Vale Jarrod Lyle, a genuinely good bloke in the cold world of golf
Related Story: 'My time was short': Australian golfer Jarrod Lyle dies aged 36
When a young man dies at the age of just 36, you might lament that we had hardly gotten to know him. But Jarrod Lyle was universally adored because, even to complete strangers, he seemed like a good friend.
We knew Lyle as the young man who had dealt with three bouts of acute myeloid leukaemia with incredible heart, openness and even generosity. We knew him as a tremendously gifted golfer whose best was competitive with the game's finest.
But the description that fits most comfortably is the one you can never feign or self-adopt; one that will have come to the mind of Lyle's many friends across all walks of life upon hearing the news of his death.
Lyle was quite simply a good bloke.
That term seems somehow dated in contemporary society — and, particularly, modern sport — but it encapsulates everything about Lyle. How until his dying days he was the same affable soul sitting on a bar stool in a clubhouse in his home town of Shepparton as he was playing a round with Tiger Woods.
As Lyle shared those final days with typical candour and warmth, his words about the young family he was about to leave behind, wife Briony and daughters Lusi, 6, and Jemma, 2, were heart-rending.
If there was any consolation, it was that the outpouring of public grief was matched by generosity. Lyle's fellow players and complete strangers have donated to a fund that will ease the financial burden of a family that lost its source of income during his long illness.
But beyond even the family tragedy, in a final bedside message recorded by Lyle's good friend, Golf Australia media manager Mark Hayes, one small mention encapsulated the feeling that has made his plight the source of such enormous public sympathy.
Declaring himself the "luckiest golfer going around", Lyle thanked everyone who had played a part in his career — including the tournament marshals.
That he would include the volunteer crowd controllers who are as anonymous as the tee markers to most players says everything of Lyle's all-embracing attitude; and why his plight created a tidal wave of emotion during his final bitter-sweet days.
In that regard, it is not too farfetched to suggest Lyle's humanity was in contrast to what we know — or, more precisely, what we are usually allowed to see — in contemporary sport, where the human element is so often blurred through the prism of conflict, controversy and detached yet microscopic media analysis.
Even Lyle's chosen sport golf, once notionally the preserve of self-policing gentlemen, has changed and its once readily accessible champions have become more remote.
The typical career trajectory for the professional golfer was once a long amateur career that might last until the mid-twenties. Then the most talented would take off by themselves and travel the world seeking the experiences in far-flung places that would forge their games in preparation for the more lucrative tours.
By the time you saw a player in the press tent at a big tournament, he had often spent years carrying his own bag through airports, sleeping in rough hotels and gaining the perspective such life experience brings.
Over time, that changed. Greater prizemoney inspired improved coaching. Young phenoms who went virtually straight from practice fairway to the big tours where they were surrounded by agents, would-be sponsors and gatekeepers.
Thus, inevitably, golf started to become as insular and aloof as the mollycoddling world of professional tennis. Laughable as it might have seemed in the days when players washed down a round with a clubhouse beer, you could now even call some of these flat-bellied gym-trained ball machines "athletes".
Then there was Jarrod Lyle, a big lump of a kid. He stood out in this colder world, not just to fans but to his fellow players.
I suspect the perspective his forebears on the tour once learned by travelling the world and paying their way came from the time he spent staring death in the face as a 17-year-old. Whatever the reason, Lyle was a bit of a throwback.
Lyle met his great friend Robert Allenby in a cancer ward. Years later the two stood beside the 18th green at Royal Liverpool after a practice round at the 2006 British Open.
When asked to recall their first meeting, Lyle said: "I was flat on my back with cords and pipes coming out of me from everywhere. I had that many drugs pumped through me I don't remember a hell of a lot of it."
After that experience, and his subsequent relapses, Lyle's head would never be turned by the bright lights of the PGA Tour or his ego stroked by the courtesans. Life was too precious and his appetite for it too great.
Lyle is not golf's only great recent loss. Five times British Open champion Peter Thomson and Ian Stanley, a hugely talented and flamboyant star of the hairy-chested eighties era, are no longer with us.
If you would learn more about golf over a glass of sherry with the esteemed Thommo, I suspect your eyes would have been opened far wider about some of life's other pursuits at one of Stanley's famous parties at his Melbourne home.
And now Jarrod Lyle is gone too. Player, husband, father and, yes, good bloke; one who constantly reminded us about the underrated virtue of common decency.
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