As you can probably tell by the size of this magazine, there’s a little bit happening in the world of golf right now. Some of it is really positive, like the international field assembled for this year’s ISPS Handa Australian Open in Sydney. What started out as a bit of a question mark earlier this year has become more of an exclamation mark, with a jam-packed field full of DP World Tour stars complementing our best home-grown talent.
Like previous years, you can find the tournament’s official programme exclusively inside this issue, where headline acts Cam Smith and Minjee Lee detail their respective missions to end two rather surprising Open hoodoos.
We also catch up with the tournament’s defending champion Adrian Meronk about his Aussie connections and overcoming that mystifying Ryder Cup snub. Could a quaint little café in Sydney’s inner-west hold the secret to this big Pole going back-to-back?
Don’t miss our fascinating interview with Gerri O’Callaghan, the Sandy Golf Links superintendent who’s pioneering a new career path for women in golf’s male-dominated turf industry. “It’s very satisfying for me as a golfer to present a course for people to enjoy,” says O’Callahghan, a plus-1 marker with 11 club championships to her name.
Sadly, other parts covered in this bumper issue are not so positive, like our politicians’ continued assault on public golf [page 22] and the scary fire danger all golf clubs must address to avoid the same fate as Victoria’s Eastern Golf Club, which burnt to the ground recently. It appears the unsupervised charging of lithium-ion batteries will soon be a thing of the past after a spate of fiery incidents. Several clubs we spoke with this past month have already added their buggy-storage protocols to “item No.1” at the next board meeting. Relocating storage sheds away from clubhouses and enforcing mandatory
at-home charging could be the new norm as insurance companies re-assess the risks, along with their premiums.
Then there are developments that, frankly, still have us scratching our heads, like the increasingly “irrelevant” Official World Golf Ranking and the hoo-ha surrounding Tiger Woods’ and Rory McIlroy’s start-up simulator league, TGL. The venture, a counter measure to LIV Golf and a timely way to reward PGA Tour loyalists, will see six teams from six different American cities – sigh – go head-to-head in a season-long competition at SoFi Center, a first-of-its-kind venue built specifically for golf on the campus of Palm Beach State College. TGL will incorporate innovative tech with virtual and real-life elements, with matches to air live on ESPN and ESPN+ from January.
Now, we’re all for using technology to provide new pathways and exposure for the game. Heck, if these Monday-night shenanigans extend Woods’ playing career by a year or two, it will have been worth the effort alone. But why would you disenfranchise fans from around the globe by attaching your teams to US cities that they won’t even play in? Kinda makes those RangeGoats more appealing now, doesn’t it? Read the room, people! Golf doesn’t begin and end in the United States.
McIlroy’s Boston Common Golf, which incidentally includes Aussie star Adam Scott on its playing roster, will surely have little appeal to the “common” golf fan outside ’Merica. Adding to the cringe-factor, we had to listen to McIlroy contrast TGL as the right kind of innovation compared to LIV Golf. “We’re [trying] to be competitive and it’s a different type of golf but it’s not the traditional golf that you see week in, week out,” McIlroy said while joining the chairman of Fenway Sports Group at Fenway Park to wax lyrical about Boston Common Golf.
“I don’t want to sit here and talk about LIV (editor’s note: “But I will, again!”), but you could make the argument that they haven’t innovated enough from what traditional golf is or they have innovated too much that they’re not traditional golf. They’re sort of cut in no man’s land whereas [TGL] is so far removed from what we know golf to be.”
Yes, Rory, but unlike LIV Golf and its successful foray into golf-starved markets like Adelaide and Singapore, you and your PGA Tour pals remain so far removed from this part of the world, we’re struggling to embrace what you want golf to be. Until such time as that changes, I’ll take Michael Block teeing it up in Sydney. If the Kardashians can become rich and famous for doing nothing, who are we to judge a hard-working PGA professional for taking full advantage of his five minutes of fame? All power to him for bucking the Yankee trend and getting on that plane.
Getty images: Christian Petersen
