The Cookie Jar Golf Podcast · Cookie Jar Golf

365 - Ian Baker-Finch

·55 min·3 clips

At Royal Birkdale, Baker-Finch says he was “never going to miss a fairway” and shot 29 on the front nine.

It begins with Ian Baker-Finch on coffee duty. He jokes that the plunger is only a notch above instant, though he has made it strong enough to do the job. From there the conversation drifts into Australian coffee culture, where the neighbourhood cafe is less a luxury than part of the day. He sketches the regulars, the barista who knows your order, the swimmers coming in from the bay, the golfers on the way out, and the school-run crowd squeezing in at the edge of the morning. That detail gives the whole exchange a lived-in feel right away. The talk then swings into golf now versus then. Baker-Finch says the modern game has more money, more fitness, and more depth than ever before. He is careful not to romanticise the old days. The great players of earlier eras were athletic too, he says, and he names Arnold Palmer, Jake Nicholson, Greg Norman, and Tom Watson as the sort of players who could have excelled in almost anything. The bigger shift, in his telling, is Tiger Woods changing the scale of the sport. After that, the best athletes in the world started treating golf as a real option. He widens the point beyond golf and into other sports. Footballers, basketballers, cricket players, and other elite athletes all play the game now, and they play it properly. The cricket examples add a comic turn. On tour, he suggests, some players worry more about getting their clubs into the bag than about how many bats they are carrying. That opens the door to a teasing run at the English cricket team and the way they seem able to turn almost any trip into a chance to talk about golf courses. The conversation keeps moving in that slightly scrappy way the show does well. One point nudges into the next, then gets corrected, then gets sharpened a bit more. That looseness is part of the charm. It feels like two people actually talking rather than a host reading a list. Later on, the chat heads toward course travel and the familiar pull of the map. Southwest London gets a mention, along with the stretch around Muirfield and the Renaissance Club, and the idea of moving around a little more while the month allows it. There is a sense of places still waiting to be played, and of golf as something tied to roads, weather, and timing as much as to score. The episode ends with Ian on a hard stop and a warm goodbye. The final note is generous without getting glossy. What stays with you is not a grand thesis but a clear, slightly dry case that modern golf is deeper, busier, and more athletic than it used to be, and that a good golf chat can still wander happily through coffee, cricket, and course names on the way there.

As heard by us

A relaxed golf conversation that shows how the modern game has changed.

Ian Baker-Finch's conversation starts with coffee and settles into a calm case for how golf has changed: more money, more fitness, more depth, and more athletes entering the game.

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Why you'd press play

When a coffee gag turns into a proper talk on how golf changed.

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