20-time Club Champion
Each time he drives to Portsea, Alan Bullas passes the Blairgowrie holiday house his parents bought in 1969. Sometimes he stops out the front and marvels that the cement sheet and corrugated iron beach shack hasn’t changed (unlike its $9500 price tag). “Even Dad’s mower strips you can still see in the front yard.”
It holds special memories, largely because weekends spent on the Peninsula opened the door to Portsea Golf Club, which Alan calls his heart and soul. Each has given the other more than words can convey – Alan as 20-time club champion, a record that will surely never be surpassed; the golf course as a place that has brought him glory, confidence and comfort.
“This place is home. I don’t drink much, I don’t go out to restaurants, I don’t smoke. I’ve always thought, well, I’m getting my entertainment down here. If I lost my confidence I’d come down here and shoot par and be right again. That’s how confident I was down here.”
He grew up in West Preston, a long way from Portsea but a bike ride to Northcote public where he’d play from dawn until dusk. Summer holidays pre-Blairgowrie meant camping by the side of the road that led up to the bluff at Barwon Heads (“they wouldn’t let you put your tent there now”), and early-teen Alan caddying “for the old people” at their famous old golf club.
He’d race back to Mum and Dad with 10 shillings and swap it for a pound note. One summer, caddying two rounds every day, he made seven pounds. He still has an album filled with pre-decimal-currency notes and coins, a window to a man who collects things with the same zeal he has collected championships.
His early golf education was “getting told off by the old blokes when I did something wrong”. At 16 he and a mate joined Portsea as juniors. There was a little hole in the clubhouse wall for green fees, but the place often felt near-deserted. “We’d sneak on and play 54 holes in a day, just keep going round and round.”
His modest early ambition – to break 40 for each nine – expanded as his handicap came down. He started playing Peninsula district championships, and broke 70 for the first time aged 26, at Carrington Park (now Eagle Ridge) at Boneo. Alan’s card from that day resides in a drawer in his front room, alongside every other sub-70 round he’s had. He shrugs when asked how many? “Probably 50 or so.”
Taffy Richards and Bullas
That was 1980, when he won the inaugural Portsea Open Amateur, and a year after his first Portsea club championship victory. By then Alan’s golf club had already provided two gifts – the belief and will to test himself against the best, and an introduction to Bronny.
It was on the third tee at Portsea that a fellow member asked 18-year-old Alan if he had a girlfriend. Jim Kirby’s wife worked with a girl at Roberts’ Footwear in Bentleigh, and Alan was soon standing at her parents’ front door in Aspendale, staring at a tall vision in a halter top.
“Don’t you let her go,” was his father’s instruction when he took her home to meet his parents. They married when Bronny turned 18, had Rennae and Greg, and were a true partnership.
She knew the unsociable fog that golf could send Alan into, and how to handle him. Losing her suddenly to an aneurism when Bronny was 50 and Alan 53 makes no sense.
“Jeez it’s still hard to believe she’s not here. She was just the best person. She used to go around looking for golf balls for me. She could read me. Sometimes she’d say, ‘I might go and watch someone else for a while.’
“All those pennant days at the old clubhouse, the girls would make a big casserole and we’d sit around a big, long table on cold Sunday afternoons. Absolutely special it was.”
Golf and its people near and far helped him carry on. Going way back, a Woodlands member told Alan that if he wanted to improve he should join a big city club and test himself against the best. After six years as a member at Southern (alongside Portsea, of course) he sought out the pennant captain at Commonwealth and asked what his chances were of getting a game.
“I’d played Commonwealth in pennant, you’d play the first hole, look around at this huge clubhouse and think, ‘How could you possibly be a member here?’”
He found a way, and won four Commonwealth “clubbies” that sit proudly alongside his Portsea 20 and seven cherished Peninsula District championships. Even more treasured is his pennant experience in a team that featured Marc Leishman and the late Jarrod Lyle, the captain who put him in the 2004 team and said, “Bully, you’re playing seven the whole year – you’re not going up, and you’re not going out.”
It took the pressure off, and on the par 3 last hole at Kew, with advice from a recent lesson ringing in his ears (“don’t stand, squat down low, open the face”), he got up and down from a greenside bunker to seal a famous Commonwealth win.
“I was the old bloke in that pennant side. I’d be hitting balls by myself and Jarrod would drag me into the group, ‘You old bastard, come over here!’ We got really close. Poor Jarrod, he copped his whack.”
Many other memorable feats dot an incredible golf journey. In his 30s he came home after qualifying for the Australian Open and disbelievingly asked Bronny, “What have I done?” He played at Metropolitan in the group ahead of Greg Norman. “Standing on the first tee, Tony Charlton introducing you, the stands surrounding you …”
He contested three Australian and three Victorian Opens, making the cut in the latter at Kingston Heath and playing with a Japanese and a Swede who spoke no English, and Gordon Brand Jnr from Scotland who thought an amateur had no place in the field and refused to speak at all. “You’re out on your own, cop it. You just try to keep calm and not make an idiot of yourself.”
Winners 1976 A-Grade final – (standing, from left) Philip Jewell, Colin Watson, Tony Clarke, Alan Bullas, Ron Bergman, (kneeling) Hans Greenfield, Mike Dore and Brian Watson
Honours he’d never contemplated came after Bronny’s passing, including making Victorian and Australian over 55s teams and touring New Zealand and Hong Kong. He yearned to win a state seniors title, and did so in his late 50s at the Queensland Amateur.
All of this success meant even more mementos – shirts, hats, all sorts of ephemera crammed into that bulging front room at home. “I’ve still got my first pennant shirt from Southern, 1976. And I’ve got every Portsea syllabus book from 1971, I don’t know why.” After Commonwealth he joined Peninsula (“a golf course that’s too hard for me”), adding still more clutter to the drawer.
Losing has always hit hard, although there have been occasions – like being two under the card playing Stuart Appleby in pennant at Victoria and losing 5 and 4 – “when you cop that in the neck”. When people shake disbelieving heads at his Portsea record, Alan counters that he’s lost eight finals as well (four to future pros). His 20 victories span six decades, a staggering feat.
Asia Pacific Senior Winners in 2012
He doesn’t mind that his fellows call him ‘Chuckles’, reasoning that it’s better than ‘Grumpy’. “I know I’m not a barrel of laughs.” But he can laugh at himself, like the story of being six shots down halfway through a 36-hole Commonwealth club championship final and, as protocol dictated, having to don a suit and tie for lunch before heading back out to certain defeat.
“Do you reckon I wanted lunch? I’ve had some hidings in my time, believe me.”
Favourite Portsea triumphs are being two down after five against Philip Jewell before reeling off eight birdies in 13 holes, and a nine-birdie day to defeat Charlie Robbins on the 36th. The confidence playing Portsea imbued at his peak made him feel so bullet-proof, he’d look up his opponent and think, “If this goes past 14 he’s done well.” He knows how arrogant that sounds. And knows, too, this is the headspace of winners.
Watching his powers wane has been draining. Alan won three “clubbies” in a row four times, and remains miffed that his attitude going for a fourth was “I don’t want to lose”. Lately he’s been too focused on simply qualifying. Or shooting sub-80, not 70. “When your attitude is I don’t want to lose and I don’t want to play bad golf, that’s a horrible head.”
20 time club champion
A visit to sports psychologist Noel Blundell (“pretty expensive”) brought candid advice: “If you don’t want to lose, don’t play.” It made him realise the losses have made the wins all the more special.
And so Alan and his Jon Jay trolley (which is as old as his Portsea membership) roll on, a lifetime of memories in their wake. He loved hitting buckets of balls into the south-westerly wind on the old practice fairway, “the best way to improve”. And buying new pants and shoes for the big events, so everything would feel clean and just right. And of course, seeing his name in gold on the honour boards will never lose its lustre.
“I’ve lost eight championships around here to people I’ve thought I should beat. You go home grumpy. But it’s been fantastic, really special. People ask me, what’s your favourite hole? I haven’t got one – they’re all special. You look out here, how good is it? It’s crazy!”