Micheluzzi’s magic ride

By Tony Webeck

THE more that you scratch beneath the surface, the more apparent that it becomes.

That David Micheluzzi’s summer of superiority was far more than a hot streak not seen in Australia in almost 20 years.

A three-time winner to claim the ISPS HANDA PGA Tour of Australasia Order of Merit for 2022/2023, Micheluzzi will get a head-start on his 2024 DP World Tour card by playing tournaments in Europe in the lead-up to The Open Championship at Royal Liverpool in July.

The expectation is that his first tournament on the continent in 2023 will be the Italian Open from May 4-7, the 26-year-old Victorian hoping to use the points he garnered as an affiliate member at the Australian PGA Championship and Australian Open to earn further DP World Tour appearances.

Eager to cash in on the best golf of his young career, Micheluzzi wants to take advantage of form that has its foundation in an impromptu chipping lesson out the front of the Cranbourne Golf Club pro shop more than five years ago.

A promising amateur whose talent wasn’t translating to the type of results that turn heads, Micheluzzi confided in friend and fellow professional Andrew Cooper as to why he was coming up short.

In particular, it was a shot into the final hole of The Dunes Medal in late 2017 that Cooper, now a PGA teaching professional at Victoria Golf Club, identified as being poison to a player hoping to make a career playing the game.

“He told me that he had a basic shot up the 18th hole – about 12 or 14 metres – and he hit it to five feet,” Cooper recalled, Micheluzzi finishing second to Blake Collyer by a shot.

“I said to him, ‘Mate, that’s just not good enough. For a player of your ability, that’s actually embarrassing and if you continue to do that you won’t go anywhere with your golf.’”

That frank assessment led to a short-game session where Cooper demonstrated eight or 10 shots that could be played around the green, opening Micheluzzi’s eyes to the manner in which the greats of the game wielded their array of wedges.

Viewing a ‘stock shot’ as an anathema to a proficient short game, Cooper went about demonstrating how the likes of Seve Ballesteros, Greg Norman, Ernie Els, Jose Maria Olazabal and Tiger Woods took spin off to get up-and-down more often.

“The chipping green at Cranbourne is literally right outside the pro shop and we’d always talk about how to play different shots,” Micheluzzi revealed on the ‘Talk Birdie To Me’ podcast.

“Some of these shots are very old school. It was more flight, land angle, how they want the ball to release on the green to hole chips and get chips close.

“I started playing around with that and I played unbelievable. I won the Vic Am final 9&8, I won the Master of the Amateurs by five shots three weeks after that and played really well at the Aussie Am.

“I thought, ‘there’s something in this’. It took me another four years to think, ‘maybe I should employ this guy’.”

In addition to his long-time swing coach Marty Joyce, Micheluzzi added Cooper to his team in March last year and the pair went to work.

At their first session there was another brutal reality check as to the quality of his strike on short shots but the quest for better drove Micheluzzi forward.

He sent a letter to his manager to outline his plans to win the Australasian Tour Order of Merit and then won the first event of the season, the WA PGA Championship at Kalgoorlie Golf Course, including an up-and-down at the 72nd hole to seal a three-stroke win.

“He was short of the green for two at Kalgoorlie and he’s hit this shot to about three feet,” Cooper added.

“I don’t think people understand how difficult that shot is. That was a really cool shot.”

Micheluzzi would add the TPS Sydney and the NSW Open titles by season’s end, becoming the first three-time winner in a season since Robert Allenby in 2005. He was also runner-up twice and recorded four additional top-10s to finish with 60 per cent more Order of
Merit points than second-placed Tom Power Horan.

But Micheluzzi is refusing to look back.

He knows now that he has the support network to take his game to the world and, in his words, “do some damage”.

“Having him has propelled me to another level,” Micheluzzi said of Cooper’s influence.

“I’ve been with Marty for such a long time. He knows my game better than anybody. Better than probably even myself.

“I want to see if I can compete with these guys. It’s going to be daunting – playing your first major can be very scary – but I’m just so excited to tee it up and show just how good the players here in Oz are.

“We’ve got a great team and I can’t wait to do some damage.”