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Ryan Peake will tee up at Royal Portrush on Thursday, and how he got this opportunity is unlike anyone else in the field.
That’s because the Australian golfer won the New Zealand Open five years after he spent half a decade in prison.
Peake was a talented junior golfer that turned professional when he was 19 years old. But, according to the BBC, Peake was “burnt out” from the game and joined the Rebels, an outlawed motorcycle gang, two years after turning pro.
“I was just normalized to it,” Peake, now 31, said about joining the biker gang. “It wasn’t abnormal from where I was from to hang out in that sort of scene with my friends.
“It’s something that I did find love in and I did enjoy it. I was interested in it, and I just found something there that I felt like I hadn’t found anywhere else.”
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Peake was a “bikie,” but being a part of an outlaw lifestyle means the risk of serving time in prison, which is what happened after assaulting someone he said was “making threats towards us.”
“We just went to deal with it, and honestly, it wasn’t meant to happen like that,” Peake explained, per the BBC. “We were generally just going there for a chat, and he was probably going to get a couple of punches along the way, and it was left at that.”
Peake landed in a maximum security correctional facility, and it was there where he decided he “wanted to achieve better things.”
“I didn’t profit from being a bikie,” Peak said. “I enjoyed the lifestyle while I was living it, but it wasn’t going to get me ahead in life, and I was just always going to fall further and further behind and probably lead to more jail.”
Peake was a teammate of 2022 Champion Golfer of the Year Cameron Smith at the time he was convicted.
But he returned to golf after jail, and the lefty started to get his career back on track. Thanks to help from coach Richie Smith, as well as support from his family, Peake received his Australasian tour card this season and earned his first professional win at the New Zealand Open.
In turn, Peake earned himself a spot in this year’s Open Championship.
He will be teeing up with Phil Mickelson and Daniel van Tonder at 2:19 a.m. ET on Thursday to begin his tournament.
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