The Club

Chapter 1 - What's in a name?

My name is Edward. Not Ed. Not Eddie. I’ve never used any abbreviations for my given name. I have never hinted at anything other than my full name in any correspondence, interview, or casual conversation. My best friends all call me Edward.

My name was given to me by my mother, Lorna Elaine Harding. She thought Edward Harding sounded like the name of one of the many dignified doctors she worked with at Noosa Heads Hospital, her place of employment for over 35 years. Noosa is a resort town in Queensland, Australia. My mother works as a nurse in the Emergency room and has ever since she moved to Noosa in her mid-twenties. When you work the emergency room in a coastal resort town in Australia, you meet your fair share of drunken louts knocked cold by the force of a surfboard. She had many stories, I’m sure, but she never told any to me. Storytelling was my father’s calling. Lorna was originally from Los Angeles and, while trying to stay cool from a scorching Southern California summer afternoon, tripped over a dashing young man sunning himself on the beach. Bobby Harding came to California to sail the coastal waters of the U.S. west coast. My mother assumed sailing was the young man’s hobby; in fact it was his life. Bobby’s only method of gainful employment came from sailing down the Noosa River hauling a group of tourists to the headwaters and back to the coast, a two- hour journey which he made three times daily for 40 years. It takes a special person to do the same job on the same route every day and never get bored. That was Bobby; his job was his passion and he seemed to discover something new about the route on every passage.

Although I never accompanied my mother back to the United States, whenever she had occasion to return to her homeland; I grew up with stories of John F. Kennedy, Sandy Koufax and the Beach Boys. My hobbies and school projects always took on a decidedly American flavour much to the amusement of my teachers, the boredom of my classmates and the outrage of my father.

Unfortunately for Bobby I never picked up the sailing bug. My addiction was developed sometime around my 12th birthday on a trip to the local municipal golf club in Noosa. I picked up a few old clubs from a neighbour and swung my first 5-iron in anger on the short dogleg Par 4 known as “Hard Left”. I was fairly dreadful at the game but with my inherited passion for repetition I eventually became one of the better players in the state.  It wasn’t until the age of 21 that I realized I had run out of talent. My game could bring me to the middle of any field but my professional playing career ended without ceremony. A few Australian Tour events were as close as I ever got to the big time.  Eventually I decided that a golf course was as good an office as any, and I set about to complete an internship at a golf course not far from home in Coolum. The Coolum course belongs to the top golf resort in Queensland, and for four years I worked the pro shop, finally earning my stripes to become a bonafide Australian PGA club professional. Shortly after my 25th birthday my father passed away and I decided to search for a position as a golf professional anywhere else in Australia.

The Club at Canberra had placed an advertisement for an assistant professional and I thought the Capital of Australia was as good a place as any to launch my career. Canberra’s head professional was the infamous James McLeod who had a reputation for hitting the sauce and who never stayed more than 3 years at any club he had led. “Cloudy” had been a hell of a player, a local legend down in Melbourne who’d cut his teeth at the same Australian Pro events I had tried in my salad years on the tour. Later he played and won on the Asian Tour before heading to the USPGA to make his fortune in his late 20s. He qualified for the tour easily with a third place finish at Q school and seemed destined for stardom, but something happened to Cloudy; without the backing of his mates from back home, there was no one to impress and fewer blokes to have a pint with at the end of the round. The laid-back Aussie couldn’t adapt to the rigours of the tour. The travel was too much, the schedule was too demanding, and the beer was too watery. Cloudy was homesick, and after 2 years of missed cuts he headed back home to return to the party with his beer-drinking mates. He found his way to Canberra after an incident at Kingston Heath in Melbourne, involving a late night wet t-shirt contest on the 18th green with the Board Chairs wife. For me, Canberra was opportunity; for Cloudy, it was purgatory.