A desire not to be the odd one out among his football coaching colleagues prompted teenager Ed Chapman to make a casual £50 investment that put him inadvertently on a career path that has since taken him around the world.

The then 16-year-old was working for Northampton Town Football Club in their community programme when a golfing day was arranged and he made the short trip to a sports outlet to buy a set of Donnay clubs because “I didn’t want to be the only one who didn’t go.

“I parred my second hole, a short par-4,” says the now 37-year-old director of golf at the Royal Auckland & Grange Golf Club in Auckland, New Zealand. “That was 2002 and I can still remember that vividly because that is the hole really that got me hooked.”

That hole represented the first quarter-of-a-mile of a journey that would see him turn professional within three years before travelling thousands of miles to his current job via posts in Dubai, Hong Kong and Australia.

His first round of golf came while he was studying a Sports Science course at college and with plenty of time to practise plus an innate aptitude – he was an excellent cricketer and tennis player as well as football coach – he got down to mid single figures within two years at Overstone Park.

After turning pro, he joined Northamptonshire County Golf Club as an assistant and, before qualifying as a PGA professional in 2009, his early travels took him to Sawgrass, Florida, on a club pro-am trip that enabled him to make a realistic assessment of his potential as a possible Tour player.

“I played really great and I shot, like, 75 around Sawgrass… Davis Love III had shot a 64 in a final round of the Players’ Championship there,” he reflects.

“I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to be good enough anyway, but that really brought it home. I’d played pretty good, and I was 11 shots off in social golf conditions, more or less, compared to PGA Tour conditions.

“That’s so many leagues away I couldn’t see a path to get there, no matter how much practice there was.”

He subsequently documented in a notebook the trajectory he wanted his career to take and it included working in Dubai, so when a friend and fellow pro advised him in 2011 that a place as a coach had become available where he worked at Al Badia Golf Club by Intercontinental, with the backing of his now wife Carla he applied and got the position, subsequently taking his first steps in golf management when he was promoted to the role as Al Badia’s Golf academy manager.

“I came from working in a nice but small, traditional UK private club to suddenly getting a budget that was about $120,000 revenue, to be brought in by coaching,” says Chapman. “I was, like, ‘oh crap, how am I going to do that, that’s so much?’

“Running the academy was in some ways being thrown in at the deep end of management because I went from having three coaches who were my peers to suddenly having to be their boss, even though they were either a similar age or a little bit older than me.”

The fact that he swam rather than sank in the management pool was illustrated when, in 2015 while looking for a new challenge, he landed the job as golf operations manager at Hong Kong Golf Club, then 52nd among the Platinum Clubs of the World and home to the European Tour’s Hong Kong Open.

With three courses and a membership around 7,500, he was plunged into an exacting six-day-a-week schedule, working 10 to 12 hours daily, although he did find time not only to gain a Masters degree in international business leadership and management, but also passed the R&A’s Level 2 Rules of Golf exams and refereed in the China LPGA event there for three years.

No wonder he says the frenetic seven years he spent there “really did fly by” with the highlight being when he competed in the 2018 Hong Kong Open.

“We had a club spot which,” and here Chapman stresses, “no one takes. Just the whole pressure; home club, members watching, unrealistic expectations that because you’re a professional you’re going to win.

“I’d just taken a group of members to South Africa on a golf trip, and I was playing really good and there had been some talks among some of the committee about it being good if one of the club pros would take the spot, so I got volunteered.”

He missed the cut after being among the side of the field that was hit by a freak windstorm on day one – although he took only half a dozen shots more that day than playing partner and Ryder Cup player-to-be Robert MacIntyre.

“Robert is genuinely a world-class guy,” enthuses Chapman. “He had just come up from the Challenge Tour, that was the season he won rookie of the year, and you could just chat away to him like he was your friend, no ego or anything – and you could tell he was an immensely talented golfer,” added Chapman.

A year earlier, Chapman had played in the Hong Kong Open pro-am as a late replacement for former US PGA winner and Sky Sports Golf commentator Rich Beem and had a brief meeting with MacIntyre’s future Ryder Cup fourball partner Justin Rose that confirmed that the 2013 US Open champion also has a justified reputation as one of the sport’s really good guys.

“I went to hand in the team scorecard to the registration place and Rose took his hat off and said, ‘hi, I’m Justin’,” says Chapman.

“If he’d just walked past me that would have been really normal, but he’s obviously seen another westerner, as such, who he didn’t know, playing in the European Tour event, and he’s just introduced himself. He is a really great guy too.”

A search for a better work-life balance led Chapman to apply for the role of director of golf at The Metropolitan Golf Club in Melbourne, a city he and Carla had visited and loved.

After a successful video interview process, he worked remotely from England for five months in early 2022, but when it became clear that a backlog caused by COVID could delay approval of his visa for as much as 18 months, both sides agreed it was best to terminate his contract. The pair returned to England and Chapman made the most of his time by working as a voluntary greenkeeper at Northamptonshire County Golf Club in order to improve his knowledge of course agronomy.

Six months later, in December 2022, he and Carla were heading for Auckland – as were their belongings, which had to be rerouted as they, at least, had made it to Melbourne from Hong Kong.

With Chapman one of the candidates to become Royal Auckland’s next CEO it seems unlikely they will return to live in England any time soon, particularly with New Zealand having a seasonal climate that offers him a taste of autumn and “winters sitting in a country pub by the fire”, a couple of things that he admits to missing about England while in Dubai and Hong Kong, along with the NHS.

“Living in Dubai, where there’s no public health care system, you appreciate that the NHS – for all its faults– when you really, really need it, it’s quite amazing,” he said.