From being the next Tiger Woods to being happy with himself

By Iain Payten

Aaron Baddeley, in 1999 and 2023.Credit: Getty

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In the final days of the last millennium, experts in their respective fields were convinced of two things.

The Y2K bug was about to wreak havoc with the world and Aaron Baddeley was about to become the next Greg Norman. Another Tiger Woods, even.

When the year 2000 ticked over and planes stayed in the sky, the Y2K hysteria was quickly forgotten.

Aaron Baddeley holding the Stonehaven Cup after winning the Australian Open in 1999.Credit: Craig Golding

But the Baddeley buzz was only warming up. Having won the Australian Open as an 18-year-old amateur in November 1999, Baddeley went professional in 2000 and then did it all over again.

The skinny Victorian teenager won back-to-back Australian Opens; the first male to do it since Norman, and Jack Nicklaus before him.

Luminaries of Australian and world golf lined up to label Baddeley the next big thing.

“Baddeley has the potential to be the Australian version of Tiger Woods,” Australia’s British Open winner Ian Baker-Finch said in 1999.

Australian legend Peter Thomson added “I like his swing better than Tiger Woods” and Norman declared Baddeley had “no fear” and a complete game.

Aaron Baddeley on the 18th at Royal Sydney in 1999.Credit: Craig Golding

South African great Gary Player went even bigger: “He is a better player than Jack Nicklaus at the same age.”

And Baddeley? He ran towards the fire. By the end of 2000, Woods had already won five majors.

“Tiger is the benchmark,” Baddeley said. “And I want to become better than Tiger.”

Twenty-four years after Baddeley first stepped on the national stage, the now 42-year-old will return home next week and try to put his name above Norman, Nicklaus, Thomson and Player in the Australian Open record books.

For the first time since 2016, Baddeley will tee up in his national Open and on a winner’s list that bears some uber-famous names, a third victory would give him the record for most years between a first and (potentially) last win.

It would be a remarkable feat, and one that reflects what has come to be the defining characteristic of Baddeley’s successful – but not wildly dominant – career: longevity.

Peak form: Tiger Woods delivered one of his all-time performances to win the US Open in 2000.Credit: AP

After the early sizzle of his teenage success and the crackling “next Tiger” hype that followed, Baddeley moved to the prestigious US PGA Tour and his career went … just fine.

Over the course of the next two decades, Baddeley played well enough to win four PGA Tour events – to go with four wins at home – and stay competitive on the world’s best tour for 20 years.

But that Tiger challenge never got off the launchpad for Baddeley, who never seriously contended in one of the game’s four majors and had a career-high world ranking of 16 in 2008. Queensland contemporary Adam Scott ended up becoming the leading Australian player of their generation.

“We all thought he would be a major winner and a multiple tournament champion on the PGA Tour. We saw that magnificent swing, and lovely attitude and had everything at that time,” Baker-Finch told this masthead last week.

“He and Adam Scott were our two big hopes. So we had high hopes they would both be great players, maybe the next Greg Norman. But it’s not easy. You move away from home, you leave your coach behind and you leave your family. It’s always very difficult. There’s always a lot more to it than just hitting a little white golf ball around.”

Aaron Baddeley on his way to winning the Australian Open at Royal Sydney in 1999.Credit: Dallas Kilponen

Speaking to this masthead from Japan, where he was playing in a PGA Tour event, Baddeley said he was never daunted by the idea of meeting all the massive expectations.

He did a good of defying them in his first Australian Open in 1999 when no one outside of golf knew his name and only Baddeley and coach Dale Lynch believed he could win.

“I don’t want to sound arrogant at all but that was definitely our plan,” Baddeley recalled. “We talked about winning the Australian Open six months before it actually happened.”

Baddeley had finished seventh at the Greg Norman International a year earlier, at the age of 16.

“I didn’t feel like I had played out of my skin to finish top 10,” Baddeley said.

“It wasn’t like ‘wow, I played unbelievable to get to this point’ so Lynchy was like, you just have to have a nice week and you’re top 10. There is no reason why the goal can’t be to win.”

Aaron Baddeley doing an interview in his hotel foyer after winning the 1999 Australian Open, with parents Ron and Jo-Ann in the background.Credit: Craig Golding

And win he did. Wearing baggy ’90s clothes and singing pop songs on the course with his caddy to stay chilled, Baddeley stared down Norman and world No.3 Colin Montgomerie to win at Royal Sydney.

“I had fun. I definitely enjoyed it,” Baddeley said. “We were singing songs and stuff like that and having a good time. But at the same time, I felt like I was definitely focused on what I needed to do and wanted to achieve.

“Growing up, there were a lot of things I said no to because ‘I got golf tomorrow’. It wasn’t my parents telling me, it was me making those decisions and putting my golf first. So in that sense, I was already mature by the age of 18.”

In the early days of his career, when those Australia Open wins went perfectly to plan, Baddeley admits now he was blessed with the naivety of youth. Everything was possible. Go beat Tiger Woods? Yeah, why not?

“I didn’t feel the expectations of anyone on the outside, it was more my own expectations,” Baddeley said.

“When you watched Tiger, especially at that time, he was winning so easily and consistently, I maybe didn’t understand just how difficult it was to win, at times. So when you win the Australian Open at 18, you feel like you should play that good every week. Looking back, that got to me a little bit. Because that’s your own expectations – that’s how good I want to play all the time. And I expected to. Still do.”

Aaron Baddeley, holds the trophy as he wins the final round of the Heritage Golf tournament in 2006.Credit: AP

Baddeley began playing overseas in 2000 and then won his first PGA Tour card in 2002. America would become his home for the next two decades.

“When you’re young … I was growing up then [in 1999],” Baddeley said. “There were still a lot of distractions. But then you get out into the world and now it’s golf 24-7, so less distractions and more time to think about stuff. That was an adjustment as well, and especially living in a foreign country.”

Aaron Baddeley shaking hands with Tiger Woods after the US won the Presidents Cup in 2011.Credit: Pat Scala

Baddeley won his first tournament on the PGA Tour in Phoenix in 2006, and his second in 2007; in what is his best season to date. He led the US Open ahead of Woods after 54 holes before a final-round 80 scuttled things, but came home and won the Australian Masters later in the year.

More wins on the PGA Tour would prove harder to come by, however. Baddeley won a third in 2011 – and played in the Presidents Cup – and then waited another five years before his fourth win, in 2016. He hasn’t won since, and after some lean years, Baddeley dropped as low as 836 on the world rankings in 2022.

Throughout his career, Baddeley has always been among the PGA Tour’s top putters, but his stats from the tee box were consistently at the other end of the top 200.

“That’s always been an amazing part of his arsenal, his putting,” Baker-Finch said. “It was his driving that was less so. When he had bad years, it was because he couldn’t drive it on the planet. I understand that and totally felt for him, at the time it was happening. But he forced his way through it and kept at it, and had a great attitude about it.”

Baddeley admits he had low periods, but his love for golf never waned, nor his passion to keep practising and playing on the PGA Tour, which he did as a past winner and with sponsors’ invitations.

“There are definitely things I would do differently, looking back,” Baddeley said.

“Stuff I have learned over the years … the only reason you learn things is because you’ve gone through things, and lived life. If you don’t go through certain things in life, you don’t learn from it.”

But while he admits he has not achieved as much in his career as he’d hoped, Baddeley never sunk into despondency.

Indeed, Baddeley is an unshakably happy guy. He says his contentment in life is due to family – he and wife Richelle have six kids – and Baddeley’s strong Christian faith, which he says provides an “inner peace” regardless of whatever score he signs for.

“If you read what the Bible says, the things that helps with the ups and the downs is that my identity isn’t in my golf,” Baddeley said. “It isn’t who I am. Even though golf is important, it’s not the be-all and end-all, so whatever you’re going through, good or bad, this is the spot that God has you at the time, and there’s a reason for it.”

The six Baddeley kids – Jewell, Jolee, Jeremiah, Josiah, Jaddex and Jedidiah – are growing up and getting into sports, and a few of his boys even want to play pro golf like their father. Baddeley loves caddying sometimes in junior tournaments, and even though they are born-and-raised Phoenix kids, Baddeley has turned his household into Geelong Cats fans, like him.

(For the record, all the ‘J’ names follow in the tradition of Richelle’s siblings, who are all ‘Rs’. “Number five was the hardest,” Baddeley laughs.)

This year, Baddeley became the sixth Australian – and 151st player overall – to play in 500 PGA Tour events. But it was anything but a milestone at the wind-down end of a career.

Indeed, Baddeley’s past season has been his most successful for many years. With three top-10 finishes and consistently strong form, Baddeley finished 96th on the FedEx Cup list and earned a full PGA Tour card for the 2024 season.

“There is a coach over here who I started working with a few years ago called Mike Adams. He has just really made things as simple as I have ever had them, with my game. Week in, week out I am hitting the ball consistent and playing close to my best,” Baddeley said.

Aaron Baddeley plays a shot in Hawaii in January 2023.Credit: Getty

Baddeley is absolutely convinced there are more wins to come in his career, and his ambition of winning a major still burns so strongly that he turned down the insane riches of LIV Golf.

“We had conversations, and it’s a tough decision, but there was so much left for me to achieve, and with all the unknowns [of LIV], you know I want to win a major and play for Australia at the Olympics and do all that, and if I leave the tour it makes it difficult,” Baddeley said.

He hopes peace will be struck in the golf wars, and can’t understand why friendships have been strained because of LIV’s arrival.

“I don’t know why people get bent out of shape about it,” he said. “You make your decision, and it is what it is. I don’t care if you want to go play LIV. Bubba [Watson] is one of my good mates, and because he went to play LIV, do I stop talking to him? No, of course not.”

Next week, Baddeley will arrive back in Sydney – the town that launched him in 1999 – and on the back of a resurgent season, will see if he can’t muster up that teenage spirit one more time.

Baker-Finch rates Baddeley “in my handful of top picks”.

“It’s a nice story,” he said. “I would love him to come back and do it again. He is still quite capable of continuing to win, the way he plays. He seems to have a new lease on life.”

Baddeley, as always, will putt out at the 72nd hole at the Australian Golf Course with a smile on his face.

But if he gets to reunite with the Stonehaven Cup soon after, the grin would be a mile wider.

“Yeah, man, it’d be very special,” he says.

“A totally different special.”

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