In the foyer at 3 Hammers Golf Complex, the talk is all about Aaron Rai’s long putting game. The night before, everybody had stayed up to watch that epic 68-foot putt that clinched the US PGA Championship for Rai, who took the first steps on his golfing journey at this homely facility near Wolverhampton. But they were also recalling him endlessly practising putts of a similar length on the carpet of that very foyer not too long ago.
With the bar on one side and the golf shop on the other, just around the corner from the indoor putting green, the foyer stretches about 70 feet to the sliding glass entrance door. And it was here 17 months ago, on the last working day before Christmas, that Rai settled in for a late-night putting session that has become the stuff of legend at 3 Hammers.
When the indoor putting green closed at 10pm just before Christmas in 2024, Rai relocated to the foyer to work on his game late into the night, below
“He had already spent hours on the indoor putting green, as he loves to do,” Rob Bluck, the complex’s academy director, said. “We closed at 10 o’clock, so we asked him to finish up because we needed to put the shutters down. He saw that we were all having a Christmas drink or two in the bar and he didn’t really want to finish, so he asked if he could keep putting in the foyer. This is a bloke who’d won his first PGA Tour title a couple of months earlier. And he must have been there practising his lag putts for another hour while we were having drinks. But that’s just an example of the man he is. He’s always had that dedication.”
Rai was four years old when he first came to 3 Hammers, a couple of miles’ drive from home. He lives in Florida now, but still returns to the venue he calls his “happy place” whenever he is back in the area. Indeed, the question is often posed why he spends so much time practising on the modest indoor putting green when he now has a bespoke putting green installed in the garden of the family home nearby.
Rai has been visiting the complex since he was fourAlamy
“There’s so much going on around our indoor green, there’s kids getting crisps and chocolate from the vending machine, there’s ball dispensers, people going past to the performance studio for lessons, saying hello, interrupting him,” Nick Forbes, the operations manager, said. “I asked him why he didn’t prefer to practise in peace and quiet at home. He said that when he’s playing in big tournaments, there’s always going to be loads of hustle and bustle around a green, cheers, chants, applause from other greens. Having all these distractions around him meant that he was also practising his focus, shutting out everything that was going on around him.”
The morning after Rai displayed that focus to clinch his first major title, there is plenty of hustle and bustle at 3 Hammers. There are players of all abilities on the driving range, some striking booming drives, others clearly at an earlier stage in their golfing education. There are parents and toddlers playing on the dinosaur-themed crazy golf course, Jurassic Creek. And there are a handful of players of varying ages on the neat par-three course on which Rai learnt the game, turning up immediately after school and playing round after round until it was time to go home.
The complex was set up in 1986 with the aim of making golf less of a “closed shop”
This is no exclusive members’ club. It is an open-door complex designed to draw in as many people as possible and to offer them coaching and guidance to take their game as far as their abilities will allow. “We set the place up in 1986 and I wanted it to be an inclusive place,” Ian Bonser, the former owner, said. “Golf could be a closed shop at the time, you had to wear the right clothes and that sort of thing. We said from the start that if you want to play golf in a T-shirt and trainers, that’s fine by us.”
It is no coincidence that Rai has maintained a team around him with a strong Wolverhampton accent, from his coaches, Andy Proudman and Piers Ward, to his caddie, Jason Timmis. For all that he now lives the life of a successful PGA Tour professional in Florida, he has always stayed firmly in touch with his roots. And all the time he is guided by his father, Amrik, who has never been seen to swing a club of his own, but has devoted himself to allowing his son to realise his potential.
“I spoke to Amrik last month when he was driving up to Manchester airport to fly to America to watch the Masters,” Bonser said. “He told me he’d driven past 3 Hammers with a tear in his eye, because he’d seen Aaron develop from that four-year-old with us and now he was going to be playing in the Masters. I dread to think what Amrik will be like the next time he drives past, now that his son is a major champion. I imagine he’ll be blubbing his heart out.”