It was a bleary-eyed decision, one in a string of many. So when Jamie Patton and Michael Goldstein landed in California in May and paid $2,220 for a 1988 Dodge Family Van they found on craigslist, they didn’t know what they were going to get.
They were two 25-year-olds from New Zealand, both recently having quit their jobs as attorneys to travel the world and play golf on a different course every day for a full calendar year. This day in California was No. 130, and with a haphazard American itinerary in front of them, they now had a wood-paneled friend to get them from venue to venue. So they personalized it; the van was now named Dodgy.
The next day, Dodgy took them to The Meadow Club, Alister MacKenzie’s first design in the United States. The next day, they played Harding Park, where the President’s Cup was held last year. Six days after that, they played Cypress Point, one of the most exclusive and celebrated courses in the country.
“We feel we’ve been pretty lucky,” Patton told The Post on Monday — Day 212 — from outside the clubhouse of Narin Golf Club in the north of Scotland. “The whole trip has been amazing, but we have some days that are we-are-so-lucky, pinch-yourself days.”
In late June, Patton and Goldstein made their way to the New York area, where they had a friend in John Sabino. Working in the financial service industry, Sabino, 48, also runs a personal blog, top100golfer.com, where he keeps track of his journey to play all the top golf courses in the country. When the two Kiwis got to Sabino’s house in Princeton Junction, N.J., they played Hidden Creek, near Atlantic City, the private club Sabino is a member of. Four days later, they played Pine Valley, followed the next day by Merion. It was two consecutive days of golf that just makes one’s jaw drop; two courses that are as historically revered as it gets and are almost impossible to find an invitation to. Somehow, the Kiwis pulled it off.
“Nobody else could do this,” said Sabino, who so trusted these two foreigners that he not only put them up in his house for two nights and paid for everything, but left them there alone for three more nights when he left to go to Scotland for his own golf trip.
“I feel like I got more out of the experience than they did. It really feels like being part of something unique. It’s almost like meeting a young [Paul] McCartney and [John] Lennon, like young phenoms.
“Their journey can’t be replicated,” Sabino added, “and frankly I’m still amazed at how they’re doing it.”
While in and around New York, they got to experience some of the best the area has to offer. In the two weeks before they left for the UK, the two played Somerset Hills, Winged Foot West, Bethpage Black, The Creek, Quaker Ridge and Garden City Golf Club. Oh, yeah, and on July 6 they played Shinnecock Hills and National Golf Links in the same day! That sequence left Patton and Goldstein with the feeling that the New York-Metropolitan area is the best in the world (that they had seen so far) for great golf courses.
“To be honest,” Patton said, “we really didn’t want to leave.”
Of all the preposterous things these two Kiwi golfers have pulled off since January, the most amazing might be that they have made it all happen on little more than a wing and a prayer.
Last August, they went on an end-of-the-season trip with some guys from their club field hockey team, which took them to the breathtaking Tom Doak design on the cliffs of New Zealand named Cape Kidnappers. Pulling up the driveway after lamenting about the boredom of practicing corporate law, Mike turned to Jamie and proposed the pipe dream of an idea — golf every day for a year, no joke.
“A week or two later, over a couple beers in my flat in Wellington, we thought maybe we can make this work,” Patton said. “We wrote some letters and got pretty positive response off the bat. Without a lot of planning, we thought that if we don’t do it, we’ll kick ourselves. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.”
Well, it worked.
After spending 41/2 months plowing through the best of New Zealand and Australia, the two landed in California. With Dodgy as their sidekick, the two affable young men got from California to Arizona, then through Texas and Louisiana to Florida, from where they started heading north. Sometimes they were put up by generous hosts, sometimes Dodgy doubled as a motel.
Patton and Goldstein found a greater cause for the trip than just their own enjoyment. At every stop, they ask for donations to the First Tee of New Zealand, a charity that helps children in their native land get into the game. So far they have raised about $10,000.
“When we realized we’d get some exposure, media wise, we wanted to be able to make the most of the trip,” Patton said. “This gave the project an underlying meaning to add to the fun.”
They also have made sure to play the best golf courses in the area that they could get on, and their entire journey has been aptly chronicled on their website, puregolf2010.com.
“I saw their story and sent them an e-mail saying if you’re coming through Virginia, I’d be happy to host you,” said Steve DeWalle, who let both Jamie and Mike stay at his house in Richmond, Va., for two nights. “They e-mailed back quick saying my club, the Country Club of Virginia, was on their list of places but they had no contact yet. I told them I’d take care of everything.”
DeWalle, who is 37 and works in advertising, not only picked up the tab, but also made contact with a friend in Dubai who is going to host them when their journey continues to the Middle East.
With four months left on this wild adventure, the duo hopes to circle back to New Zealand by New Year’s Eve. Their plan — which is, of course, still unsettled — will take them through all of the British Isles, where they are now, and eventually through the Middle East and Asia. That is, if contacts like DeWalle’s continue to pop up. According to their luck so far, that shouldn’t be a problem.
“Seriously, the playing part of this is all great fun, but the coolest thing about the project is when you’re sitting at someone’s dinner table you didn’t know from a bar of soap the day before, and someone else on the computer says if you’re here, come stay at my house,” Patton said. “That’s what the project is all about, meeting people, experiencing different cultures.”
New cultures continue to await these two journeymen, and after playing Piping Rock on Long Island on July 12, they had to hop on a plane and head across the pond to get their feet on some real links land. They had tentative dates set up to play Prestwick, North Berwick, Carnoustie, St. Andrew’s . . .
So they had to sell Dodgy. Here, in New York, again on craigslist, they found a couple of 19-year-olds from Switzerland who were about to drive across the country in the other direction, destination Los Angeles. They sold their lovable van with a bit of sadness for $2,750 — $500 more than they paid for it.
“These guys will be successful no matter what they do in life,” Sabino said. “They’re trained as lawyers and then they basically dropped out of society. Now they’re 25 and they’re figuring out what they want to do when they grow up.”
No matter what happens come Jan. 1, 2011, it’s no question these two globetrotting Kiwis already have gotten more out of life than anyone, including themselves, ever could have expected.
bcyrgalis@nypost.com