Ryan Peake: Former Rebels bikie member turned New Zealand Open winner ready to tee off at the British Open

As the 2025 British Open golf tournament gets underway, a little-known WA golfer has emerged as one of the hottest interviews and most sought-after selfies.

In a sea of primped and stage-managed celebrity players at the Portrush Golf Course in Northern Ireland, Ryan Peake stands out.

The heavily built and heavily tattooed left-hander carries himself less like a professional athlete and more like a bikie.

There’s a good reason for that — he was one.

The 31-year-old Perth man is the talk of The Open, which starts tonight, less because of his swing and more because of a life story you’d expect of a boxer.

He was a child prodigy golfer who went off the rails, became a Rebels bikie and was sent to jail for five years after bashing a drug dealer.

At his lowest ebb, he received a prison letter from a legendary sports coach who convinced him it was worth having another crack at the sport he had fallen out of love with years earlier.

That coach, Ritchie Smith, had known Peake when the bikie was Australia’s most talented junior golfer.

“At the age of 15 I met him for the first time,” Smith said in a documentary about Peake’s life that is airing during coverage of The Open.

“I always liked him. I didn’t even know he was in jail so when I found out about it, I thought I’d make contact.”

Smith, who coached Hannah Green and brother-and-sister stars Minjee and Min Woo Lee, knew Peake had talent.

In 2009 the then 16-year-old had come second at both the South Australian Junior Masters and Tasmania’s Tamar Valley Junior Cup. He won the Tasmanian Junior Open Championship and was that year’s Srixon Junior champion and West Australian champion.

In 2010 Peake took out the Mastercard Amateur Masters and placed second in Malaysia’s Saujana Amateur Championship. A year later he came 10th in the WA Open.

“The first conversation I had with him there was no golf involved” Smith said. “I just wanted to make sure he was alright.”

When the coach asked the convict what he intended to do when he got out of jail, Smith was disappointed to hear Peake was considering an apprenticeship.

“He just kind of went quiet and then said ‘what about golf?’,” Peake recalled.

“I just laughed. I said ‘mate, I haven’t touched a club in seven years and I’m not going to hold one for at least another couple’.”

Smith was gently persuasive.

“I knew that if I was going to commit to golf again then I couldn’t stay with the club,” Peake told The West Australian on Tuesday, ahead of a practice round with 2022 Open winner Cameron Smith.

“I spoke to the other Rebels I was in jail with and they agreed it was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up and they gave me their blessing to leave the club.”

Peake handed back his colours and left the gang with two years left on his sentence. It was a risky move because he lost the protection afforded by being a patched bikie.

He started working on his fitness, dropping close to 35kg while inside Acacia Prison, and set about convincing jail authorities that he should be allowed to complete his time at a minimum security facility so he could train properly.

“They transferred me to Wooroloo and I lobbied them to be able to get a set of golf clubs so I could practice while I finished my sentence,” he said.

It wasn’t quite like riding a bike, but Peake was quickly able to re-master the torque, centripetal force and double pendulum effect (the pivoting of first, shoulders, and then wrists) required to make a good golf shot.

In 2019, while on day-release from jail, he won a tournament at his old northern suburbs golf club.

“The last time I had been at Lakelands the gang crime squad came and arrested me, so it was pretty nerve-racking,” he recalled.

“When I accepted the trophy, I told everyone that I hoped they enjoyed the rest of the night, but I had to go back to jail.”

He walked out of prison a free man soon after that win. The training became more intense as Smith re-honed Peake’s skills.

“One day he’d be great and the next day he would play like s**t,” Smith remembered. “That took about two years to get through.”

With the financial support of two Perth businessmen who were transfixed by his story, Peake won a handful of pro-am tournaments. Those titles won him entry to bigger events, including the Australian Open in January.

He failed to make the cut in that championship, travelling east to play in the New Zealand Open a few weeks later.

“I almost didn’t make it to the first tee because their immigration officials saw I had been a bikie and I was held up in detention while they confirmed I wasn’t a patched member anymore,” he said.

“I was telling them that I wasn’t in the club because I had become a professional golfer. It sounded ridiculous when I was saying it, so I’m not surprised that they took a bit of convincing.”

Peake started the final day four strokes behind the leader. He clawed his way up the ladder and by the 18th hole was winning by one stroke.

His sprayed his tee shot wide of the green and was still four metres from the hole after his chip shot left him short.

“I wasn’t sure what the other players had done on their final holes, and I turned to my caddy and said to him, ‘don’t bulls**t me, is this putt for the win?’ He said ‘yeah, it is’.

“I looked at the pin and I said to him ‘watch this’.”

His putt saw the ball hit the hole, dead centre.

“That was a life-changing moment for me not just because of the prizemoney, but because it qualified me for the Asian tour and the European tour,” Peake said. “It also meant I had a spot at The Open, which is every golfer’s dream.”

Peake’s win made international headlines and he was the star of an eight-page feature in Golf Digest magazine

Veteran Australian journalist Peter FitzSimons called his tale “the best golf story of the year”.

Peake is in such demand at Portrush that a special press conference was convened in a suite at the clubhouse on Tuesday so the media could hear from him first-hand.

It is a far cry from his life in 2012, when he decided to turn pro in a desperate bid to break out of a funk that had gripped him for more than a year.

A disastrous performance at that year’s WA Open at Royal Perth was followed by tour school at The Peninsula Golf Club in Victoria — a week-long golfing Hunger Games where 200 players hit three rounds of stroke with the top 50 or so getting through to the final stage and the chance at one of 30-odd pro cards.

“I missed the cut and that was without doubt the loneliest week of my life,” Peake told The Sunday Times three years ago, in what was his first interview after getting out of jail.

“When I got back to WA I went to Royal Perth to practice. I sat in the car for half an hour because I didn’t want to get out.

“Eventually I popped the boot. My clubs weren’t there and I realised I had no idea where they were. That’s when I knew it was over.”

It was a quick descent. He started drinking hard and his already beefy 95kg frame ballooned to 130kg. Casual friendships with some Rebels bikies turned more serious and he became a nominee for the gang.

At age 21 he was accepted as a patched member but he kept the association a secret from his family.

“I’d push my bike down road and put my vest on later out of respect for mum and dad,” he said.

Peake’s life was undone properly in 2014 when he and five other Rebels confronted a northern suburbs drug dealer who had threatened to shoot their chapter’s president.

The baseball bat beating they administered saw Peake arrested by the gang crime squad at the Lakelands golf club, where he was working as a greenkeeper.

Four years after being crowned WA Golfer of the Year, Peake spent his first night in jail as a sentenced prisoner.

On Thursday, when he tees off alongside the world’s best golfers on the first day of The Open, Peake will be playing for more than prizemoney; he’ll be playing for redemption.