Top coach Crawley's journey from Harrogate to the heat of Arizona

FORMER Harrogate High School pupil Donald Crawley showed he was a more than capable golfer when he won the Midlands' Assistants championship early in his professional career.

But he took a look at some of his peers – such as Nick Faldo, Ian Woosnam and Sandy Lyle – and, making an honest assessment of his abilities and theirs, figured he was never going to compete at their level.

He decided instead to preach what he had practised and pursue the life of a teaching professional. He has come a long way since, not just the 5,000 miles which separate his native Yorkshire from his adopted home of Arizona where he is the director of instruction at The Boulders luxury golf and spa resort in Carefree, just outside Scottsdale.

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He was a six-handicapper when he turned professional and then moved from Pannal to an assistant's post in Northampton working for John Jacobs, Britain's leading teaching professional of the time who, as well as having his own TV series, captained the first European Ryder Cup team in 1979 against the USA at The Greenbrier in West Virginia and again two years later at Walton Heath.

In April 1980, when only 21, Crawley headed for the USA on a three-week teaching assignment – and he would never return to these shores to work, only to visit occasionally his parents and sister who he had left behind.

"I was totally lost at first, I had no clue what I was doing and just kinda followed my feet," recalls 52-year-old Crawley. "People say it took a lot of courage but I was prepared to take the risk although I didn't have anything to fall back on.

"After that three-week assignment, John Jacobs recommended me as a golf teaching professional to some club pros in Chicago so I ended up in a very nice country club, Exmoor, a nice little British word."

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After teaching at Exmoor for three summers, and overcoming an attempt to deport him in 1981 when his temporary visa ran out, he finally got his Green Card (permanent work visa) in 1984 by which time he was director of the John Jacobs Golf Schools.

"We ended up with 42 golf school locations and at the height of business in 1999 taught 20,000 students in one year," explains Crawley. "People were coming on vacation for a minimum of three days, the bulk part of that was in Arizona, and people would also come to the USA from all over North America, and from some parts of Europe, too. Golf schools were a hot item.

"Then in 2000 the whole business changed and I was fortunate to see the golf school business was declining rapidly and so I separated myself and came to The Boulders. Here we offer much more of personalised, individual tuition; I call it boutique golf where I will teach one, two, maybe four people but it is not a big group of instruction.

"We do some corporate events but here at The Boulders we teach a lot of couples who come on vacation. I took the John Jacobs business model and applied it to The Boulders and, of course, they love it because we put heads on beds, which is the name of the resort business."

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Crawley used Jacobs's simple approach to golf as his template and created his own teaching system, Golf Simplified. During the summer, when the searing Sonoran Desert heat drives away many of his customers, he travels around spreading his golfing gospel; his month's commitments when we met included visits to New York, Chicago and Colorado.

The extensive travelling does not deter him. "Teaching is my passion, I have been doing it for 36 years – when's the retirement coming along?" he says, then laughs as he adds, "I have three boys and I have to put them through school, so I'll probably be teaching for another 30 years."

He met and married "a good American girl from Michigan" and loves his adopted country but admits to yearning for some aspects of life back home. "I miss good fish and chips, and a good pint of Yorkshire beer," he says. "I was a die-hard Tetley and John Smith fan. The thing I miss the most, though, is British people. Of course I'm partial, being Yorkshire, but Northern people are very friendly, very approachable, and I miss that, particularly in a smaller community. Harrogate has become a big town but when I was brought up in the Sixties it was smaller whereas in the US you tend to get lost. I've lived on the same street here for 17 years and I don't know my neighbours. My wife does, but I'm guilty of not getting to know them, too."

It is a small lament which quickly gives way to a beaming smile as he gestures towards the azure blue skies and the absorbing desert landscape bordering his academy's practice ground and says: "We are sat here and this is my office – just look at this. We golf 365 days of the year." And many golf a lot better than they would have done without the passionate and proficient teaching of this Yorkshire lad made exceptionally good.

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