BRENDAN MOLONEY
IT IS hard to accept that 30 years have passed since the Bicentennial Classic was played at Royal Melbourne and few of us will ever see another tournament as good.
It was staged in 1988 by the late David Inglis, founder of the Australian Masters, who also brought Jack Nicklaus and Robert Trent Jones Jnr. to Australia to design the Heritage and National courses respectively. Inglis felt golf was not doing anything to mark Australia’s 200th birthday so he attracted the majority of the world’s top 50 players to Royal Melbourne with prizemoney of $1.5 million.
By today’s standards, the money does not sound a lot but at the time it was the biggest purse ever seen in Australia. Back then The Age newspaper cost 40 cents and $1.5 million would have bought 600,000 papers. Today the cover price is $3, so on this comparison the prizemoney in 2018 would be $11.25 million.
To find the next biggest purse we have to go back in time, not forward. It was 1934 when Victoria celebrated its centenary and the government appointed tennis great Norman Brookes to stage a series of sporting events including a tournament at Metropolitan Golf Club with a purse of £2,000 ($4,000). At the time a 20-day cruise from Sydney to Noumea cost 30 guineas ($63) so the winner could have taken it and invited more than 60 friends.
The money attracted a team of America’s best pros led by Gene Sarazen while the Hon. Michael Scott, winner of the inaugural Australian Open in 1904, turned up with the British Amateur team. It was won by American Jimmy Thomson, who was accompanied by his wife, the beautiful movie star Viola Dana, whom he kissed before sinking the winning putt. The next week General Harold Grimwade, a friend of Brookes and patriarch of a very wealthy Victorian family, put up enough money for the field to play at his club, Peninsula, in Frankston. A ditty at the time ran: Frankston is a pretty place, Full of shady nooks, Where God knows the Grimwades And the Grimwades know the Brookes. Despite views to the contrary, I was not around for this event but was at the Bicentennial Classic and remember it as a fabulous time in Australian golf. The previous week Mark Calcavecchia won the Australian Open and $63,000 at Royal Sydney and the week after, also at Royal Melbourne, they played the World Cup.
Inglis’ dream of honouring his homeland with the Classic was not immediately embraced by all. During the Masters at Huntingdale, ABC broadcaster Graeme “Smokey” Dawson got up in the press tent at 2.30 p.m. on Monday November 21 and declared that if it went ahead he would walk the length of Bourke Street naked. It was a big claim so I wrote it down and got him to sign it while Rob Grant from AAP was a witness. Inglis, who died of motor neurone disease in 2003, had it framed on his office wall and left it to me. Dawson claims he made the walk, a distance of two kilometres, at midnight but I don’t believe him.
Part of the Classic hype was Nicklaus arriving in his private jet to play Royal Melbourne for the first time. He caused a fuss when he innocently described the layout as a “good members’ course” but the abiding memory was the press conference he did at Essendon Airport. It was the last airport arrival that journalists of my era can remember covering. It marked the end of a tradition as old as newspapers which included ‘Argus’ golf writer Jack Dillon meeting Alister MacKenzie on the ship in 1926 when he came to design Royal Melbourne’s new course.
At the Classic, Peter Thomson, writing for The Age, tipped Jumbo Ozaki and Ben Crenshaw as the best chances while I suggested Greg Norman and Calcavecchia, as likely winners. Jumbo caught the eye of all by hitting 50 balls from the range onto the roof of the maintenance shed, a carry of 275 metres, while the others couldn’t even reach the wall with their best drives. Thomson was a far better judge, with Jumbo only a shot behind Fred Couples after the first round. Crenshaw shot 65 on the second day to lead Couples and Rodger Davis by two.
In the end it came down to a shoot-out between the latter two, which Davis won with a par on the second extra hole after tying on 17 under. A shot behind was a kid by the name of Brett Ogle and a further shot back were Hale Irwin and Crenshaw.
Davis walked away with $500,000 and handed $50,000 to his caddie Max Cunningham. Couples had to console himself with $165,000 and Ogle, 24, probably thought he was set for life with $90,000. Will we ever see the like again? Will an experienced writer bemoan a caddie earning more in a week than he would make in a year? It is highly unlikely.
Inglis is gone and the Grimwades give their spare money to charity these days. Kerry Packer put a huge amount of money into golf but he’s gone too. Bill Hamel, the boss of Holden, and Bob Mansfield, who ran Optus, were keen golfers and hands-on at the tournaments they sponsored. One can only hope we find another known to God before too much longer.