But the wait is over — Michael Ormandy has completed his training and the 34-year-old is now a fully-fledged professional.
Ormandy did it in style too, winning the supreme award for outstanding trainee professional at the annual championships in Queenstown earlier this month.
Ormandy spent three years training to be a professional at the Otago Golf Club.
The previous person to train in Dunedin as a professional was Shelley Duncan, who is now the director of golf at the Otago Golf Club. She became a professional just under 20 years ago.
Ormandy said the three-year course to become a professional was much different than he had expected.
He had thought it would be a few rounds of golf and some work around the game but it was far more than that.
"It was way more intense and I needed to take much more time to do all the work. Then you are still working at a 40-hour week so it was very full-on at times," he said.
"We did a lot around the small business space, all the accounting and finance work and how to start up a business."
He was one of only eight trainees, of 20 at the start, who made it right through the trainee period.
Ormandy said all the hard work and long hours was worth it and he was looking forward to becoming a professional.
He was not aiming to join a tour and play the game fulltime but may play in a few pro-am events.
He was talking to the Otago Golf Club about a role as he had worked at the club throughout his trainee years.
Ormandy grew up in Oamaru but has come south even when at school to play competitive senior golf.
He made representative teams as an amateur and worked as the golf development officer at Sport Otago for a couple of years before moving to the Otago Golf Club.
He enjoyed Dunedin and was turning his hand to teaching and giving lessons for golfers about their game, up to 14 lessons in a week to different players.
Golf was not an easy game and many found it harder than they imagined.
Ormandy, who loved living in Dunedin, said getting good at the sport was about putting the time in and sticking with it.
"I think it is about expectation verses reality. A person will get a lesson once a fortnight and then not touch a club for the rest of the time. Golf is not that sort of game.
"It’s a hard game — got a lot of intricacies, even for the best guys. You watch the top guys and they hit some pretty bad shots. But they never show them. That is the way golf is."
— Additional reporting Neville Idour
