Magazine: Australian Masters to be Rotated
By Editor in Golf on 27th Oct 2008 6:00
This week's announcement that the Australian Masters is to be rotated around the sandbelt after 30 years at Huntingdale is a brilliant decision for an event hoping to stand out from the average week-to-week professional event where the choice of venue is largely determined by short-term commercial reality.
The first Masters was part of a vibrant local series of tournaments and we were lucky enough to play a group of courses that were the envy of golf professionals all over the world. In 1981, my first year on the tour, we played the Australian Open at Victoria, the PGA Championship at Royal Melbourne, the Victorian Open at Metropolitan, the Westpac Classic at Royal Adelaide, the South Australian Open at Kooyonga and almost every other year we seemed to be playing the immaculate holes at Kingston Heath. The European and American tours combined do not see that number of quality golf courses in a whole season.
Huntingdale is far from a poor golf course, but the local tour is now formed around three major events, the National Open, the PGA Championship and the Masters, and last summer they were played at The Australian, Coolum and Huntingdale. The former, redesigned by Jack Nicklaus in 1977, bears a striking resemblance (not surprisingly) to an American version of a tournament course and Coolum is an American-style resort course that few are willing to suggest is among the top-50 courses in the country.
There are probably eight or nine Melbourne courses that could be judged as architecturally superior to Huntingdale and now that the tournament is the only chance before the 2011 Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne for us to see the best of our players, it makes perfect sense to rotate it around the elite courses of the city. For a tour known for playing our best courses it is important that we go back to playing our best courses.
Too much professional golf is played on boring one-dimensional layout and that has created a game dominated by, as Geoff Ogilvy noted this week, players who bomb it off the tee, hit the same high iron shot into the greens and then engage in a putting contest from 20 feet ( six metres).
Source & More: www.theage.com.au
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This week's announcement that the Australian Masters is to be rotated around the sandbelt after 30 years at Huntingdale is a brilliant decision for an event hoping to stand out from the average week-to-week professional event where the choice of venue is largely determined by short-term commercial reality.
