Think back to December of 2019. Before you had any idea what COVID was. You’d likely never had a PCR or RAT test. And the closest thing to LIV Golf on your radar was the PGA Tour’s bizarre and confusing tagline “Live Under Par”.
That was the state of the world, and golf, when the men’s Australian Open was last held, and local boy and club member Matt Jones won a second Stonehaven Cup at The Australian Golf Club in an eery bushfire induced smog that forced Kiwi Ryan Chisnall to wear one of the masks we were all soon to become all too ofay with
Go back to 2005 and that was the last time the men’s national Open was held in Victoria and cast your mind back to 2002, the year our pre-eminent men’s championship was last held on the world-famous Melbourne Sandbelt.
A lot has happened between all those rotations around the sun, but finally the tournament returns this month, so too Jones, as does the Sandbelt in the form of Victoria and Kingston Heath Golf Clubs as co-hosts to a truly unique concurrent men’s and women’s Australian Opens where both fields share equally the $3.4 million prizemoney.
The return of the Open on the men’s side will be clearly different based purely on the presence of Minjee Lee, Hannah Green and co. alongside them. But the tournament itself enters a whole new age after two years of cancellation largely at the hands of travel restrictions limiting the organiser’s ability to put together what it considers a palatable able field for the national Open that sponsors ors can get behind.
IT WILL BE MY FIRST
