Anthony Quayle only asked to go for a coffee, but Steve Williams suggested he caddie for him instead.<\/p>\n
They exchanged numbers and the master New Zealand looper was quickly locked in for this week’s Australian PGA Championship and next week’s Australian Open in Melbourne.<\/p>\n
So far so good, with former Japan Tour talent Quayle cruising to an early clubhouse lead with a four-under 67 on Thursday at Brisbane’s Royal Queensland Golf Club.<\/p>\n
On the bag for 13 of Tiger Woods’ major titles, Williams also caddied for Greg Norman and won a 14th major with Adam Scott in 2013.<\/p>\n
Quayle, who has won his way on to Europe’s DP World Tour that officially kicks off in Brisbane this week, has relished the union.<\/p>\n
“I met him at the New Zealand Open earlier this year … got on fairly well and I said, ‘Do you mind if we go grab a coffee afterwards, I’d love to pick your brain?’,” Quayle said after his bogey-free round.<\/p>\n
“He said ‘Bugger that, I’ll give you my number, I’ll come caddie for you’.”<\/p>\n
Thursday’s round followed a nine-under 63 in the final round last year that catapulted Quayle to equal third and laid the platform for his European tour entry.<\/p>\n
Since then he’s had top-10 finishes in 11 of 17 events, including six top-fives.<\/p>\n
Quayle hopes Williams’ influence can transform him from contender to winner.<\/p>\n
“He’s probably the most positive and clear caddie that I’ve ever worked with,” he said.<\/p>\n
“He probably has a reputation for being quite intense, but my experience today wasn’t that at all.<\/p>\n
“It was just very direct, ‘This is what we need to do here. You think you can do it? Yep, let’s do it then’.<\/p>\n
“There was no room at all for any sort of doubt at any point. It just didn’t seem to creep into my mind.<\/p>\n
“The game feels really good … without being great, and I’m hoping that Steve can bring part of that missing ingredient for me these next couple of weeks.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Anthony Quayle only asked to go for a coffee, but Steve Williams suggested he caddie for him instead.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":156690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-156689","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-new-zealand","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/156690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}