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Jock’s
From playing in the Open Championship to setting up Hong Kong’s most popular supermarket chain, Jock Mackie has been a success both on and off the course
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STORY BY ALEX JENKINS PHOTOGRAPHY BY CHARLES MCLAUGHLIN
hen the world’s best golfers gather at Turnberry for the Open Championship in July, former Hong Kong international Jock Mackie will be celebrating more than most when the first tee shot is struck. The reason? The 2009 edition of the event marks precisely 50 years since Jock teed it up at Murifield to become the first – and so far only – Hong Kong golfer to play in the game’s oldest Major championship. Arguably the most prolific local sportsman of his generation, Jock, who turns 81 in August, represented Hong Kong is six different sports – including rugby, cricket, swimming, tennis and hockey – but it was golf in which he truly excelled. Born in Penang to Scottish parents, Jock arrived in Hong Kong, via Singapore and Australia, in his late teens and quickly established himself as one of the colony’s finest players. Having started the game at his mother’s behest at the age of eight, Jock got down to scratch within a few months of joining the Hong Kong Golf Club and was soon winning titles. “We were all very keen about our golf in those days,” remembers Jock, who won the Hong Kong Open Amateur Championship three times in the 1950s. “The routine was to head up to Fanling on the Saturday and play a warmup round in the afternoon. We’d then have a ‘Dice and Gin’ evening at the club and the next morning we’d play a more competitive round. Sunday afternoons was reserved for a friendly game, but we didn’t play much more than that – we all had jobs to do.” Indeed they did. Jock, whose father worked for Cable & Wireless, first entered employment as a management trainee with Jardine Matheson in 1948, before becoming a sales director with Dennis Hazell & Company, a distribution company that handled Slazenger and Penfold sports goods, 20
HK Golfer・Jun/Jul 2009
two of the biggest golf brands of the era. It was towards the end of his time with Dennis Hazell, that Jock enjoyed his annus mirabilis – 1959. As well as playing in the inaugural Hong Kong Open that year, Jock, as a key member of the Fanling fraternity, along with the likes of Kim Hall, Alan Sutcliffe and Hugh de Lacy Staunton, helped organize it too. “I remember getting on the phone and calling up the Australian pros to see if they could come and play in it,” he recalls. “It started off small but we put on a very good tournament and look where
it is today. We’re all very proud of what it has become and I haven’t missed one yet.” Jock started that first Hong Kong Open brightly, carding a solid 70 to finish the first round just one shot off the pace. Although a 76 on the second day put him out of championship contention, the very fact that he was representing Hong Kong in the colony’s own tournament was, in his own words, “a tremendous feeling.” Fast forward a few months and Jock was teeing it up alongside Max Faulkner, one of the greats of HKGOLFERMAGAZINE.COM
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the game, at the Open at Murifield. Having got through qualifying earlier on in the week, Jock was, by his own admission, “jolly nervous.” “The biggest difference between amateurs and professionals back then became immediately obvious,” recounts Jock with a smile. “On the first hole Faulkner hit his approach just short of the green and received generous applause from the crowd, which was understandable, as he was a former Open champion. Then I stepped up, having hit my tee shot slightly further, and put it
Mackie at Muirfield (from above): Jock (left) with Ken Kinghorn and Max Faulkner at the Open in 1959; relaxing at Shek O Country Club, home of the "Jock's Pot." HK Golfer・Jun/Jul 2009
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