[Photo: Getty images]
Adam Scott welcomes the idea of he and fellow Masters winner Rory McIlroy going head-to-head in the final holes of this year’s Australian Open on Royal Melbourne’s Composite course as the national championship shapes up to be a blockbuster.
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Last month, career grand slam winner McIlroy committed to play in the Australian Open for two years, first at Royal Melbourne and then Kingston Heath in 2026. The subsequent demand blew tournament officials away with “unprecedented” ticket sales in the first 24 hours.
It will be McIlroy’s first competitive appearance in Australia since the 2014 Open, a year after he lifted the Stonehaven Cup at Royal Sydney. McIlroy has never played in Melbourne as a professional and has only played Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula as an amateur in 2005.
May’s announcement came several months after tournament officials revealed they were separating the men’s and the women’s Australian Opens after a complicated three years of running the two championships concurrently on the same two co-host courses.
Scott, the 2009 Australian Open winner at NSW GC, applauded the move to bring Royal Melbourne back into the fold as a host, a top-five course in the world which had not staged the Open since 1991. In that time it had welcomed three Presidents Cups (1998, 2011, 2017) but nothing of the prestige and history of the Australian Open.
Former world No.1 Scott is a long admirer of Royal Melbourne having donated the sticks he used to win at Augusta National in 2013 to the Sandbelt club, which are on display in the hallway of the clubhouse.
“It’s great; it just shows you that the venues really matter these days, I believe, and the Australian Open really matters,” Scott told Australian Golf Digest via phone from the US Open at Oakmont CC.
McIlroy had spent the past few years verbally praising the Australian Open in public interviews in which he urged for it to be elevated and return its stature it enjoyed in the 1960s–1990s when Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson and Greg Norman regularly played and won the Stonehaven Cup.
Now, McIlroy will physically boost the 121-year-old national open when he challenges for a second Australian Open having defeated Scott on the final hole in 2013 when, coincidentally, Scott was the reigning Masters champion who had also claimed the Australian Masters and PGA that summer.
“To have the endorsement of the latest member of the career grand slam coming down is huge,” Scott said. “The current Masters champion is going to be down in Australia, I think it’s a big deal. In 2013, when Rory and I came down the stretch, battling it out, in my mind it was like those glory years of the ’90s when Greg Norman was battling it out with different guys, so that’d be great if it gives it that kind of boost.”
