TEEING OFF: BRENDAN JAMES
GEOFF Ogilvy counts winning the Australian Open just behind his US Open victory in his list of career achievements.
As you will read in his feature article starting on page 44, winning his national championship means more to him than all the big money events he won on the PGA Tour. Which is why he has chosen to constructively criticise the Australian Open for becoming ‘a second-second rate’ tournament.
Like Ogilvy, my love of golf … my life spent playing and writing about the game can be traced back to watching the 1981 Australian Open at The Lakes.
I have since been to 29 Australian Opens and I haven’t missed one since 1996. It has always been my favourite tournament. The characters that have lifted the Stonehaven Cup and the memorable moments that have defined the history of the championship make it our greatest of trophies. Most of the best golfers to play the game – Gene Sarazen, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Peter Thomson, Greg Norman – have claimed the title.
My personal adoration of this great championship weighed heavily when deciding to replace our annual Australian Open preview with a critical examination of the tournament. Ultimately, I felt it would be an insult to our readers to devote five, six or seven pages of this magazine to promote the Australian Open as a ‘must-see’ tournament, when as many as 11 of the 16 Australians in the top-300 of the official world ranking won’t be playing at The Lakes this month.
The Australian Open should be the top event of the local golfing calendar. Instead it appears, at best, to be treading water. Some might suggest it is stagnating.
The Australian Open is hamstrung by a raft of issues other than declining prizemoney and three of our top-four players choosing not to play this year.
Ogilvy is right when he says the Open has become just another tournament. The Stonehaven Cup has sadly lost its lustre but all is not lost if Golf Australia and Largadere, the sports management company contracted to run the event, undertake changes to turn the ship around.
Here are four suggestions I think would help get the Open moving in the right direction. 1. Join the European Tour. A co-sanction agreement with the European Tour offers two main benefits. European Tour players will add greater depth to the Open field and Australian players will have a chance to get a toe-hold on the second biggest Tour in world golf. At the moment, the Australian Open offers neither. 2. Change dates. The Australian Open has been played in the six-week window from the first week of November to the end of the second week of December for the past 40 years. With the big tours now hosting events for 50 weeks a year, changing dates is not as easy as picking a four-day window and announcing you will be hosting a tournament.
That said, there is strength in numbers and positioning in a week in February beside other events like the European Tour co-sanctioned World Super 6 and Vic Open would help lure more quality players.
Finally, I’ve seen it all too often that when players do come to play the Australian Open at year’s end they are spent. Like all of us at the end of the year, we’re looking forward to the Christmas break and winding down. Move the event to February and the stars will have more petrol in their tank to compete. They will want to play for the right reasons beyond feeling compelled to play when they would prefer time off. 3. Hit the road. Playing the Australian Open only in Sydney has run its course. The championship has been tied to Sydney through the lucrative sponsorship deal the tournament has with Destination NSW. The Australian PGA has a similar deal with Events Queensland, which keeps that championship in the Sunshine State.
While the Open will go to Melbourne twice (2020 and 2022) before Destination NSW’s current contract with the championship ends in 2023, Golf Australia needs to look beyond 2023 and take its flagship event around the country.
Having the Open permanently based in Sydney has seen it become less and less significant to golf fans living in the rest of the country. Golf Australia should set up a rota of the nation’s finest tournament courses and take the Stonehaven Cup on the road to all the states.
If, for example, the Australian Open was due to be played in Adelaide, the Stonehaven Cup should be toured around the state to schools and golf clubs for three months to give fans a handson experience. That would ignite nationwide excitement for our national title once more. 4. Cap appearance fees. Americans Brandt Snedeker and Matt Kuchar will play the Australian Open this month and are likely to pocket a fee for teeing up that is greater than the $225,000 cheque going to the winner. The success and growth of the Vic Open in recent years is proof that you don’t need to outlay six and seven-figure sums to buy players to put on a memorable tournament.
These suggestions may well fall on deaf ears. Sobeit if they do. But I would hate to see more than a century of championship history lost by seemingly putting change, meaningful change, in the too hard basket.