My first exposure to golf was as a caddie at Riversdale Golf Club when I was 10. It was during the War; in 1944 I started to caddie at Riversdale. I knew one other fella who used to go there sometimes and he said there was a bit of money in it. Nobody had any money so I went… and never stopped. I’d work Saturday afternoons and Sunday and earning nearly half of what Dad was.

I’d never seen a course anywhere else so I didn’t realise Riversdale was considered a hilly golf course. That was the only one I knew! It was 18 holes, I knew that. I knew you had to hit it up the right-hand side of 17; you couldn’t hit left.

When I was 12 I caddied for a guy regularly on Saturday afternoons and he won the Club Championship after I coached him around having never played golf. He told George Naismith that if I ever wanted to use his clubs over Christmas I could borrow them. So I started playing the odd nine holes using mens clubs at 12 years of age.

I went from no golf at 13 to comfortably breaking 80 at 15. All of us kids learnt by caddying. I’d never hit a golf shot and here I am clubbing the bloke who won the club championships. On the last hole he wanted to hit a certain club and I said, ‘No way!’ I gave him his 7-iron and said, ‘This is the club.’ I’d never played a game of golf in my life!

There were only two high schools in those days and because I lived in Mt Waverley, Dandenong High was impossible to get to so I’d catch the train into town to go to school. But they wouldn’t take me because I was under age so I had to go back and do Year 8 again. In March or April that year George offered me a job in the shop so I raced home on the bike and told Mum and Dad, ‘I’ve got a job!’ I was only 13 at that time and became probably the first assistant pro that had never played 18 holes. By the time I was 17 I was good enough to be in the PGA.

The biggest job I had when I started at 13 was buffing the clubs. In those days every set of clubs had to be buffed on a buffer after the play. Winter time you’d first have to wash the mud off and then buff them, and there were 250 sets in the shop. And I was it.

We would make clubs up. We’d start off with heads, shafts and leather grips, nothing else. George was a master clubmaker and I got the job of filing the head into shape. It was a real art. Pros in those days were very important to golf clubs because there weren’t any golf sports stores; the only place you could get a golf club in the first five years I was at Riversdale would have been through a pro shop.

George was from the wooden-shaft days and he could make a club feel real good. He was absolutely flat strap making up wooden-shafted clubs because you had to know where to shape the shaft itself. You had to make it so that it could move a bit so it was a real art. They were artists.

I had a stroke of luck. George played in Sydney and brought home another trainee by the name of Peter Thomson. I improved more by watching Peter than anything anybody told me.

I played in assistant pro tournaments and when I turned 14 I won my first money up at Heidelberg. We were handicapped at the start and I started off on 20-something and didn’t do very well. The second tournament my boss wrote that I had improved and couldn’t have the same handicap, which didn’t suit me at all. I then went to Heidelberg and was off 17 or something and we played nine holes in the morning and 18 in the afternoon. I shot par for the first nine and walked in and said, ‘Half of 17,’ and the bloke said, ‘You’re not getting that handicap son.’ And he dropped me back to about five. I didn’t even win the damn thing!

I was assistant pro at Riversdale until I was 20 and then went to Green Acres and stayed there for four years. Then I went to be the club pro at Yarrawonga, which was the first bush club up that way with grass greens. I had three years there and it was the right age for me to take some responsibility and do a bit of development.

I won quite a few pro-ams over the years and came second at the Vic PGA in 1966 at Huntingdale. It makes you think how close we were to being good golfers. Geoff Flanagan was the first person that ever broke 290 around Huntingdale over four rounds; my score in coming second would have won the first three Australian Masters tournaments.

Thommo came home to Melbourne to have a rest one year in the middle of the British season. They talked him into playing at Woodlands on Queen’s Birthday and he knocked me off there. I beat all the locals but Thommo was just a bit better.

After Yarrawonga I spent three years at Medway Golf Club and I was playing pretty well at that stage, playing in all the major events. I played in the same tournament that Jack Nicklaus played his first tournament in Australia at The Australian Golf Club. Alan Heil and I knew Gary Player who brought him out so we asked if we could walk around with him. We walked around for Nicklaus’s first nine in Australia. I realised then that I was never going to be a Jack Nicklaus. We’d never seen the ball go so far.

There was a hole at The Australian along the freeway – maybe the sixth or seventh – and it was two woods and a wedge for most players. Somebody might get up there on a helping day. Nicklaus had never used a small before and he hit a drive down to where God would have thought he was cheating. He hit a 3-iron that landed on the back of the green and bounded 40 yards over the back. He hit a 6-iron and cleared the green with that as well. So here’s a hole of some 575 yards and he’s cleared the green with a drive and a six.

Following Medway I was at the public course at Waverley for 16 or 17 years but the hours became too much and I got the job at Kingston Heath. My wife at the time wanted to go back to the Murray so I went up to Barham for quite a few years. Then my son became a pro and he was in Darwin and wanted some help with the teaching in the area. I couldn’t handle the heat so I got a job as the pro at Eden on the South Coast and spent about eight years there.

Golf was at its absolute peak during my time at Waverley. We had golfers every day and I was giving up to 100 lessons a week. All the pros were the same at the public courses, we were starting golfers off all the time. I can still walk down the street and someone will yell out, ‘Hey Huxtable! I started golf at Waverley with you.’ If a person started and then got going you would recommend they go and enter a private club and join up. We were the feeder grounds for the other clubs in the area.

You had a process for beginners and they had to learn not to sway. Most people used to go sideways and try and lift the ball; you had to teach them to stay in between their feet and rotate. I think I was one of the first people to ever use that word in relation to the golf swing. I got sick of the word ‘pivot’. When I’m teaching now I still use the word ‘rotate’. It’s the best way to get people going.

I shot 69 around Southern one day and there was an 80mph wind blowing. Johnny Kennedy was the bloke I played with and he said it was the best round of golf he’d ever seen. I won it by about eight shots and they reckon I’d cheated. It was just one of those days when everything fell into place.

The average person who lasts at golf is usually a pretty nice person. I’ve got thousands of friends all through golf. We’ve got that mateship because it was a smaller pro game back then and the PGA pros were the top of the tree. There were very few tour players. If I was 22, 23 I could have been tempted to go away and have a go of being a tour player but I enjoyed the club life, the actual life I was leading in a pro shop.

Image: Yarrawonga Mulwala Golf Club Resort