Old friend alert!
Beginning Thursday—Wednesday night in America on Golf Channel—the world will be reunited with Royal Melbourne for the first time since 2023’s Asia Pacific Amateur. It’s also the first time RMGC has hosted the Australian Open since 1991 after 16 previous editions.
Television never quite captures the brilliance of what is generally considered the ultimate convergence of sand, tight turf, and extreme fine lines that are perfectly manageable if your brain is fully functioning on every shot.
Many of Royal Melbourne’s defining ground features are flattened by the camera lens. But we also haven’t seen golf here in the drone era, where the right pilot can highlight elevation changes and green tilts. Thankfully, a lot’s happened in golf television over the last few years. If last week’s Australian PGA telecast is any guide, we should see fresh angles and some green contour maps that further bring Alister MacKenzie and Alex Russell’s holes to life.
Even without ever fully understanding what makes the place so unusual—unless you’re a member playing it on a regular basis—Royal Melbourne’s sprawling bunkers, texture-rich natives, and feature-enlivening turf make the place a joy for even novice fans to watch. The place has verve. It awakens senses elite players forgot they had after playing too many lesser courses. Even at its most extreme in wind, heat, and rock-hard turf, players love the place because they know there is always a safe option that rewards the perceptive.
Tiger Woods plays the par-3 seventh during the 2011 Presidents Cup
Beyond the visual eye candy, the warm Aussie vibes, and player reverence through the decades, what makes the two courses as good as golf course design gets? After all, Royal Melbourne does have a few factors working against it.
It does not border a significant body of water but does get coastal breezes.
The Composite doesn’t feature a grand finishing hole, or even a hole that would have the American Society of Signature Holes (ASSH) raters demanding template hole Hall-of-Fame status.
The West and East Courses play over nice sandy ground that’s dramatic in spots, but it’s hardly life-changing. A densely populated residential neighborhood also surrounds it though homes are rarely visible. Still, Cypress Point, it is not.
A Composite of the club’s West and East courses is necessary for tournaments. To make things even more confusing and open the place up to lazy architectural indictments, the Composite for this week’s Crown Australian Open is not the same one used in the last two Presidents Cups. Nor is it the same routing used in the Asia Pacific Amateur two years ago. But this week’s sequencing is the most relied upon, dating to 1959’s World Cup: 12 holes from the West and six from the East.
The East (left, mostly) and West Courses play through a residential area.(Google Earth)
So what makes Royal Melbourne so special, no matter what iteration they’re playing?
RMGC squeezes every possibility out of the land to require thought and shotmaking.
It’s the ultimate melding of design and maintenance, a fortuitous product of smart evolution, creative decisions, and refined maintenance practices started by construction supervisor and greenkeeper, Mick Morcom, and crystallized by longtime superintendent Claude Crockford.
RMGC has the best collection of par-3s and short par-4s on the planet. It’d probably have the best par-5s, too, had the R&A and USGA taken the distance issue as seriously as the current regimes have.
Any type of golfer of any age can whap it around the two courses. But to conquer RMGC under normal fast-and-firm tournament conditions requires precision and intelligence found nowhere outside of St Andrews.
Despite several massive bunkers, Royal Melbourne is actually the ultimate example of design restraint. Its best moments are defined by little swales, bumps, dips, curves, mounds, sneaky green tilts, and uneven stances, all accentuated by the maintenance. The 1926 (West) and 1931 (East) designs are a product of a time when shaping equipment wasn’t as efficient, meaning every existing feature was treated with care. Whatever they “made” was done with a deft touch.
As maintenance practices became more refined, Crockford kept innovating to create turf unlike anywhere else in the world. The practices always had an eye on firmness and turf health. But a byproduct of his efforts made the subtle features that much more meaningful, all while accentuating the glorious aging process of the bunkers. The maintenance mission at Royal Melbourne has continued into the modern era. (Check out the Shell’s Match between Player and Thomson to see how the place has evolved in the best possible ways, except maybe when greens get over 14 on the Stimpeter!)
