After chatting with Christopher Longbottom for half an hour, I felt like the only thing missing from his resume was breeding Llamas in the middle of Bolivia.
Let’s begin with his journey as a young professional just out of his apprenticeship with respected Australian PGA master coach Peter Knight who, at the time, was the club professional at Paradise Palms in Far North Queensland.
It was 1991 and being a regional area, his trainee playing events were somewhat limited and didn’t give him much to compare himself to as a player so when he left Peter Knight it was back behind the counter at Golf World in Cairns and standing outside Palm Cove Resort as a concierge and a spattering of Sunshine Coast pro-ams to make ends meet.
It was at the resort where things took, some would say, a bit of an unexpected change.
Longbottom met and be-friended a family visiting from Finland who had just opened a golf course in their homeland. Not long after the chance meeting the family invited the young professional to spend six weeks with them helping to run their new venture.
“Six weeks turned into 12 months and then in 1994 I went to Norway for six months. That turned into 12 years.”
He wound up becoming the club professional at Alesund Golf Club and, through his Scandinavian contacts and friends, gained a few sponsors invitations into some European Challenge Tour events.
“While I was a club professional in Norway, I began playing some tournaments on the European Challenge Tour – Norwegian Open, Polish Open, Finnish Open. I didn’t have a Challenge Tour card so I was relying on sponsors invitations.”
In 2006, the general manager of Alesund Golf Club decided to take over the pro shop which changed Longbottom’s financial arrangements dramatically … for the worse.
“I was the ripe old age of 38 and now teaching at Ballerud Golf Centre and I thought, ‘bugger it’,” he said. “I might as well have a crack at playing full-time.”
He wasn’t talking Challenge Tour – he was going for his full European Tour card. It was at the demanding Panoramica golf course and after four rounds, he was five-under. How close was that to getting through? One shot!
Was he gutted at getting so close?
“No! Funnily enough, I didn’t have any expectations. It’s not like I had a great track record of playing. I could always get the ball around, but it’s not like I was the longest hitter or the best at anything so it was nice to say I could perform in that type of environment. I got more positives from it than negatives.”
Spurred on by the narrow miss, Longbottom targeted Asia and played in Thailand full-time for two-and-a-half years with the view to gaining a tour card in Asia.
“At the Asian Tour school, I shot 78 in my third round and that was too hard to come back from,” he said. “Golf is brutal and you can’t make those types of mistakes. I suffered from doubt and always thought I wasn’t good enough.”
Now this is where this journey becomes a little quirky.
“After that stint playing the Thai PGA Tour, I found myself running a construction company in Thailand for five years.”
As we all know readers, the classic natural progression all tour players take when they have a bad season is to run a construction company, right?
Turns out, he had an opportunity, with a friend who was a Thai businessman, to develop some land. He learnt to speak the local language, understand the business culture and honed his management skills.
“Managing 50 local Thai people was a challenge,” he admitted. “It’s all about face and respect – they don’t like change. My experience managing that business was maybe the catalyst to my pathway to golf club management.”
When I asked about his family, I immediately had skip back to 1996.
“I was playing the Polish Open and I met this beautiful Polish girl named Dominika at a disco,” he explained. “We got along really well, but it was on-and-off for a long time We reconnected in late 2013 and got married in May 2014 and we have Mia and Zoe, Natalia and Emelia.”
“I could always get the ball around, but it’s not like I was the longest hitter or the best at anything so it was nice to say I could perform in that type of environment.”
After deciding to move back to Australia (Gold Coast), to raise their family, Christopher and Dominika actually found it difficult to slip back into the Aussie workforce.
“Within two weeks of facing the decision to return to Norway, he secured a job at The Copperclub at Port Hughes in South Australia as director of golf and within eight weeks he was appointed general manager.
“That was a springboard into golf management for me.”
In 2017, he took on the role of GM at South Lakes Golf Club in South Australia where his management skills and experience were recognised with the 2018 South Australian Management Professional the Year by the Australian PGA.
The job at Harden Country Club came up soon after and Longbottom saw a terrific opportunity to be part of a challenging new project with a new clubhouse and, sure enough, his skills were again acknowledged with the Management Professional of the Year 2022 NSW/ACT.
After four years at Harden, Christopher and Dominika felt the need to move to a more populated centre with more opportunities and choices for the family and Hill Top Golf and Country Club at Tatura in Victoria, 10 minutes from Shepperton was perfect.
“We have about 600 active members with golf and bowls, a 6000m par-71 golf course, two bowling greens, the Links & Rinks Bistro which is very family oriented and a 13-site fully-powered caravan site, which is available to book and order online.”
With his obvious golf management skills, I would say Hill Top Golf & Country Club is about to become very busy.
Christopher Longbottom has been on some journey but it would appear he and Dominika have found their home.
