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<\/p>\nFive professional wins, two Open Championship starts and a career spanning the globe haven\u2019t satisfied Dimi Papadatos. The New South Wales Central Coast pro reflects on the sacrifices of tour life and why he still believes his best golf is ahead.<\/p>\n
My Dad and I actually started playing golf at the same time, literally by accident. I came home from school one day and our dryer had caught fire in the garage, so we had to clean everything out. While we were doing that, I found an old set of golf clubs Dad had won in a raffle years earlier and had never used. We had a chip around in the front yard, then went to the park, then the driving range and eventually played nine holes at my local course, Toukley Golf Club on the New South Wales Central Coast. John Lewis, the head pro, signed me up to the junior cadet program, I got a handicap and it literally all started from there.<\/p>\n
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I still remember rocking up to Toukley after soccer one morning wearing my soccer boots because I had no idea. No one really introduced me to the game. Dad came with me nearly every day and Mum would drop me at the golf course until dark whenever Dad was working. They sacrificed a lot so I could chase it. I always loved sport, but golf was the one that grabbed me.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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I loved competing and travelling, had a pretty good amateur career and turned professional at 21 after earning my card at Australasian Q-School while I was still an amateur. I knew I wanted to be a professional golfer, but I had no real idea what life on tour actually looked like. I learned as I went.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019ve been lucky enough to play all over the world. I spent time on the Asian Tour, seven years between the European Tour and Challenge Tour, a couple of seasons on the Korn Ferry Tour and now I\u2019m back playing in Australia. I\u2019d still love to get back overseas because that passion has never left.<\/p>\n
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Europe was always my favourite place to play. Asia was great because it was close to home and America was an unbelievable experience, but Europe was hard to beat. The golf was fantastic, but it was everything outside golf as well. If you had a week off, you could be in Greece or Spain enjoying the beaches, restaurants and culture. America is very golf-focused. Europe gave you a chance to separate yourself from the game, and I think that\u2019s really important over a long season. I\u2019d love to get back there. I played a couple of Challenge Tour events recently on invites after not being there for three years and it reminded me exactly why I enjoyed it so much.<\/p>\n
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I\u2019ve been fortunate to have some incredible moments. Winning the New Zealand Open at 22 with one of my best mates, \u201cFordy\u201d, on the bag will always be special. But winning in Portugal was probably the craziest week. I flew from Australia with conditional status for what I thought would be one tournament. I packed for one week, travelled by myself, didn\u2019t have a caddie and there weren\u2019t any other Aussies there. I won the tournament, threw the novelty cheque in the back of the rental car and drove to Lisbon before heading to Belgium for the next event. Suddenly I\u2019d gone from one start to spending the next six months in Europe.<\/p>\n
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People often don\u2019t realise what professional golf is really like.There\u2019s this perception that it\u2019s glamorous, but unless you\u2019re on the PGA Tour or LIV Golf, there\u2019s very little certainty. You\u2019re constantly fighting to keep your card, travelling from one country to another, spending long periods away from family and mates and sacrificing a normal life. Sometimes you invest everything into one week and come home with nothing. I\u2019ve flown all the way to Scotland for Q-School or the Dunhill Links, missed the cut and then had to turn around and fly home. During Covid, I was stuck in Scotland for two weeks and it would\u2019ve cost about $30,000 just to get home. They\u2019re tough moments, but I\u2019ve honestly never stopped wanting to do it. Results can make you question yourself and long stretches of poor golf can test anyone, but I\u2019ve always had the desire to keep going.<\/p>\n
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If my career ended tomorrow, I\u2019d be proud of what I\u2019ve achieved, but I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019m finished yet. I still believe my best golf is ahead of me. I\u2019d definitely like to achieve more in the game, but I also think I\u2019ve not always given myself enough credit for some of the things that I have done and that\u2019s probably to my detriment. If you\u2019d told me when I was starting out that I\u2019d have five wins on tour, a runner-up finish in the Australian Open, a second at a Korn Ferry event in Chile, two British Open starts and passport stamps from all around the world, I\u2019d have taken it.But at the same time, I want a lot more and I\u2019m not really that satisfied and that\u2019s probably why I\u2019ve still got that drive to continue on. I don\u2019t feel like I\u2019ve quite put it all together for a period of time. I\u2019ve had moments of really good golf, but I haven\u2019t really put it together for a stretch of three or four years. I\u2019m hoping that\u2019s still ahead of me.<\/p>\n
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Away from the fairways, I\u2019m an ambassador for Lexus Australia. After I finished second at the 2018 Australian Open, I was approached by Lexus and had a chat to the general manager at the time, Scott Thompson. They were looking for a golf ambassador, and my name came up. I was obviously pretty excited about that and came on board. I\u2019ve been with them now for the best part of seven or eight years. It\u2019s been a great relationship. They\u2019ve been very supportive of me and my career and travelling, and also got me involved in some really cool golf events \u2013 Melbourne Cups, all sorts of things. It\u2019s been amazing. I\u2019ve also opened an indoor golf simulator business on the Central Coast that\u2019s going really well. I\u2019m enjoying dividing my time up between playing on the tour and running a business.<\/p>\n
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People love hearing about the time I \u201cplayed\u201d with Tiger Woods at The Open. It was my first major start, at Royal Portrush in 2019, and I was having a practice round with Ryan Fox and fellow Aussie Jake McLeod. \u201cFoxy\u201d invited us out so we booked in with him, as you do with the majors for your practice rounds, and hit a few balls on the range before we walked through the tunnel and ended up on the first tee with an odd number. There were quite a few people starting to gather around the first tee at 7:30am for a Tuesday and I wasn\u2019t sure what was going on. I said to my caddie at the time, Luke Reardon, \u201cWhat\u2019s happening here?\u201d And he said, \u201cOh, the Big Cat\u2019s over your shoulder there.\u201d Tiger ended up teeing off and his caddie Joe LaCava said, \u201cIf you don\u2019t mind, we\u2019ll just cut through. We\u2019re going to play the first and cut through to the back nine, if that\u2019s all right?\u201d And then Tiger butted in and said, \u201cI\u2019ll just get out of your way if you like or, if you want to, just hit now and play the first hole with me, then I\u2019ll get out of your way.\u201d We all looked at each other and jumped at the opportunity to play the first with Tiger. And, of course, after his perfect 3-wood, he hit a nice, high-cut 7-iron to a foot and scooped it up and went on his way. I think he was hoping that by saying, \u201cI\u2019ll get out of your way,\u201d he meant, Leave me alone, but I was like, No, no, no. You\u2019re not going anywhere, mate [laughs]. So we were pretty happy we didn\u2019t say no. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Five professional wins, two Open Championship starts and a career spanning the globe haven\u2019t satisfied Dimi Papadatos. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":870826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,439309,755,188103,346058,85],"class_list":["post-870825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-dimitrios-papadatos","tag-golf","tag-journeys","tag-september-2026","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=870825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/870825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/870826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=870825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=870825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=870825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}