It’ll be special, Bruce, when and if LIV golf moves to the Adelaide city park lands at North Adelaide – just a few torpedo kicks symbolically from the old beer-and-spiritual home of plastic cup throwing: the hill at Adelaide Oval.
The tenor of professional golf tournaments worldwide experienced a new level of joyous mayhem at the first LIV event at Grange Golf Club in Adelaide in 2023. The chaos was the setup at the par 3 12th hole – or Watering Hole – with wraparound stands for spectators, as well as bottomless sales of beer and blasting pop music.
All the rowdy party needed was a golfer to hit a hole in one there. Chase Koepka provided it: his 9-iron shot found the green and rolled into the cup as “the roars just kept getting louder and louder and louder”. It was the second ace in LIV Golf’s history and the sixth in Koepka’s career. But none of previous five brought the response like Adelaide’s: a huge shower of beer cups onto the course.
Adelaideans, of course, had been well practised in the art of plastic cup throwing during the era of rowdy sozzled crowds on the oval scoreboard hill during hot afternoons at Adelaide Test matches. The bold boot-wearing bare-bodied Johnny Haysman was among those who loved the attention that went with being pelted with plastic cups as he strode the path in front of the hill.
The hill also remains sacred – scared? scarred? – as the birthplace on Day 1 of the 1994 Ashes Test match at Adelaide Oval of the Barmy Army, in all its beery belting-out British boisterousness – tuneful and good humoured but.
The hill was gentrified as part of the remodelled Adelaide Oval and Party Central switched to the back of the members’ grandstands where cricket became an afterthought between pricey Pimms. Between the Americanised Big Bash giggle games and the bewilderingly crammed international schedule, the old respect for cricket is being lost.
In our day (when men were men, women were women and the sheep were very very nervous), we were hooked on cricket by matches such as the 1961 Fourth Test draw at Adelaide Oval against the West Indies when Ken Mackay and Lindsay Kline held out Lance Gibbs for two hours.
After that, we were willing to stay awake all night listening to the radio (wireless?) during Australia’s Ashes tour of England when Richie Benaud and Alan Davidson always bagged the goodies. Commentators such as John Arlott (“The slips are all standing, legs apart, waiting for a tickle”) was poetic and melodic in his commentary and anecdotes but not enough to cover those seemingly endless breaks in play during the rain of Elizabeth II.
But, underterred, we continued to devotedly follow Test cricket, taking it upon ourselves to write doiwn every run as it was scored in our lined exercise books. We could easily keep up with the scoring rate of W.M. Lawry or G. Boycott, so slow that it dawned on us that a whole lifetime could be wasted on this. Ah, now we remember! That’s one of our excuses for why we took up drinking – if not throwing plastic cups!