Above: Peter Senior was acknowledging Masters fans here in 2015,
but he might as well have been waving goodbye to the tournament.
IT WILL be a shame if the Australian Open and PGA Championship pass without mention of their dear, departed younger sister.
The Australian Masters was regretfully announced as not taking its place on the 2016 PGA Tour of Australasia schedule for the first time in 37 years, but the message was ‘sold’ as it being a one-year hiatus (although plenty suspected it was the beginning of the end). As the calendar turned to 2017, nary a mention of the gold-jacket tournament could be heard.
“As part of IMG’s ongoing evolution of its golf business, the company is in the process of re-imagining its Australian Masters event to ensure the delivery of a world-class experience. To best execute a change on this scale, the Australian Masters will not be played in 2016 and IMG will unveil its plans for the event in the coming months,” reads the woefully out-of-date message on the tournament’s website.
So here we are with December in view and there has still been not so much as a squeak of news about the tournament – be it good, bad or indifferent. No one likes to spread bad news; I get it. But silence leads to assumptions and the only logical one to make here is that the Australian Masters is dead.
I’ve always felt a certain affinity with our Masters. It’s the only one of the ‘Triple Crown’ tournaments younger than I am, meaning I can remember almost every edition. Strangely, I also liked its shameless copying of the real Masters at Augusta National, right down to the tournament logo and winner’s jacket. Adopting Huntingdale Golf Club as its home for so many years fit that ethos, although when it was decided the event should rotate across the Melbourne Sandbelt I agreed with the move. Likewise, I loved the old February date when we saw golf action during what was normally a lull in the season, although again the move to the end of the year made logistical sense.
So the loss of the Australian Masters feels more devastating than the demise of, say, the Greg Norman International or Canon Challenge. And the silence around its passing only heightens the loss. At one point, rumours circulated that the in-limbo Perth International would effectively become the Masters, but the conversion of the Perth event into the World Super 6 essentially quashed that thought.
On that Thursday in November 2009 when Tiger Woods played his first competitive stroke in Australia for a dozen years by teeing off in the first Australian Masters held at Kingston Heath, I recall privately pondering what the mood at Huntingdale must have been like that day and whether the members in action were thinking the same thing I was. I felt a similar sensation last summer when there was no gold jacket presented for the first time since 1978. Twelve months on, there’s sadly no other explanation than to assume it’ll never happen again.
It’s a pity, for our Masters deserved a better send-off than to slide silently into oblivion. If it indeed had to die, it warranted acknowledgement closer to a state funeral than the private burial it received.
