If the golf purist had their way, there’d be a fifth major in the men’s game, and it would be in Australia.
We know complexities such as time zones and television make this idea a pipe dream. Nonetheless, it is a shame that the immense quality of Australian golf can’t be seen on a more regular basis, given that some of them place very high in world course ranking lists.
Geoff Ogilvy has a major trophy for keeps. He also won the Australian Open in 2010 and etched his name into a ‘Who’s Who’ of the sport down under: Devlin, Von Nida, Thomson, Graham, Norman, Elkington, Scott and him.
The 2006 US Open champion once speculated that if golf started again tomorrow, Australia could host a major tournament and believes the national Open should be at the top of elite players’ bucket lists.
“The golf landscape just evolved that way, and I really like that aspect of the game. I think if you were starting again, you might consider having a major in Australia, a bit like tennis, but you can’t invent these things, they just evolve,” Ogilvy said to NCG.
“The Australian Open is one of the oldest tournaments in the world, and probably should be higher up the list of tournaments that players really want to win. But the majors have been majors for a really long time.
“The best golfers in the world have had them on their ‘most want to win’ lists for close to a century or more. You can’t create that. It just evolves.”
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‘The Sandbelt Invitational is a pretty cool event’
Ogilvy won arguably the most dramatic US Open ever at Winged Foot. He crucially parred the final four holes to finish on five-over-par. Phil Mickelson and Colin Montgomerie double-bogeyed the 72nd hole excruciatingly when both had the tournament at their mercy.
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In the 18th fairway, Ogilvy met his ball in a sand-filled divot. He missed the green but chipped up and nervelessly made a six-footer which eventually became the winning stroke. Such circumstances that led to victory required grit under boiling pressure which he learned when thriving under match play conditions at Victoria Golf Club during his upbringing.
Ogilvy no doubt hopes many more Aussie golfers can follow in his footsteps in the coming years. He has certainly done his best to develop new stars by hosting the Sandbelt Invitational, an initiative he and course architect Mike Clayton created during the COVID-19 pandemic, a global health crisis that cancelled the Australian Open in 2020 and 2021.
The event has been discontinued for the time being. Nonetheless, Ogilvy described how it all came about:
“The Sandbelt Invitational is a pretty cool event. We play on four of the best courses in Melbourne and pair young golfers, both men and women, with tour players. The idea came out of the pandemic when there was a couple of years without much to play in for the Australian golfers.
“We were sitting around after the Australian Open had been cancelled due to all of the issues that came along with COVID and we just threw ideas around and wondered if there was anything we could scrape together that would be something for the locals to play in. So we called a few clubs and went from there.
“We were trying to put this together in a couple of months, and Melbourne golfers had missed a lot of golf through the pandemic, so we didn’t feel comfortable asking for a whole week at a course, so we thought one round at the four best courses we could find was a great way to put together a four-round tournament with the least amount of disruption to the members of the clubs we were visiting. So, through circumstances, we ended up with a pretty cool tournament.”
PGA Tour winner and Presidents Cup player Cam Davis won the event in 2022 and familiar faces of the Aussie golf scene such as Peter Fowler, Lucas Herbert, Elvis Smylie, and David Micheluzzi have also competed. DP World Tour stalwart and former Ryder Cup player Nicolas Colsaerts played in 2023.
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