Mathew Goggin (Class of 1991) Pro Golfer
Posted on May 12, 2025
Pro golfer Mathew Goggin (Class of 1991) splits his time between the United States and Hobart, where he’s focussed on building public golf courses at Seven Mile Beach.
Where do you call home?
Tassie’s home. I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, and have lived in America for 25 years – my kids are American, they have American accents – but I always feel like a visitor. Probably a better way to explain it is I’ve never allowed America to be home. When I get off the plane at HBA, smell the air and see the River Derwent – that’s home.
What was your path after school?
When I finished at Friends’, I worked for my dad [Charlie, who had a stud and training facility] for a year and played a bit of golf. Then the Australian Institute of Sport golf program started. I had offers and opportunities to go to college in America to play golf, but I was thinking: Now I only have to go to Melbourne. And it was more golf than study – that ticked a few boxes.
You were 18. What was it like?
It was basically five girls and five boys living in separate houses, eating meals together and practising as a group. It was a fledgling program with lots of experimenting on the fly but the two years there took me from being a raw kid out of Tassie to probably the best amateur in Australia. I won the Australian Amateur (1995) and a bunch of tournaments then played a few big amateur tournaments for a season in America and the UK.
What propelled you into playing pro?
Usually when you turn pro, you need to go through a qualifying process, Q-School. Back when I started, amateurs would play in a tournament and the top 50 would get rights to play the Australian tour. But if you won the Australian Amateur, you got to skip that. You were exempt. So I turned pro and never looked back.
Was it good or bad to skip a tournament so early in your career?
Exemptions are always good. That week is like a mini-Olympics every year for golfers. To skip one is a bonus because it determines your whole year. For example, if you’re playing the US Q-School and you make a mistake on the 108th hole of 108 holes, that’s the difference between playing for $100 million over a year or $10 million.
It sounds stressful in a sport that’s already famously a mental game.
Very. It’s why it’s called a Qualifying School. It’s like when school exams used to be the be-all-and-end-all. You’d sit a bad exam and it ruined your year.
Do you feel stress when you’re playing, or do you rise above?
There are two types of stress. There’s the “playing well stress” that’s easy because you’re having a great week. You’re nervous but you know you have a chance to win a tournament and that’s fun. The other stress is when you’re not playing particularly well and you have to get through a Q-School to get your job back, or you must make the cut to get you high enough in the rankings to avoid going to Q-School. So you might be a good player having a bad year, and now you have to make the last cut of the last tournament when you’re playing poorly. That’s very difficult stress to deal with.
When you say, “having a bad year” or “you’re playing poorly”, it sounds fixed, as though your mind is set.
The stress of what we call keeping your card, keeping your playing rights, can spiral into stress of making you play poorly. You’re worried about just getting through each week more than you are about trying to win tournaments. So what you do is detach from the results and get into your process. You can only do something really well under pressure when you’ve practised enough so that nothing changes, and you rely on your routines and rituals to get you through – things like arriving at the course at the same time, doing your workout straight after competition, even on bad days. Rituals are the things you do every day during competition days that make every day feel the same whether you’re leading the British Open or playing a practice round. It’s setting a standard and an approach you rely on when the pressure is the greatest. It’s doing something well – in spite of yourself – no matter how uncomfortable.
It’s not about adjusting your attitude?
You don’t go out with purity of thought. It’s not as though you think, “I’ll pull this off and it’s going to be amazing.” The tough thing about golf is you’re out there for so long. There are many ebbs and flows to the day and many different challenges. There are good breaks, bad breaks, you get tired, maybe you forgot to eat. These lead to crescendos in emotion. There are also variables – different shots, different wind conditions – and a player’s not necessarily comfortable under every condition. There’s no pure day where everything is just perfect. Everyone thinks when you’re playing well, you’re doing everything perfectly, but you’re not. You’re having as many negative thoughts as when you’re playing poorly. You still have to hit the shot.
Did you develop this approach through experience, or have you done lots of mindset training?
I’ve done some training, but it’s experience. I wasn’t exposed to any of that coming out of Tasmania, which was hard. I think intentionally subduing myself because I didn’t want people to think I was arrogant held me back in my career. It’s a Tasmanian thing to not celebrate being good at something. In America, they celebrate anyone who’s doing well.
Did coming from Tasmania offer any advantages?
Sport was accessible. Golf was very accessible. Tasmania has the most golf courses per capita in Australia and it’s affordable, whereas in America golf is very much a rich person’s sport. Also, my mum [19-times Tasmanian champion Lindy], dad and grandfather [engineer Gordan Jennings] played golf. It was a family thing. On Friday there’d always be four Goggins on the tee. Having a close-knit family and a stressless childhood helps. But I also think there’s a quiet toughness Tasmanians have. You’d go to the mainland and realise you’re as good as the other guys, that you could beat the other guys. You might not show that outward confidence but deep down there’s a resilience. I always say to my kids, Ava and Atticus, “You’re Tassie-tough.”
Was it lonely when you started?
No, because as soon as you go overseas, Australians are thick as thieves. I remember landing in Jakarta in my first year and I didn’t know how to get to the hotel, let alone the tournament. The other golfers on the plane were like, “Get in the cab”. It would have been impossible without them.
Did going to Friends’ influence your career?
I really wasn’t that interested in the academic side of school but I loved sport and I played everything – water polo, badminton, basketball, cricket, tennis, football and a lot of hockey. From all that exposure I think I learned how to be a competitive athlete. That’s not a reason to go to Friends’ but it was for me.
Do you approach playing senior golf the same way you’ve always approached competition, or is it more fun?
They’re big events that are run well and on TV and it feels like a continuation of your career, even though for a lot of us, including myself, we have injuries. [For Mathew, these include back, wrist and elbow damage.] With Seniors, you get to go back and act like a PGA Tour pro, and you’re not playing against the kids. It really is a bizarre return to an arrested development.
Tell us about the public golf courses you’re building at Seven Mile Beach and Five Mile Beach.
The 7 Mile Beach development is bigger than I thought it would be; it could be a massive employer and driver of economic activity. I also want to play. Injuries meant I didn’t get to play that much over the last five years. I didn’t have that “petering out” most golfing careers have. But if you’ve always been competitive, you want to play. You can’t help it.
Read about Friends’ other high-achieving sporting alumni here.
