the animals are roadside. Some call the golf courses their homes.

“Lizards. Big, scary lizards,” Case said. “They’re all over the place. Iguanas, someone told me. And other ones with giant collars around their necks that they expand like a peacock when you get them mad. I think I saw these things on Marlin Perkins’ animal show once.”

Case’s Australian education also included the realization that if you can overcome a fear of the giant lizards, there are dozens of really outstanding reptile-related practical jokes to pull on your mates.

“I caught a big Iguana lizard, a really big one, and stuffed him inside a guy’s golf bag,” Case said. “Right in the side compartment with the zipper. We’re all waiting and here comes this guy and he’s got to get some golf balls out of the bag and he unzips the compartment and reaches in and we all hear this real loud, ‘hisssss,’ and the guy goes screaming up in the air.

“The lizard made some real loud noises, but this guy made some real loud noises himself.”