Golf: The man who drives Rotorua boys to success

TIM WATKIN takes a lesson from the inspirational teacher who turned Rotorua schoolboys into golfing world-beaters - and learns about the personal cost of success.

The ball comes sweetly off my seven iron on the seventh tee of the Rotorua Golf Club and flies straight and high through a clear blue sky towards the green.

"Top shot," Ian Woon says enthusiastically. "Yes, if it can just clear ... "

Thud. The ball lands thick in the bunker, a couple of metres short of the green's front lip.

Woon is undeterred. "Come on - we'll get you out of there in one."

It takes two, plus a couple of putts, before I complete this par three.

It's been a year since my last round of golf, and I've never been any better than a mid-20s handicapper. But Woon - a 58-year-old father-of-two, stocky with a lively, weathered face - is as encouraging to me as he has been to thousands of students over a 30-year teaching career.

As we follow our balls round a few more holes, me topping and slicing my way from rough to rough, Woon chats to the other golfers and club members he sees.

Everyone knows Woonie. Everyone warrants a smile and a "How ya doing?" in his straight-down-the-middle, blokey New Zealand voice - even the Japanese couple from Auckland and the boy on his bike watching over the fence.

He speaks with the same kind of energy as drives his life. Enthusiasm surrounds him like a forcefield.

Through the holes, Woon is relentlessly analysing - my game, his son Tarron's game, and his own. The eagerness to learn, to improve, is infectious.

On the ninth tee he suggests changes: shorten my stance, get closer to the ball, raise my tee. My drive is clean and straight down the fairway, if a little short.

"Good shot. Come back tomorrow and we'll add some distance," he quips.

It isn't the Masters, which will grip golf fans including Woon this weekend. Neither is it the World School Championship, for which Woon took a trio of Rotorua kids and nurtured them into world-beaters two years running.

But it's on these ordinary courses of Rotorua that Woon is turning teenagers into golfers and spotting the talent that may one day end up walking the venerated turf of Augusta. If proteges Sam Hunt or Jae An ever make that cut, they'll have much to thank Woon for.

F EW realise the breadth of his successes, and the personal cost.

Woon didn't plan to be a teacher. When he left his parents' small orchard, 5km from the Hastings Post Office, for Massey University, he wanted to be a vet. When he transferred to Victoria University, he thought of accounting or insurance.

"I don't think I came to grips with anything that I really wanted to do," he says.

Born in 1943, the third of four boys, Woon first learned about the importance of committed teachers at Hastings Intermediate.

"Two guys, Andy Nola and Morrie Taylor, did so much for us I guess it stayed in my psyche to keep working with kids and give back what they'd given us," he says.

At high school, cricket coach Buck Hamilton became another mentor.

Woon excelled at sport and was the leading run-scorer in Wellington club cricket one season while he was at Victoria.

"I had a lot of things going for me and I never took some of the opportunities, when I look back," he says matter-of-factly.

His eldest brother, Bob, says their father fell ill just as Ian was hitting his sporting straps.

Woon returned to the family orchard for three years, wanting to be near his family, then moved to Hamilton where he met his wife, Linda, now principal at Rotorua's Kawaha Point primary school.

In 1970 they found a day between the rugby and cricket seasons to get married. She jokes that she was won over by his stories of scoring 1878 runs at an average of 90 in his last year at Hastings Boys High.

Shortly after, Woon was offered a part-time teaching job at Hamilton Boys High and thought he'd give it a go. "It just fell into place that way. I didn't have a plan and I still haven't got a plan ... I wish I had put some planning into my own life."

It is one of those odd paradoxes that people nominate Woon's devotion to meticulous planning as one of his great strengths as a teacher. "He's a mastermind," says Chris Grinter, his principal at Rotorua Boys. "He becomes totally focused on the cause at hand and everything else is secondary while Ian is chasing a goal."

Yet Woon's own life has followed the winds.

Sitting down at the family dining table under a couple of Rei Hamon prints, he pulls out the Bible. "Not that I'm heavily religious at all," he says, though he goes to church most Sundays.

In the front is a quote he wants to share: "It's not the strongest of the species that survives nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change".

He closes the book and places it beside him. "I think that's really important in my life, in terms of having to change all the way."

One of the biggest changes came in the mid-70s, when Linda convinced him to sell their home and head to Britain. There, it became clear how Woon's sporting passion could be tied to inspiring school children.

The couple landed jobs at The Priory, a private Surrey school of around 250 pupils. The principal soon suggested that Woon could make his mark with the school's rugby team. The school had an annual match against a bigger school down the road called Homevale.

"We've played them every year since 1906," the principal said.

"That's marvellous," Woon replied. "What a great exchange."

"The thing is, we've never beaten them. To be truthful, we've never got within 50 points of them."

Woon thought: "No one beats me by 50 points." An intense introduction to New Zealand-style rugby followed, and a few of Woon's secrets of success came to the fore. He got the parents involved and researched the opposition in-depth. The next year, The Priory scored a try from a clever opening kick-off and ran away to win 37-3.

It was a pattern of transformation that Woon took wherever he went and applied to whatever he taught.

W HEN the couple returned to New Zealand they settled in Paungaru in the Hokianga - Dame Whina Cooper's home patch. The redoubtable kuia told them no local student had ever achieved a full school certificate and challenged them to change that. The year after they arrived, eight children passed School C.

After two years they crossed the harbour to work at Opononi. There, 24 kids sat School C and 24 passed.

The couple became great friends with Cooper, who later often stayed at their Rotorua home when she needed to escape the limelight. Woon learned Maori and developed a commitment to improving Maori achievement in science and maths.

When he came to Rotorua, he decided to put his energies into science fairs. In typical Woon style, he flew to Wellington to see what it took to win the nationals. His eyes light up when he talks about the projects and the pupils involved.

Woon keeps motivated because he loves learning. I ask him to analyse his formula for success, and he sidetracks into excitedly describing a science fair entry on pre-colonial Maori food preservation. He loves knowing this stuff, loves seeing his pupils achieve. To do that, he insists, "you've got to get with them and work alongside".

As he did with pupil Rawiri Waru on a science fair experiment into Rotorua's geothermal activity. Waru beat 10,000 others to win the world science fair champs in Germany in 2000. Woon clocked up 700 hours on the project.

Still, what about the lesser-achievers? Not all teenagers succeed.

"But they do when you look at the long run," Woon says, and it's clear that although he's committed to excellence he's not an elitist. "They'll have a lot of successes and if you can build on the individual successes - and they can be so small at times - you'll see them flourish and come through."

So winning is all important? No, he says quickly, then reconsiders. Woon loves winning.

"I certainly want to win and I want my kids to win. But I want them to realise that's not the only thing about taking part in sport. In golf, winning can just mean scoring better than yesterday."

At Rotorua Boys, Woon began with a handful of golfers and within a decade turned it into one of the world's top golfing schools. He was lucky to have pupils of exceptional talent, but it was his drive to bring the golfing and business community on board that created a nest of junior champions.

There are now 82 golfers at Rotorua Boys, all with handicaps, and the numbers are leaping ahead each year. In a few weeks the school will open a $240,000, 15-bay driving range, the first private-public partnership on Ministry of Education land.

Woon says community partnership, especially with parents, is "where you get the real achievement".

Ken Smith, father of top amateur golfer and former Woon pupil Mark Smith, says: "If kids do well he pats them on the back. If not, he encourages them. Even now [Mark Smith is in his 20s] we will be at a tournament and Ian Woon turns up. He shows total, devoted interest."

Paul Hartstone, who coached the Rotorua Boys team and is now a high school teacher in Hamilton, says: "I don't know of any teacher who organises anything on the scale he does. He spares nothing. He's full-on and expects that back from the pupils".

He is the great ideas man. Others, such as Linda, are left, in Woon's words, to "tie things together".

"He's passionate and creative and prepared to devote all his time and energy to realise these dreams," says Rotorua Boys' Grinter. "But something's got to give when Ian's on a mission."

W HAT few know is quite how much has given.

Woon's devotion, meticulous planning and desire to win came together at the Royal County Down golf course in Northern Ireland on a sunny day in 2000. Three Rotorua Boys pupils - Sam Hunt, Mathew Holten and Bradley Iles - were representing New Zealand in the World School Championship.

Woon - the mentor and manager, but never the coach, as often assumed - had planned the campaign in detail.

Says Hartstone, who coached the team, "He would make a great general. Ian wouldn't put a troop in the field if he didn't know exactly what would happen to him."

The team, the youngest in the tournament at 15, 16 and 16 respectively, arrived in Britain a month before the tournament. To build to a peak and get the golfers used to the toughest conditions, Woon had arranged to play 10 top courses.

But he had begun the campaign months before. Royal County Down is a links course, so he had researched their peculiar demands and spoken to successful links players. He got laptops for the kids, a laser distance measurer and a digital camera.

They played the iconic St Andrews and the notorious Carnustie and the boys managed scores in the 80s. Good, but enough for a world championship? Enough to beat the mighty Australian and South African favourites?

Then, at Gullane, Hunt shot a 66. "We knew we had something," says Woon. "We could do this."

They played Turnberry. They walked the course beforehand. They measured distances. They took photos of each hole from four different angles then downloaded them on to their laptops and spent the evening studying them by the fire at the local pub.

The next day, all three boys went under par. They were learning how to win.

They arrived in Ireland two weeks before the tournament. They were allowed to play the course only once as practice, yet the boys were on the course at 6 every morning, talking with ground staff. They would walk the course, measuring, photographing, considering what strokes they'd need. They talked to members and caddies.

"It was all about preparation," says Woon. "That was the reason we won."

He wanted local support for his boys, so taught them to visit club staff every day, to shake hands and look people in the eye. The team wore black every day, so they were instantly recognisable around town.

By the morning of the two-round tournament, all was in place. By that evening, incredibly, they had a 15-stroke lead. The next day they extended that lead to 28.

W OON says that day was his best sporting moment. "The absolute fulfilment of seeing such young kids beat the world. All the things we had planned came together."

It had been a dream year. As Linda says, "I doubt if any teacher in the world has had two world titles [the golf and science fair] in the same year in two diverse areas".

Last year he took a break from the science fairs but carried on with the golf. The same team went to The Berkshire course in England and, thanks to a superb last round by Hunt, retained their title.

These days Woon is on the golf course every day - not playing, but encouraging and advising the 100-plus boys now members at local clubs.

And he's still working with fourth-form star Jae An, who played at the New Zealand Open this year. They should be preparing for a Rotorua Boys' threepeat at the world champs, but in-fighting at the Golf Foundation in Britain has caused the cancellation of this year's tournament.

The irony surrounding all this golf work is that until our round last week, Woon had not played for nearly five years. He had simply been too busy.The passion has at times been all-consuming, and the price high.

"You put so much time into these things, to get real success takes huge hours," he reflects. "It's easy to let it overtake what you should be doing in terms of your family."

Says Linda, "It has cost him the growing years with his own sons, it's cost him financially, it's cost him his own marriage."

Though still close and supportive, Ian and Linda are separated. Woon's other commitments proved too much.

"He lives for his students and school," Linda says, "but it has cost him his family."

The passion has also worn him out. He's tired.

This remarkable teacher has decided to call it a day, frustrated at the lack of recognition for teachers and anxious for a new challenge - maybe something in golf or business. He's looking round.

As we walk to my car, Woon is enthusing about fishing on Lake Rotorua the next morning. "I'm no good at lake fishing, but it's great to keep learning isn't it?"

A few days later I get a phone message. He caught a six-pounder and it tasted great.

"It's all go here mate," he says. "Never stops ... "