Paul Holmes: Anzac spirit thrives on the green

Well, it is a special day, I know, Anzac Day, the day on which we pause to remember the duty and sacrifice of those who came before, the people who served us in times of darkness and conflict, those who gave their service and ultimately their lives in times gone by and those who offer themselves still in defending the integrity of this land.

And, of course, it is a day upon which to celebrate the fundamental friendship we enjoy with our Australian cousins.

We have a fierce rivalry in many things. In sport, it is a brilliant rivalry.

So I want to tell you about the most wonderful 10 days of Anzac spirit we've enjoyed at the farm here in Hawke's Bay where Hastings hosted the annual New Zealand Amateur Golf Championship.

It started like this. Our friend Vicki Wallace phoned Deborah. Could we put Ben up for the few days of the tournament.

Ben, who turns 21 today, is one of New Zealand's finest and most dedicated golfers.

Ben won the Auckland golf club's senior championship at 14.

He practises golf some 20 hours a week, does gym work as well and still manages to work his way through a commerce degree. Ben lives and breathes his golf, eats only the right food, prepares, plans, does everything a top athlete should do. Of course, we said, we'd love to put Ben up.

Then Vicki said, well, he's got a mate with him, an Australian boy from Perth.

Could Matt stay as well? Absolutely. In a subsequent call, Ben's dad, Gary, himself an Auckland championship winner in years gone by, tells Deborah that Matt just happens to be the current Australian amateur champion, a title he won in Perth three weeks ago and is the defending New Zealand amateur champion, having won the 2009 title.

Ben and Matt are both on their respective national teams and got to know and like each other through Anzac competition.

So a couple of days before the tournament began, the boys arrived. I call them boys. They are both 21 years old. But I like to call them boys. After this last fortnight we feel as if they are our sons.

We've known Ben for years. His brother Andrew is a very good mate of my own boy so our families have had a lot to do with each other. Ben introduced Matt.

Matt Jager. Matt is very tall, a ready smile, rangy, very slim, nothing to him. Good looking in a relaxed, easygoing Aussie kind of way. Dry, like a drover. Super-casual, well-mannered. We liked him immediately.

And yet there was something else. You felt it very soon after meeting him. There was something that was deep and serious, something that kept its distance, something you couldn't get to.

Nothing fazed him. He knows exactly where he's going. He has steel. He would come to amaze us over the week with his relaxed handling of immense pressure. It caused us to laugh with glee at the cheek of it, that profound confidence of someone who knows he has a true gift and knows how to call upon it.

Ben Wallace has this gift too, of course. Ben also has that confident cheek. Ben is quieter. Ben is intense. And there is nothing wrong with intensity when you have a passion for something.

Ben simply comes at his golf from a different place. And Ben wanted very much to win the title at Hastings. But you could tell that while they are deep rivals, they truly are friends. I came to really admire this. It is, I suppose, the finest part of sport.

The boys played together in the team competition on the first day. They finished well coming second equal. They came home tired but happy enough.

I cooked them my special quince and pork chop casserole. I noticed they both avoided the fat and the pork rind. Eat some of that, I said. Don't worry about all this sports science bloody nonsense. You need a bit of animal fat to keep you steady tomorrow.

Anyway, in the stroke play competition, out of the blue and tearing up the track came a youngster, Brad Kendall from Tauranga, and Brad won that part of the tournament. Matt finished second and shrugged his shoulders. "Second's fine, now comes the match play."

So we had started with 150 golfers and now we were down to 32.

Thirty-two became 16 then 16 became eight. These were eight of the finest young golfers in the country. Both of our boys advanced.

Two of the eight staying with us! We couldn't believe it. We felt so privileged. We felt a great responsibility. We were sensitive to the boys' stress and their tiredness. I tried to make them laugh. We fed them well.

As the tournament progressed, the boys came home each night exhausted. We had long spas. We talked about winning, but not too much. Deborah and I prayed for a Wallace-Jager final.

But in the quarter-finals, Ben came up against the immensely pleasant, 18-year-old Kendall. There he was in the last eight up against Ben Wallace. On the day, Brad Kendall became Ben's tormentor and won through to the final day to face Matt Jager.

By lunchtime next day, in the final, Matt was up 5 up. Early afternoon we hurried out for the final holes. Matt was on fire. "Like that one, Paulie?" he grinned after he sank a long, impossible putt. Cool as a cucumber.

It was just a matter of time. Next thing he was 6 up. And when Brad hooked a drive into a thicket of pines, the smiling assassin attacked to finish him off. Brad got himself miraculously out of the trees and almost on to the green but it was too late. Matt sank the putt, birdied the hole and it was all over. Our Anzac mate had won.

It was handshakes all round. Matt saw us standing there, almost in tears at the brilliance we'd seen from both lads and tears of joy for our boy in his victory, the first back-to-back wins in this competition for nearly 20 years.

He saw us and came over. "That putt was for you, Paulie." Sure it was, Aussie, you dear boy.

The New Zealand Golf people said we could bring the cup home for the night, this historic cup on which the first name was engraved in 1893. Matt went off to the clubhouse to get it.

Deborah and I got home and lit the fire. My best friend, Peter Beaven, himself a dedicated golfer of no mean ability who had been out there with us in the afternoon, drove out with a bottle of Australian red.

Matt and Ben arrived. Matt poured the wine into the cup and we all sipped it dry, making sure we had one for all of those great names engraved upon it, Nobilo, Tataurangi, Stuart Jones, Danny Lee, Ted MacDougall and Owen Kendall himself, Brad's father, who won it in 1987.

Deborah, Peter and I could not believe it, that cup sitting there on the low table on Tuesday night, its winner upstairs in his room fielding a barrage of calls. We felt as marvellous as if we had won it ourselves.

Ben was deeply disappointed at not being there in the final but he was generous about Matt's win. The friendship was not damaged. Both boys had agreed that if one of them wasn't in the final, the one would caddied for the other and Ben had caddied for Matt all day. The Anzac spirit was alive in our house that night.

Next morning I gave each boy a copy of my book, Holmes at Large, and wrote inside the cover for them. Matt went upstairs. When he came down with his bags he stunned me by saying that he'd just read one of the columns up in his room, the last one in the book, the one about how the right attitude makes its own luck, something I firmly believe.

"I reckon I did a half-good job of that this week," he said.

You sure did, cobber.

Oh, and the cup was washed and dried thoroughly and is safely back in the hands of New Zealand Golf. It has not gone off to bloody Australia.