The Australia Letter is a weekly newsletter from our Australia bureau chief. Sign up to get it by email.
This week, we have a special treat: Karen Crouse, one of our sportswriters who was here for the Australian Open, spent time with Briony Lyle, the wife of Jarrod Lyle, one of Australia’s most beloved golfers, who died of cancer a few months ago.
He was only 36. Here’s his New York Times obituary if you missed it.
We’ve turned the newsletter over to Karen and Briony, for insights on sport and life. Tell us what you think at nytaustralia@nytimes.com.
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Briony Lyle laughs when she thinks about it now, but in the days after her husband, Jarrod, died following a lengthy battle with leukemia, she wondered what she would do with herself. For nearly a decade, her days had revolved around Jarrod’s schedule, first as a professional golfer and, later as a second-and-third-time cancer patient.
Jarrod’s death last August at age 36 unleashed a global outpouring of emotion and support from people whose lives he touched or who were touched by the story of a seemingly regular bloke who had absorbed life’s — and golf’s — bad breaks with grit and good cheer.
At the time I marveled at how a group of athletes who tend to measure success so rigidly, who generally buy into the belief that they are what their scores say they are, rallied to give a farewell befitting a giant to Jarrod, a journeyman whose highest finish in 121 P.G.A. Tour starts was a tie for fourth.
Curious to know what life was like for Briony after the elegies stopped, I followed the Australia Day migration of beachgoers to Torquay, the gateway to the Great Ocean Road, where Briony and Jarrod moved in 2012 and where, she said, Jarrod peacefully passed his final days.
The half-year anniversary of Jarrod’s death was upon her, but that’s not why Briony saw reminders of her husband everywhere.
The day before, an American, Bryson DeChambeau, had claimed a seven-stroke victory at the Dubai Desert Classic, a European Tour event. Briony has never met the 25-year-old DeChambeau, but at the P.G.A. Championship, held the week after Jarrod’s death, DeChambeau won a long-driving contest and donated the $ 25,000 winner’s check to an education fund set up for the Lyles’s young daughters, Lusi, 6, and Jemma, 2.
Since then, Briony, who never really cared for golf, has been a huge fan of DeChambeau. She recently sent him a thank-you note, which began the same as hundreds of others that she had written over the past few months: “We may never meet, but what you did was so amazing, just to say thank you is not enough.”
This week in the United States, the P.G.A. Tour is outside Phoenix, for a tournament known for its party atmosphere, huge crowds and stadium-style 16th hole.
The par 3 has been the scene of nine aces, including one by Tiger Woods and another by Jarrod in what was perhaps the signature moment of his P.G.A. Tour career.
It happened during the second round of the 2011 event, and Jarrod’s reaction was almost as memorable as a result. While the shot was airborne, he made the motion to sit with both hands as if his golf ball were a puppy at obedience school. After the ball bounced on the green and rolled in the cup, he pumped his arms multiple times, then windmilled his arms to churn the already raucous crowd of more than 25,000 into even more of a lather.
Smiling ear to ear, he ran over to his caddie shouting, “You beauty,” only, in typical Jarrod fashion, with an expletive added for emphasis.
Briony said Jarrod replayed the video of the shot and his reaction hundreds of times over the years.
“He’d tell people not to believe all the views it has gotten because he’s been responsible for most of them,” she said. “People thought he was just being humble, but he was telling the truth.”
She laughed.
“He watched that video all the time. I can remember waking up to him giggling and I’d ask him what he was laughing at and he’d say, ‘I just watched the hole-in-one again.’”
Golf did not captivate Briony, who was a high school classmate of Jarrod’s in their hometown, Shepparton, in northern Victoria. When they started dating a few years later, she attended his tournaments but recognized early on that she was going to need a diversion.
“I couldn’t possibly spend my time walking aimlessly around golf courses pretending I was invested in every shot and every moment,” said Briony, who enrolled in classes in Melbourne to become a massage therapist. She accumulated her required training hours, she said, by setting up a massage table at tournaments and kneading the muscles of the caddies.
She earned her certification in 2012, shortly before giving birth to the couple’s first daughter, Lusi. Another daughter, Jemma, arrived four years later. Around the time of Lusi’s birth, Jarrod learned that the leukemia he had battled successfully in high school had returned.
He was off the P.G.A. Tour for more than two years, then came back and made 20 more starts. He had returned to Australia to play his home tour and try his hand at broadcasting when he found out in late 2017 that the leukemia had returned a third time.
During his initial battle with the disease, Jarrod became acquainted with Challenge, a nonprofit dedicated to providing practical and personalized services to the families of cancer patients. The organization’s mascot is a duck named Leuk, and since Jarrod’s death people from all over the world have snatched up Leuk merchandise, everything from duck head covers to pins and ball markers.
Next week top performers from the P.G.A. Tour of Australasia, the Australian Ladies Professional Golf, the European Tour and the Ladies European Tour will converge on Barwon Heads Golf Club, not far from Torquay, for the Vic Open. Briony will be there, selling Leuk the Duck merchandise to raise money for families dealing with cancer.
“I have my moments — many, many moments — mostly nighttime where I can’t sleep because of things playing over in my mind,” Briony said. “But I’m able to grab on to this incredible thing that came out of what happened, there’s so much good that came out of it and I’m just so determined to draw attention to this cause because I’m not unique, unfortunately.”
A bittersweet thing happened; she lost her golfer husband and found a calling that drew her deeper into golf.
“After he died, I kept telling people over and over, my life tended to revolve around Jarrod either in illness or career and now my life continues to revolve around him,” she said. “That’s the legacy.”
— Karen Crouse
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Australia and New Zealand
• As a Reporter, She Wrote About Business. As a Novelist, She Writes About Murder. The novelist Jane Harper leans on the harsh Australian environment to tell stories of murder and survival. She talks about her new book, “The Lost Man,” and how years as a journalist taught her about writing under pressure.
• New Zealand Vowed 100,000 New Homes to Ease Crunch. So Far It Has Built 47. A plan to ease New Zealand’s housing crisis has yet to live up to its promises, and new figures show homes are further out of reach than in the United States, Britain and Australia.
• What Happened to Australia’s Waterfront Hotel Restaurants? Our restaurant critic Besha Rodell gets nostalgic over Australia’s elegant and dramatic waterfront institutions.
• ‘It’s Entirely Up to Me’: Indigenous Australians Find Empowerment in Start-Ups. More Aboriginal Australians are owning businesses — and breaking stereotypes along the way. As one of these entrepreneurs, Marsha Uppill, put it, “We’re not just good sports people — we’re good science people, we’re tech people.”
• The Most Famous Man at the Australian Open Is Not Who You Think. Tennis champion, radio host, disability advocate, festival organizer, author — Dylan Alcott is everywhere. Read about the most popular man at the Open.
• Not-So-Hidden Cameras Take Australian Open Viewers on an Intimate Tour. Speaking of being everywhere — has the tournament that branded itself the Happy Slam become the Orwellian Open?
• Across Australia, Yet Another Scorching Summer. Mass animal deaths, bushfires and power outages. A look at how Australia is managing a disastrous summer.
• The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix Australia in February Look out for “Nightflyers,” the new adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s 1980 novella. Also “Get Out,” the breakout horror hit from the writer and director Jordan Peele.
#HustleCulture. Scam?
Millennials have been routinely lampooned as apathetic and lazy — but recent articles (like this one from BuzzFeed) are shifting the discussion to a concern of the generation burning out from overwork.
Here’s The New York Times’s take, which asks: Why are some millennials pretending to love work? When did performative workaholism become an acceptable lifestyle? And whom does it really benefit?
A Deadly Chill Grips the American Midwest
While Australia continues to sweat through summer, Americans from New York to Chicago are being urged to stay inside to avoid bitterly cold weather that broke temperature records. At least 21 people are now believed to have died as a result of the cold, which reached as low as minus 38 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 38 degrees Celsius) in some areas.
Our international climate reporter, Somini Sengupta, reported on the links between the extreme weather in both sweltering Australia and the freezing Midwest.
… And We Recommend
The latest issue of New Philosopher magazine is out in stores now, which features articles from The New York Times’s philosophy column, The Stone.
In the spirit of intellectual (and experimental) discourse, the team from New Philosopher will be leading discussions next week in our NYT Australia Facebook group on the topic of “Being Human.”
It’s intended to be fun and inclusive, so please don’t be shy and join in (and prepare for things to get deep).
… And Don’t Miss
Paul Krugman, a New York Times columnist for 20 years, Nobel Prize winner and distinguished economics scholar and professor, will join me in conversation at the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne at 6 p.m. on Feb. 14 to talk about the economic and political changes facing Australia, the United States, Europe and China. Get your tickets here.