Golf’s darkest day

The sun was out, the wind was down and the field was away. Yet the 2002 Australian Open stopped not long after play started. Two decades on, we revisit the day Australian golf made world headlines for all the wrong reasons.

[Feature image – Getty Images/Mark Dadswell]

Twenty years ago, tournament golf in Australia suffered a summer that saw its two premier events stall in unusual circumstances. The opening round of the 2002 Holden Australian Open was cancelled when parts of the course at Victoria Golf Club became unplayable despite perfect weather. One week later, Peter Lonard and Jarrod Moseley were declared joint winners of the 2002 Australian PGA Championship when dwindling daylight meant the playoff they were one hole into could not be completed.

It became known as the fortnight when one championship couldn’t start and the other couldn’t finish. The organisers of the Australian PGA were criticised mostly for not attempting to resume the playoff on the Monday morning. Yet wet weather was the main culprit there and player commitments in a tight schedule precluded its continuance. However, the firestorm directed at the Australian Golf Union (AGU) for its handling of the national championship was far more savage.

On Thursday, November 21, 2002, putts on Victoria’s increasingly baked third green began horse-shoeing around the hole without touching the cup. Officials suspended play after players complained that their balls would not stay on several greens. When Richard Ball putted past the cup at the third hole four times only to have the ball roll back 20 feet, the West Australian’s group refused to continue.

Play stopped for more than 40 minutes as course staff watered the problem greens, yet the round was soon abandoned and all scores from the day voided. The first and second rounds were rescheduled for Friday and Saturday, with 36 holes initially slated for a blockbuster Sunday before a subsequent decision to play just 18 holes on the final day as the $1.5 million national championship was trimmed to 54 holes.

AGU executive director Colin Phillips made himself accountable for the situation. “I’m not apportioning any blame to anyone,” he said that Thursday. “The buck stops with me, so I accept full responsibility for it.” Yet Phillips, who passed away in 2019 at age 76, was hardly the lone hand in what became a notorious incident in Australian golf.

With Victoria Golf Club set to host the championship for the first time since that dark day, Australian Golf Digest spoke with 18 of the key figures involved in the 2002 Open, intertwining their current-day perspectives with a few extracts from the newspaper reports of the time. Even 20 years on, the memories are still sharp, the emotions raw and the stances emphatic. The ‘circle of blame’ that ringed all parties involved remains just as circular today as it did then. The week remains a sensitive topic for some, with Victoria’s course superintendent and general manager of the day both politely declining to be interviewed. Additionally, John Lindsay, the club captain in 2002 and a three-time Victorian Amateur champion, has since passed away.

The championship returns to Victoria

Twenty-one years had passed since the club staged the men’s Australian Open, with American Bill Rogers capping his scorching 1981 season by raising the Stonehaven Cup. Anticipation for the 2002 edition was high.

Steve Allan, the eventual champion: “In the middle of the year, the tournament was announced that it was going to be at Victoria, and I loved Vic. When it was announced, I really wanted to play.”

Mike Clayton, whose firm, which also included John Sloan and the late Bruce Grant, were the consulting architects at Victoria: “Bruce, John and I, we didn’t have the maintenance contract, but we put ‘Toddy’ (Ian Todd) in the [course superintendent’s] job. John and Ian had set up the courses for the Victorian Open [which Victoria held from 1994-’99] and the PGA in ’99. They’d done a fantastic job setting up those tournaments. They’d been brilliant at it. The courses were always on the edge, but they were perfect.”

John Sloan: “I’d been consulting [at Victoria] from a course-management point of view for many years, and Michael Clayton Golf Design were the architects at the time. I had this dual role of golf-course management consultant and being part of the design team.

“We probably started work for that Open 18 months before the event in preparation. We were looking at some of the design issues on individual holes: tree removal, the lengths of the holes, putting any Tiger tees in, that sort of thing. We were looking at that review as well as getting our heads around, with the club, ‘What sort of golf course do we want to present in 2002 for this event?’ Similar to a lot of clubs – particularly the Melbourne Sandbelt clubs that had become a little defenceless against the modern game – it was a very strong view of ours and the club’s that the greens had to be firm and fast to give the golf course the teeth it needed. Because there were a number of holes that were quite short by modern standards.

“I’d worked with Toddy at Woodlands. He was my assistant, and then he got the job at Vic and I started consulting there with him. So we are great mates and had a long-standing relationship. I was consulting at a number of golf courses; we’d prepared for tournaments many times. I worked very closely with Trevor Herden (the PGA Tour of Australasia’s tournaments director) on golf-course preparation, so we were liaising with him. Trevor came out to inspect the course a number of times to see how we were going. The club was very much involved – we were having regular meetings. We had a brilliant captain in John Lindsay and a terrific board. The board of Victoria was totally supportive, just really enthusiastic that we were going to have the tournament. So none of this was done under cloak and dagger. It was all out in the open, because anyone who came out to the golf course could see what we were trying to do.”

Mike Clayton: “It was in perfect shape. It looked amazing. The greens were obviously on the edge. A couple of players spoke to me about it and said, ‘You’d better be careful.’ I had no reason to suspect there’d be a problem because they’d always been close to the edge. John said, ‘They’ll be fine.’

“In fairness, it’s no different to the on-the-edge greens that Royal Melbourne always put up. The Sandbelt’s always pushed the edges, all the way back to Claude Crockford (the legendary greenkeeper at Royal Melbourne). Bruce Grant and Graeme Grant had both apprenticed to Crockford, and John Sloan’s first job in golf was working as Graeme’s assistant at Kingswood. There’s a long lineage all the way back to Crockford with the view that you can never get greens hard enough or fast enough, and that has always been the way of the Sandbelt.”

John Sloan: “You can’t just automatically say, ‘We want to have super-fast, firm greens.’ That takes a lot of preparation to get the turf to that stage. You can do it very quickly, but the turf’s not nearly as good.

“I worked at the ’81 Open at Victoria. Those greens in ’81 were slick, too.”

John Hopkins, Australian Golf Union chairman of rules and chief referee: “The rough was pretty light. It had been a dry spring, so the rough was wispy. The impression we had was that the greens were going to have to be firm and fast to keep the players in check – not that I had any say in the setup.”

Dominic Wall, Australian Golf Union development manager: “There was a real competition within the Sandbelt courses to be known as the course that produced the hardest, fastest greens at a major event. Whether that was competition from the clubs or the superintendents, I don’t know, but it was certainly a feeling at the time that they wanted to have something that signalled their course was the top course in that criteria.”

Mike Clayton: “I don’t think that’s what happened at all.”

John Sloan: “No. No, that’s just rubbish. We grew up on the Sandbelt, we grew up learning the lessons of Crockford and Graeme Grant and those surfaces. I remember some of the surfaces that Graeme produced at Kingston Heath’s Opens. I remember talking to him after the 2002 Open – he flat-out refused to let the AGU tell him where to put the pins, and the club supported him and backed him. So he had control over that part of it.

“But it was not a competition. The defence of the Sandbelt has always been the strategic nature of the design, exacting surfaces, particularly on the greens. We just wanted Victoria to have the best defences.”

Dominic Wall: “I went back and forth numerous times in the lead-up to the event. It was evolving. It was developing, and it was looking really good, but there were some doubts in the lead-up that we expressed to the club about the greens, but we were given assurances that it was all part of the plan and it was developing well. I don’t think they were significant doubts; it was more, These are looking extremely hard, extremely dry, which is probably not inconsistent with other Sandbelt courses in the preparation to major events. We had certainly flagged those points.”

Trevor Herden, the PGA Tour of Australasia’s tournaments director, who was working his final event on home soil before starting a role with the PGA Tour in America: “We offered all the help we could possibly give them, but [the AGU] didn’t seem to want any of our help. I’ve done a number of tournaments at Victoria and I even sent Colin Phillips, and others, the hole locations that we’d used in other tournaments there, and that was not accepted either. I had to back off at that point because I felt I was getting too involved, and they didn’t want us involved because we’d quite often been told that it’s nothing to do with you; it’s our event. So we had to stay at arm’s length in that regard.”

Dominic Wall: “We did consult with the host club in terms of the setup of the championship. We did discuss the setup with the PGA Tour [of Australasia], but they weren’t as directly involved in those days as maybe they are now. And in terms of things like setup, we consulted the PGA Tour in relation to their setup for the course when they had the Australian PGA at Victoria in 1999. So we gained their information and their notes. But in those days, a lot of the trust in terms of the setup and the planning in terms of the course, we would have direct meetings with the club and we would provide what our specifications and recommendations were. And a lot of that was left up to the club.”

John Neylan, expert agronomist who would go on to assist with future Australian Open course preparations: “I don’t think any of us outside of the people that were directly involved with it really knew what had actually happened. From a turf-maintenance point of view, there was talk around what might have been done to quicken up the greens and make them more challenging.”

Steve Allan: “I’d been playing in the States and got home a week before, so I played with Geoff Ogilvy and Andrew Getson at Vic on the Friday before the tournament. I’d heard the greens were brown. I drove in and it was crazy how brown they were, how hard and how tight. It was only the Friday before, yet it was already like, Holy geez, these greens are on the edge!

“I remember the greenkeeper coming up and saying to Geoff, ‘What do you think?’ And he said, ‘Geez, they’re on the edge.’ And the greenkeeper goes, ‘We haven’t even started rolling them yet.’

“Most tournaments in Australia, the greens are pretty firm but they get firmer as the week goes on. So a lot of the good scores are shot on Thursday, Friday, unless there’s rain during the week. That’s the way it’s always been, yet it was like that already. The Friday before was like a Sunday. The players knew it was on the edge.”

Simon Magdulski, Australian Golf Union manager of amateur championships: “There’d been discussion in the media, but we’d certainly heard discussion about the state of the greens just being different to the way greens had been presented previously. There was something unusual about them, but it’s not uncommon for things to be blown out of proportion.

“The first time Tom Duguid (the AGU’s manager of rules and handicapping) got onto the golf course was probably the Saturday ahead of the event. He came into the office at Vic, sat down next to me, shook his head and said, ‘Well, if you win the toss on those greens, you’d bat first because Warnie will be turning it square by day three.’ It was 20 years ago, but I still remember him saying that. And I remember shaking my head and thinking, Yeah, righto Tom. Good on you – again, just blowing it out of proportion. But then when I got onto the golf course on the Wednesday, looking at the greens, that was my reaction – Wow, now I know what Tom was talking about. It was something like I’d never seen.”

An infamous 62

Dominic Wall: “Some things happened in the lead-up to the event. Stuart Appleby shot a 62 in the pro-am, and I think that created some concern within the club.”

Simon Magdulski: “Pro-ams in those days were played on the Tuesday, so the pro-am was something of a test. Here’s the first real test of how difficult this golf course actually is, and we’ve got time to modify the presentation if we need to.”

Stuart Appleby, defending champion: “All the pins were in the middle of the greens on that pro-am day, so they’re all pretty easy and I putted out of my mind. To this day, I don’t know if that was influential in them maybe going, ‘Well, it’s pretty difficult and it’s borderline, but it might not be as bad as we think.’ I know I got blamed for that a little bit. It might have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. It’d be nice to know if someone could say, ‘Well, Appleby shot 62. We were going to just single-roll them, but we’ve decided to triple-roll them because it can’t have been that bad.’”

John Sloan: “With what Stuart did on the Tuesday, it just indicated that you could play them but they were exacting – but that’s what they needed to be. It was just an indicator that, to shoot that score, you have to have good greens and you have to be able to putt on good greens to shoot 62 around there. So the club was probably not all that happy that he shot 62, but we were.”

Mike Clayton: “If the best score in the pro-am had been 76, then there might have been a different reaction.”

Simon Magdulski: “Here’s the first real test of how difficult this golf course is, and this fellow’s had 62. If you’re good enough, you can play well on this golf course and we want the best players to win. That was the counter-argument, as I remember it. But right at the end of Wednesday, not everyone was comfortable with things.”

Paul Gow: “My pro-am partners didn’t score for the first 11 holes as they couldn’t putt on the greens.”

Mark Allen: “It was my estimation that the greens were running at 14 on Tuesday. It was getting ridiculous. I remember Rich Beem playing late on the Wednesday. We got to talking to Rich on the Wednesday night, and he said he’d never seen anything like it. To tell you the truth, the Australian players on the Wednesday, we had never seen anything like it.”

Rich Beem, tournament drawcard and reigning US PGA champion: “I went out and played another nine holes on Wednesday afternoon with Peter Lonard. On the sixth or seventh hole, they’re out there double-cutting the greens. They’ve got a roller and I’m looking over at Pete, going, ‘This is getting a little bit extreme.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, this is fast for even us.’ These things were already running at 13 to 14 on the Stimpmeter and that’s before they rolled them. So I’m thinking, Wow, these are going to be pretty dicey, but obviously these guys must know what they’re doing down here.”

Mark Allen: “The green with the most slope was No.6, the par 4 up the hill. We were looking at that green and having a few chips from behind the green and just trying to stop it at the only flag they had – and that was somewhere on a little shelf. We were hitting chips, and if you hit the chip a tiny bit too hard, it went not just off the front, but way off the front. One of the officials came by and he told us that this green was going to be slower than the other greens because of the slope. He also told us they were only going to put the flag on this little shelf four days in a row. So we knew it was going to be a circus at that stage.”

Mike Clayton: “I wasn’t playing, which was part of the problem. If I’d been playing, I might have had a bit of a different perspective, because I had a putt on a few of the greens and they were crazy fast. I hit some putts on the 11th green and from the back of the green down to the front pin, you could get it close but it was kind of silly. You were literally tapping the ball like you would hit a three-footer, and it was trickling down to the hole and stopping by the hole – but that was the third ball. The first two went off the green.”

Dominic Wall: “Things happened, as we found out afterwards and at that time that we didn’t know about from an AGU point of view. A growth regulator called Endothal was put on the greens. We believed that was after the pro-am on the Tuesday, and also probably in the week before. That’s essentially a product that’s used to stop poa control on bentgrass greens, basically to harden and toughen up the greens and stop the growth of the grass for a few days.”

John Neylan: “Endothal works as a desiccant. It browns the grass off, it dries the leaf out, so it’s going to quicken up the pace of the surface.”

Dominic Wall: “They were starting to look extremely difficult in terms of where they were going, but then that enhanced everything that was going on without our knowledge. Then on the Wednesday night, we had instructed certain things to happen on the course in terms of the preparation for the first day and the watering of the course that night. We didn’t know that, essentially, the water wasn’t put on the greens on the Wednesday night, and then on the Thursday morning they were double-cut and rolled.”

John Sloan: “I didn’t hear a word from the AGU [until] Wednesday night [when] we got the pin placements for Thursday. No earlier than that. They were on-site for three or four weeks before. We were preparing the golf course; we were doing nothing different to what we were setting out to do.

“We got the pin placements for Thursday, from the AGU, sent to Toddy. He and I got in the ute and went around and ‘spotted’ those pins on Wednesday night and just said, ‘You can’t put the pins there.’ There were six holes where, the way those greens were, you could not put the pins in those spots. If you did, you couldn’t putt the green.

“There were half a dozen pins there that no one had ever seen at Victoria, including on three, six, 11 and 13. They’re really, really tough greens. There are only really three or four pin placements that are safe on those greens when they get to that speed.”

Dominic Wall: “There was a lot of criticism about the hole locations, particularly on the third. Honestly, we took the brunt of that, but the hole location that we used on the third – either 22 centre or 20 centre – was exactly the same location that was used on the first day of the Australian PGA in 1999.”

John Sloan: “We demanded a meeting straight away with the AGU. I let Trevor [Herden] know. Trevor came out. Trevor was like, ‘Whoa, this isn’t our tournament, John. If this was us, how we do it, we go out together and we select the pins the night before and we work out where the best spots are.’

“We were told in no uncertain terms, the only role we had was to be there at 5 o’clock in the morning to cut the pin where the pin was on the paper. We were told very much, ‘We’ve been doing this a long time. We don’t need you to tell us how to and where to put the pins.’”

Mike Clayton: “We had a long discussion on Wednesday night. I know [John] was frustrated, as he wanted to go and put the pins out on Wednesday night, because he said, ‘This is not a job you can do in the early daylight hours of Thursday morning,’ which is what Colin had always done with the Open. He was frustrated at Colin’s insistence on doing the pins on Thursday morning, as opposed to Wednesday night. Now, whether that would have made a difference, I don’t know, but I know he was frustrated.”

Trevor Herden: “We always prepare that the night before. It’s twofold: it’s when we get the latest forecast, and you’ve got all your prep done and the superintendents know all the rest of it. We liaise with them, of course, but it’s a safeguard. If you’re going to rush around in the mornings and not put in 100 percent – I’m not saying they didn’t put 100 percent effort in, but if the effort was not quite right, then you soon get caught out on these tricky golf courses.”

John Sloan: “We probably cut six holes in the dark, so you need to have a white spot that you’re looking for, where you’ve putted it the night before and the ball’s going to stop near the hole.”

Craig Parry: “The flag placements were put on a hill and it wasn’t a flat area. That happened. Now, 3 percent is the maximum slope they can have on the green on the PGA Tour.”

John Sloan: “You only have to get it slightly wrong. It can be six inches wrong and it can be a real problem.”

Mike Clayton: “It was John’s call. The club trusted us to do that. I think Colin did, and so if Colin had insisted on it then, ultimately, he had the control. But I think given that Stuart shot 62 and Colin and John had worked together in the lead-up to the tournament and John had said, ‘It’s fine, don’t worry about it,’ I think Colin took John’s word for it.”

John Sloan: “We had control over everything except we didn’t have control over where the pin was. Of course, when the s–t hit the fan, they went back to the right system: Trevor, John Lindsay, myself and Toddy then went out and selected the pins for the rest of the tournament, which is what should have happened from day one, because the AGU were just out of their depth. The AGU needed to hand over the setup of the golf course to Trevor.

“I don’t want to speak disrespectfully of Colin, who’s passed, but it was just a lot of politics. They’d say, ‘This is our tournament. You work for Victoria. You just do as you’re told.’”

Dominic Wall: “We took a lot of care and effort in terms of the hole locations, and our group had a lot of experience in that area. I don’t think it was the hole location because it was a whole lot of greens that were affected, whereas the main issues were on the third. I said how that hole location was exactly the same location that was used in the Australian PGA on the first day. So those things happened behind the scenes. Ultimately, you can say yes, we were responsible, and we were at the end of the day, but there were certain things that went on behind the scenes that we weren’t aware of until that day, and even found out after that day in terms of a review and assessment of what went on.”

Simon Magdulski: “Colin didn’t speak to me about it much. To people not involved in his inner circle, he liked to project a message of, ‘It’s all fine. Yeah, they’re really hard and fast but this is all under control. There’s no problem here. This’ll be fine.’ Privately, I remember late on the Wednesday – it might have just been me and Colin who were left in the office and it might have been 8.30 or 9 o’clock at night – I remember Colin, just as he was walking out the door, having a little chat with me. I didn’t ask him any questions, he just made a couple of comments about the golf course and he was pretty worried about it. There’d been the problems in ’87 at Royal Melbourne [where Greg Norman led a player walk-off after the greenkeeper mistakenly identified a bird dropping as the officials’ mark for the pin placement on the third green that resulted in a horror hole location], so for Colin, he’s mindful that his ‘brand’ had had its issues over the journey. But my clear take on it was that, in his ideal world, the course wouldn’t have been presented the way it was at the start of Thursday. But the reality is that he’s not the guy putting chemicals on greens and mowing them.”

John Sloan: “Toddy and I went to bed… I’m not sure we actually did sleep. We were saying, ‘If we get the wrong weather here, we’re in a load of trouble.’”

One fateful day

Trevor Herden: “When I got there that first morning, I saw others that were involved in the setup coming off the golf course. I asked, ‘How are you going with it all?’ And the comment was, ‘We’re great. We’ve finished.’ This was at least an hour-and-a-half before play, and they said they’d already finished, so I had a few concerns at that time.”

John Sloan: “Those pins that were put there on that Thursday, we wouldn’t put them out for a midweek ladies competition.”

John Hopkins: “I turned up Thursday morning to take control of play and we’re down on the left-hand side of the first, which was playing as a par 3, and stayed there for two or three groups. The balls were landing on the green and then just bouncing through the back, so the first green was looking rock-hard. Anyway, play progressed.”

Kurt Barnes, reigning Australian Amateur champion: “I remember standing on the first tee with ‘Apples’ (Stuart Appleby) and him saying, ‘These greens look dead.’ Those greens were brutal that first day. Quickest greens I’ve ever experienced.”

Mark Allen: “My caddie had been out having a look because we were hitting off in about the fifth group off in the afternoon. He told me that on some of the holes you could not go past the pin. He’d seen people hitting downhill putts out there that were just off-the-charts stupid. And that Thursday was the most perfect day in the history of Melbourne for tournament golf. It was the perfect temperature. It was 22 degrees and it was the perfect wind. Twenty-two degrees can feel hot in Melbourne but this breeze was just really gentle, wouldn’t affect the ball and was a perfect breeze for this day.”

Trevor Herden: “Play was OK at the start, but then as the holes got more wear around them, those that were in the wrong spot and with the pace of the greens, etc. one thing led to another, and they ended up where they ended up.”

Paul Gow: “I asked my caddie to give me metres to the front edge only. It was such a defensive course that week.”

Richard Ball, who was drawn with Bob Shearer and Mark Allen: “I knew something was wrong because there was a delay in the tee-times. Someone was talking about Pete Lonard hitting it onto the 14th, the par 3 up the hill, and he walked up there and found his ball 50 metres short of the green when at some stage it had been 15 or 20 feet away from the hole. I also overheard someone saying, ‘No one can keep it near the pin on 11.’ So I knew there was something weird going on before we even went out.”

Steven Conran, who shot a one-over 71 on the Thursday, the equal-best completed score along with Andrew Webster: “When we got on the back nine, every time we putted out on a hole, I remember us making comments like, ‘I wouldn’t like to be putting to that hole in a couple of hours’ time.’ It seemed like the further you went, the harder it was to just putt one up to the hole and tap it in. You always seemed to have a three or four-footer.”

Craig Parry: “It wasn’t easy. We were just about to play 17 [when play was halted]. I was out early and I was about four-over par and I reckon Lonard might have been one-over. Obviously it was unplayable – and there wasn’t a breath of wind out there, either. It was dead calm, and that’s what made it even worse, to be called off.”

John Hopkins: “I was in a buggy with a fellow called Jim Halliday, who was head of rules for the Royal Canadian Golf Association and had refereed at a number of US Opens. I got a call saying that players were refusing to play on the third green. I said to Jim, ‘I think I know what this problem is going to be.’”

Mark Allen: “Bob Shearer and I were talking while walking down the third going, ‘What do you think the highest score is going to be? Because we’d already seen a couple of high scores from people who could play.

“My caddie told me not to hit the ball past the hole on the third – it was one of those holes. So I hit a really good drive and I purposely hit my [second] shot to the front of the green, but Richard was further short. I think he’d hit from the rough or the fairway bunker.”

Richard Ball: “The third was just a circus, quite honestly. I chipped up. It was 18 inches to two feet away. My wife was caddieing for me and she gave me my putter. Next minute, it’s 10 feet short. We just looked at each other and said, ‘What’s just happened there?’ I didn’t actually see it roll back.

“I remember thinking over the first putt, Well, I can’t be short here – it’s just going to come back to me, so I ended up knocking it past and it stayed there.”

Mark Allen: “Now it’s my turn, so I putt up and it gets to about two feet short of the hole and it’s doing a little semi-circle. I can see it’s going to roll back to my feet but somehow it did a little rock, nestled in a tiny hole and stopped two feet short of the hole. So I run up there to mark the ball thinking, Beautiful. Bob had to putt across the green. He was pin-high and he hit a putt so short – because of where the hole was – and it just somehow stopped. He ran and marked his ball as well.

“Now it’s time to watch Richard from past the hole. I’m telling you, he just breathed on the thing. I thought he’d hit a good putt. I thought somehow he had made this work, but it went past the hole as slow as a putt could ever move. And it went off the front of the green again.

“We had probably a hundred people following our group because people love Bob Shearer. So now Richard hits another putt up and this is the way I remember it – he’s probably got it differently in his head – but it rolled back to his feet again. He hit the next one six feet past the hole again, his next didn’t go in and it rolled off the green.”

Richard Ball: “I can only recall having four putts and it still wasn’t in because it was going up and down the hill.”

Mark Allen: “I looked at Bob and said, ‘Bob, this is unplayable, isn’t it?’ And he goes, ‘Yes, it is.’ So I looked at the rules official and I said, ‘Have you been watching this?’ Nice and loud so he can hear it. He goes, ‘Yeah.’ And I said, ‘It’s unplayable, isn’t it?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, we’re not playing.’ That is still fresh in my memory.”

Richard Ball: “I remember Mark saying something unrepeatable. He also said, ‘Bally! Stop! Stop! This is ridiculous!’ He spoke up. I was just thinking, Crikey, I’ve never seen anything like this. What happens? He called for an official. Bob didn’t say much. I think Bob had seen it before. We seemed to stand there for hours, waiting to see what happened. I looked back towards the tee and there were five groups waiting to go.”

Rich Beem: “I bogeyed the first hole, but then on the second hole I made a par. I hit my first putt from 25, 30 feet past the hole and I nudged it down there to kick-in distance and knocked it in. My caddie walks over and says, ‘I don’t know if you know how good that first putt was. That was incredible.’ I was really afraid that it could have gone anywhere. We walk over to the third tee and there’s a group on the tee, a group in the fairway and you could see a group up at the green. Brett Ogle was commentating and we asked him, ‘What’s going on?’ He said, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but the golf ball’s not staying on the green.’ I said, ‘I can believe that. I can most definitely believe that.’”

Mark Allen: “You could see what was happening behind. Then Colin Phillips turned up and said, ‘What’s the problem?’ And I said, ‘This golf course is unplayable. This hole is unplayable.’ I explained to him what was going on.

“Peter Thomson rolled up and he just stepped back and watched and was just listening. And Colin Phillips said to me, ‘Mark, these greens aren’t any faster than when they were cut this morning. And when we tested it this morning, this was fine. I said, ‘Yeah, that’s right, Colin – for the rest of the green. But more than half the field have walked through this hole. Every player and caddie has stood within four feet of this hole and now it’s twice as fast as the rest of the green.’

“Peter Thomson walked up after I’d said that. He dropped a ball one foot from the hole and it rolled off the green, and that’s when it was all done.”

John Hopkins: “They told me the ball was coming up and back to his feet. I said, ‘Well, there’s not much I can do about it. You’ve just got to keep playing.’ And they said, ‘Well, we’re not.’

“I spotted Peter Thomson standing at the edge of the green, so I went over to Peter and I said, ‘What are you seeing? Is it unplayable?’ And he said, ‘Well, it doesn’t look too good, John.’”

John Sloan: “I had to go to the funeral of a close friend in Mount Martha. When we got out of the funeral, Toddy rang and said, ‘Are you watching the telly?’ I got home and turned the telly on and there was one of our staff watering the third green with ‘Thommo’ there. I felt sick to the stomach and hightailed it back there.”

John Hopkins: “We called in the course super, who came and gave the green a bit of a light sprinkle. At this stage, play was still halted. I did a roll call around to find out if any other greens were going the way of the third, and it turned out that there were a handful of greens that the rules guys reporting back to me said looked like were on their last legs.

“A couple of the other greens were then being syringed, and I started getting messages from the rules guys that the players were extremely unhappy about the greens being syringed because they said that we were altering the playing conditions.”

Richard Ball: “The only time I got involved in an angry way was when Colin Phillips said after I’d said, ‘So what’s going to happen? Are we going in?’ And he said, ‘No, no. We’re going to water the greens and we’re going to keep going.’ I said, ‘You’re cracking jokes! How’s that a level playing field?’ I added, ‘Well, can I have my chip from the front edge again?’ He didn’t say a word. He just got in the cart and drove in. I never saw him again.”

Colin Phillips, in an interview in our November 2005 issue: “One of the rules guys radioed me and said that there was a problem on the third green, with the ball not sitting still. And I knew that pin placement was as easy as you could get because it was slap in the middle of the green, but the green did slope from back to front the whole way. I got in touch with this guy and asked him to get some water on it to slow it down.

“By the time I got there, they had the hose out and were watering it. Mark Allen [who was in the group playing the third hole] gave me both barrels as soon as he saw me coming down the hill, which was understandable.”

Mark Allen: “Colin Phillips didn’t want to give up, God bless him. So they started watering the green. And you can’t have more than half the field play a green and then for the last 40 percent of the field have an altered surface. That is just completely unfair. So when Colin Phillips ordered them to start watering the green, I knew then it was complete amateur hour and Australian golf was in danger of becoming the biggest joke in history, especially when we had some big-name players there that week.”

John Hopkins: “My initial dilemma is: if a player says he’s not going to play, I’m running the event, so I’m going to say, ‘Well, you’ve got to play.’ I had to start with that position, to say to these guys, ‘You’ve got to play.’

“I caught up with Trevor Herden and we had a chat as, at this stage, there’s probably half a dozen greens being syringed. We wanted to talk about what we do about play. We had TV cameras all around us, so we ended up sitting in one of the TV trucks. It was eventually agreed between ourselves that we just wouldn’t be able to play on.”

Graeme Rowland, Channel Seven executive producer: “The first I knew about it was when Colin grabbed one of the cameramen’s headsets and called me in the [TV] truck to tell me that the [third] green was unplayable and that they were stopping the tournament, which we were obviously all stunned by because it was totally unexpected.”

Martin Jolly, IMG Australia managing director: “I remember driving down the driveway and I was a little bit late on Thursday. I was coming in for sponsor and client lunches that I was hosting. Coming down the driveway, I was pulled aside by our head of sales, a guy called Jonathan Field, who said, ‘There’s an issue. Colin Phillips, Dominic Wall and others – they want to have a meeting,’ where I was told what was happening.

“From an IMG point of view, given we were responsible for all the television, all the sponsorship, all the hospitality, I was running from sponsor meetings back to see Colin to find out what decisions were being made. I remember it being called off and then going into what you’d call some sort of information flow to make sure that everyone knew what was happening and why.”

Dominic Wall: “We all got together afterwards and had meetings that evening, that night, the next morning, and put a whole lot of things in place that were able to manage the championship and get it through. We were in regular communication on radios.

“Talking to the PGA Tour, talking to the various officials within the club, the captain, the superintendent, we felt that in the interest and the fairness with all the players, that that was really the only approach that we could potentially take. There were a lot of discussions and meetings. And there wasn’t, I would say at that time, a lot of pointing the hat at why this had happened.”

John Neylan: “People don’t do these things to cause a stuff-up on purpose. It’s the nature of working with nature, and occasionally she’ll come in to bite you hard just to remind you that you don’t actually have control of everything.”

Steve Allan: “One of the greenkeepers from my home course, Woodlands, was on loan that week and he told a story that they were having bets in the greenkeepers shed about whether play would get finished. They knew it was just a matter of time on a few holes.”

Trevor Herden: “The players were up in arms. They were all hot under the collar because there’d been other instances. Some of the other things that had happened in the Australian Open were unfortunate as well. And here was another one.”

Craig Parry: “I played in the one at Royal Melbourne in ’87. It wasn’t a good memory, having to come back and start all over again, but it was the fairest thing we could do.”

Steven Conran, on whether he felt like his hard-working 71 had gone to waste:
“A little bit, I suppose. I know there were some big-name players there that were really ‘racking it’ that first day. Charles Howell was 10-over or something and then they go and throw water on the greens and he comes out the next day and he’s in the lead. That irked me a bit.”

Stuart Appleby, on the role his pro-am 62 played: “I remember everybody getting on my case about it, and once we lost that round they were on my case a bit more. The rumour spread around that it was half my fault.”

The immediate aftermath

Melbourne’s The Age newspaper was quick to pounce.

“AGU executive director Colin Phillips, who accepted blame for the fiasco on Thursday, could no longer contain himself in the face of public embarrassment,” led its reportage. “Phillips said the AGU, as the organiser, relied heavily upon the host club to ensure the course was in proper condition, adding that Victoria had not followed guidelines for preparation of the venue.

“He said the club had been warned by the AGU early in the week that the greens were too fast, but club captain, John Lindsay, said on Wednesday they were perfect.

“With one of Melbourne’s most prestigious clubs accused of bringing Australia’s top tournament into disrepute, Victoria declined to defend itself, citing an agreement with the AGU not to comment. Nor would the club allow the man whom it consults over turf management, John Sloan, to explain himself.”

Peter Thomson, in The Age: “It’s a mistaken belief that fast greens are what a championship should be about.”

Richard Ball: “I remember looking at the back of the newspaper and seeing a picture of myself and Mark [Allen] and thinking, I’m in here for all the wrong reasons! It’s certainly something that has been etched in my memory forever. I’ve never heard of it happening anywhere else.”

Dominic Wall: “There was one particular article that appeared on the Sunday afterwards that criticised the nature of the AGU staff and AGU involvement. I thought that was really quite poor to blame individuals, where I think it was a lot to do with the process.

“I had a lot of respect for Colin Phillips, before and after that event, because he really took the blame. And if you look back at the press conferences, he didn’t cast any criticism on anyone else. He took the blame and let the buck stop with him. He could have quite easily come out and said, ‘Well, there are all these things that happened at the time that we didn’t know about,’ and pushed it in a different direction. That said a lot about him and his background in the sport. He did have a lot of credibility, and he certainly approached it from a very professional manner. Ultimately, the AGU was responsible because it was our championship, but maybe our processes, which improved afterwards, needed to be looked at before. But we moved in a positive direction.”

Martin Jolly: “The late Colin Phillips, who I greatly admired, he basically took the brunt of it. I actually admired him more than I already did as a partner that he said, ‘Leave it with me. I’ll take it. People will blame me. The blame game’s started. We’re all very good at that in Australia.’ Colin was very resolute in the way he handled it. He stood up, he spoke extremely well. He got whacked in the press, but he took it on the chin. I thought he was tremendous in a very difficult situation.”

Mike Clayton: “It was his job to do that. The buck did stop with him, but in a way it wasn’t his fault.”

Simon Magdulski: “Colin, to me, never tried to apportion blame for that sort of thing to other people. He was a very private sort of a guy, but it’s just not his style – even in the background, sitting down over a beer or a glass of wine – to be opening up and telling stories about, ‘This is what really happened. It wasn’t my fault – it was all these other people.’ I think he genuinely took the view that, ‘I’m the tournament director; I’m the executive director of the AGU. It’s my responsibility.’ But he probably also took the view that, ‘If I start trying to sling mud around, it’s not going to play well for me anyway.’ But it wasn’t just on that occasion. That was my recollection of him, that he didn’t like to get into trying to blame others.”

John Sloan: “He might have said that publicly said, but he certainly didn’t say it privately. The buck stopped with me and that was fine. I don’t have any issues with that at all. But it is just disappointing that it ended like that because there were so many reasons why it shouldn’t have. Colin probably rightly publicly took it, but not in private. There was hell to pay.”

Colin Phillips, in an interview in our November 2005 issue: “I haven’t changed my view. I know that we certainly weren’t informed about what was happening with the greens and I am certain the club didn’t know either.”

Simon Magdulski: “Colin was the AGU person who knew far more about what was going on than anyone else. The reality with Colin was that he didn’t really bring other people into his decision-making considerations. So while other people were significant on paper to some of the decision-making, in reality they weren’t.”

Dominic Wall: “From an AGU point of view, we didn’t say to the club that they should toughen up the greens, make them harder and make them quicker – probably the exact opposite. We wanted to prepare the greens. They were going down a particular path. We had requested certain things, and some of those weren’t done.”

John Sloan: “If you’re going to provide exacting surfaces, you need to have that control over where the pin is because otherwise you can come a complete cropper, like what happened. Those greens at Victoria, particularly those half-a-dozen, those surfaces are exacting. Those greens have since been softened and recontoured just to take some of those contours out of them – that was probably just to give more pin placements.

“You either get it right or you get it wrong. And I think the same thing would’ve happened irrespective of the weather. Obviously if it had rained a heap, it wouldn’t have happened as much, but the pins were just in the wrong spot. It’s as simple as that.”

John Hopkins: “I don’t think there was anything bad about the hole location on No.3; it was just simply the greens. I think they were ‘Stimping’ close to 18. The real problem was those greens should have been watered on the Wednesday and, as I understand it, they weren’t. That’s where Colin and I got pretty forensic after the event and during 2003, trying to work out what the hell happened and was it the super, and so on. At the end of the day, if the Australian Golf Union is in charge of the event, then it’s got to be our decision about the course. But in those days, often the superintendent of the course tended to have a bit more say.”

Mike Clayton: “Looking back 20 years later, the ultimate manifestation of ‘greens can’t be too hard or too fast’ was what happened at Victoria that week. It got pushed 1 percent too much and it fell off the edge.

“It can happen, but I don’t think we’ve ever gone that close to the edge again. It’s never really happened again, so in many ways you could argue it was a good thing because it said, ‘OK, that’s where the line is. If the line’s at 100, we’re not going to get to 99 on Tuesday and then hope it’s going to be OK.’ It was a bit of a Paul Keating – it was a recession we had to have.”

John Sloan: “We probably weren’t forceful enough, either. We were just doing our thing and trying to stay under the radar and prepare this fantastic golf course. We wanted to show it off to the best of its ability. But I think we were naïve because I honestly did not know that we were not going to be able to select where the pins were, and when we got delivered the pin placements on Wednesday night, Toddy and I looked at each other like, ‘What?’ We didn’t know that was going to happen because they didn’t go out and ‘spot’ them. It was done from a desk inside the clubhouse. It’s hard to believe.”

Mike Clayton: “It was also a manifestation of the beginnings of the now two decades-long equipment debate. How do you protect the golf course against the ball? This was two years after the Pro V1 [first launched] and the distance explosion had happened. We were two years into that 20-year jump in distance. It was a part of: ‘How do we protect these short golf courses against the ravages of what equipment was doing to them?’ If you were playing that course with a ball that went 250 yards, I don’t think you would have the greens the way they were. I remember talking to John about the scores and saying, ‘How do you protect the course against what the ball was doing?’ That was one way to do it – to make it difficult to get the ball close to the hole.

“It shows how close it was to the edge, and it shows how close it was to being perfect. If we put more water on it on Tuesday and Wednesday night… and that’s kind of where I blame myself. I should have been stronger with John and said, ‘We need to get this a little further away from the edge than it is.’ But Stuart shot 62. I thought, Well, someone shot 62, and John was so good at what he did that I thought, It’s his job. I’ll leave it to him. Obviously it’s easy in retrospect, but what I regret is: I should have said something then.”

John Hopkins: “It was pretty stressful for a period of about 30 minutes to an hour while we went through the processes and, finally, we were left in a position where the players were going to stage a walk-off if we syringed the greens [yet] if we didn’t syringe the greens they were going to die. Play couldn’t continue. We were left with absolutely nowhere to go.”

Mike Clayton: “They watered the greens all night on Thursday, and I remember John saying to me, ‘I’m more embarrassed about the way the golf course is presented today than it was yesterday.’ Which was probably a bit of a defensive reaction on his behalf, but the course was just mush on Friday.”

John Sloan: “It’s hard to make fast greens slow in five minutes, particularly as the greens were still really exacting. But of course we put more water on them to make them a bit more receptive. We put on some quick-release fertiliser that night as well, to try to generate a little bit of leaf growth in them over the next few days, just to quieten them down. But the main thing we fixed up was getting the pins in the right spots with John and Trevor.”

Mike Clayton: “I felt bad for John Lindsay, who was the captain of Victoria and was great. He took it pretty hard, because he was the one who copped the brunt of the member criticism.”

Simon Magdulski: “I remember having a brief chat with John Lindsay on the Saturday or Sunday and asked him how he was going. He looked at me and he just looked shattered. He said, ‘This was meant to be the best week of my life and it’s just turned into a complete nightmare.’ Sometimes people say that sort of thing and there’s a bit of a wry smile, but there was no wry smile. He looked devastated.”

Trevor Herden: “I had to deal quite a lot with the club because the club were also in defence-mode. They’d tried something new, which was to put their business in the hands of a third party, which was somebody else to prepare the golf course. That was something that I considered at the time was abnormal. I thought they could get somebody in to give them some guidance, but not actually be in total control of it. That’s hindsight now, but that to me was always something dodgy to do. No one’s ever done it since, and no one had ever done it before.”

John Sloan: “The saddest part about it was Victoria, because it’s a brilliant club. It’s a great golf course. They’re fantastic people. They supported us and they were the ones that copped it for their reputation. That was the real sadness about it because they didn’t deserve
any of it.

“It was very, very difficult. I reckon it aged me a lot because we’d taken so much pride in preparing the golf course and to have it fall over like that was so shattering. And I don’t think the members ever really received an adequate explanation of what happened. I can only speak so highly of the club. The s–t did hit the fan the next week, because they obviously had to find a scapegoat and I no longer was working there because I had to go. And that was fine. I have no malice at all towards them and I’m still great mates with Toddy and a number of the guys that worked on the course.

“Toddy and I made a pact that, during the tournament, we’d only drink low-alcohol beer. Then on that Thursday night, we got all the low-alcohol beer in the fridge and chucked it in the hopper and went and bought full-strength beer and said, ‘We’re never going to do a tournament ever again on low-alcohol beer!’ I remember that clearly.”

The players weigh in

Stuart Appleby: “That was embarrassing. It was just officialdom gone bonkers. I’ve got a feeling the blame was not taken by the highest people in that organisation, either. Go to the experts. Go to the players and ask, ‘What are these greens doing?’ Or go to the club and the guy who’s been cutting these greens forever. Honestly, it’s not that hard. It’s just unfortunate that an organisation that has very little experience in elite preparation of golf courses to the highest level, week in and week out, was making these decisions.”

Mark Allen: “This was amateurs running a professional event who didn’t understand that, on Sandbelt greens, when you have a lot of players and a lot of caddies walking near the hole, that part of the green gets very crusty and very quick. They didn’t understand that.”

Rich Beem: “I was like, ‘I can’t believe we’re going to cancel this tournament because of perfect weather.’ It wasn’t blowing hardly anything – maybe five miles an hour. I just remember a glorious day. It was a beautiful day to be out there playing golf.

“The organisers didn’t think that comment was funny. They weren’t too thrilled with it. When they asked me to come back into the media centre, I said, ‘It’s almost like they weren’t paying attention to what they were doing,’ because how can you let a golf course get away from you that badly? On Tuesday, it was fine. There wasn’t anything to be worried about. And how it ended up being on Friday was absolutely amazing. It was just in perfect condition. It was not like the course was easy – it was still firm and fast, being that time of year. But they didn’t take kindly to the fact that I said it didn’t look like they were paying attention to what they were doing. But how do you not take blame for that because you have to know what the weather forecast is with it being that dry out there. I was just astonished because it was cancelled because of perfect weather. I said what I thought instead of saying maybe the correct thing to say since they were paying me to be there.”

Richard Ball: “I’m not quite sure what they were trying to achieve.”

Rich Beem: “Everybody wants the fastest greens and the best greens, and any player will tell you, the biggest piece of technology that’s changed the game over the past 15 years isn’t the golf club, it’s the lawn mowers. They’re able to do things now that guys weren’t able to do even 20 years ago.

“I don’t think it ever would have come to that in this day and age, but reflecting on it, they wanted to get the greens to the edge, but they unfortunately went past that edge. That’s the disappointing [part]. I feel bad for them as everything else they did that week was absolutely magnificent.”

Richard Ball: “It was a whole new world for me. I should have been a bit more like Mark Allen, but I was too ‘green’ to know what my rights were. I learned so much from Mark that day. I really did. He just stood up, he did it well. I take my hat off to him.”

Mark Allen: “I always tell people I single-handedly saved the reputation of Australian golf that day. It was so stupid that you just couldn’t believe it. The greens were purple. Anyway, they watered those greens and the next day it was completely playable for the rest of the week. They really watered them. I reckon they went from 16 on the Thursday to running at 11.”

Greg Turner, who’d won the 1999 Australian PGA at Victoria and shot 80 on the Thursday, in The Age: “It’s not the incompetence that astounds me, just the extent of it.”

Greg Norman, who did not play in the Open and instead hosted his own tournament in Florida, in The Age: “Looking at it as an Australian in Florida it was sad because it’s a bit of a humiliation for the game of golf in Australia, especially when you get the repercussions over there 10,000 miles away. They were basically laughing at us. It really doesn’t hold a whole lot of credibility for the stature of the game of golf over here. I think they’ve got a long way to go to repair the damage.

“Co-ordination and communication are the most important things. At the end of the day, the game of golf is one of integrity and high standards. [If] the integrity and high standards are tarnished and diminished in any way, shape or form, be it by the players, administrators or [course] superintendents, then somebody’s head should roll.”

Kurt Barnes, who carded the day’s highest completed score, a 91, but had it expunged from the books: “We heard the news that the first round had been wiped and we were throwing high-fives to each other. It was like, ‘Beauty! That score didn’t count – let’s go and shoot a good number tomorrow now.’”

A tournament to run

Martin Jolly: “It was a very stressful day. There were a lot of meetings going on at a very fast pace and getting everyone to buy in. And of course, when you’ve got a number of stakeholders in an event as big as the Australian Open, it’s very hard to get everyone to line up: television, other sponsors, commitments, players, international players, international television broadcast – all those things that we handle. Unfortunately, it was one of those things that happens in live sport, but the organisers, everyone did the best they could to get the best outcome they could, given the situation.”

John Hopkins: “It wasn’t just a difficult ruling for one player; it changed the whole nature of the event. It was just a massive decision to have to make. Fortunately, I had Trevor Herden to help me on the decision; I had to do it in combination with Trevor.”

Trevor Herden: “I was hellbent on trying to get the 72 holes in and cancel that round and start again later in the day.”

Graeme Rowland: “I don’t think there was an option to play into the Monday.”

John Hopkins: “The issue was TV and we had to talk to the head TV guy. It was like, ‘How many John Wayne movies can you show this afternoon? Because we don’t think we can continue play.’ Reluctantly, Channel Seven had to go along with our decision. So at that stage we called off play for the day.”

Graeme Rowland: “We had the five-hour slot that we have to fill because of sponsor commitments. It generally involves running replays of previous events. We’d always have maybe a one-hour highlights package of last year’s event standing by. In the event of play being cancelled all together, I would have previous events timed out that would comfortably get us to our off-air time. You never, ever go to air on a live production without standbys in place to enable you to keep it going.”

John Hopkins: “I went back to the press room and sat with Colin Phillips and we started talking about, ‘How do we get ourselves a 72-hole event?’ There was a real conflict between Channel Seven and the PGA Tour [of Australasia]. Channel Seven said, ‘We want to play 18 holes on the Friday and then we want to seed the groups after that.’ The tour said, ‘There’s no way. You can’t do that. You’re going to have to play Friday as if it was Thursday and Saturday as if it was Friday.’

“We were keen to then do 36 holes on the Sunday after a cut, but Channel Seven wouldn’t have a bar of that. A combination of Channel Seven and the PGA Tour pushed us into a 54-hole event. That’s the way it unfolded.”

Trevor Herden: “I put [a schedule of 18 holes Friday, 18 holes Saturday, 36 holes Sunday] on the table, but Channel Seven and the Australian Golf Union didn’t want to go down that road. Channel Seven, for some reason, thought that because the telecast had already started, there’d be too much confusion in spectator-land and they didn’t want to do it. Then Colin Phillips, God bless his soul, he backed Channel Seven. It’s his tournament, of course, and it’s his network with IMG. So between those three, they decided to keep it to 54 holes.”

Graeme Rowland: “I don’t recollect us being offered a 72-hole option. From a television point of view, obviously it would have created issues, but those issues were never raised because to my knowledge that option was never discussed. If there had been a round-table discussion, I’m sure there would have been points of view put forward, but I don’t know of a round-table discussion actually happening. If there was one, I wasn’t part of it. I ran the golf unit, I was executive producer of the golf coverage, but the network head of sport would be the person who would sign off on any decisions like that. I was trying to hold the coverage together – doing interviews in the locker rooms and with tournament officials, trying to explain to the public what was going on. But the rest of the timeslot, we replayed the previous year’s event.”

Mike Clayton: “Channel Seven refused to play 36 holes on Sunday, which was more of a taint on the tournament than anything on Thursday. We could have easily played 72 holes. That shows the power of TV, which was putting their interests ahead of what was best for the tournament. We could have played on Monday. We played on Monday in 1987.”

Martin Jolly: “Seven had other programming; they didn’t want to break into the Monday programming, and that’s just the way it was. So we couldn’t get it to air on the Monday anyway, which is what forced that final decision to play it over 54 holes.

“There would have been other factors. Television was a big factor in it because of Monday programming and not going into the Sunday night news and whatever they were showing at the time. The second one was the players. A lot of them said, ‘No, we can’t hang around for the Monday. We’ve got to get out of here.’ If I remember correctly, that was the most important factor – the players not wanting to come back and play on the Monday.”

Dominic Wall: “TV was one consideration. Some people said, ‘Oh, that was the only consideration.’ It wasn’t, and I think one of the main things was the equity to the players and the Rules of Golf. And even though the weather on Thursday was good, it was looking like the weekend could be a lot hotter and windier and potentially a northerly blowing. So there were a number of considerations that were brought into play. It wasn’t just, ‘Well, TV don’t want it. We can’t do it.’ I think that’s a little bit unfair to say it was largely television-led. That was just one of a number of considerations.”

Martin Jolly: “The final decision rested with the Australian Golf Union. Yes, we were their commercial partner – we were their joint venture partner, actually, in perpetuity – and so we had to deal with them long term. We were in all the meetings, but the way that joint venture worked was: IMG was responsible for a lot of the players, international players, television, sponsorship and marketing and the event organisation or from an implementation point of view. But anything to do with the golf rules and regulations of the golf, the PGA of Australia, that was all run through the AGU. The final decision on the golf rested with Colin Phillips, Dominic Wall and that team.”

John Hopkins: “I well recall the press conference, however. It was crowded. I said, ‘Well, I hope we can play 36 on Sunday.’ But then I had to justify why we couldn’t do 36 on Sunday and I started quoting the 1964 US Open at Congressional and what happens if it gets too hot. Because at that stage Channel Seven had basically said, ‘You can’t do 36. We won’t do it.’ We were stuck.”

Play restarts

Simon Magdulski: “I remember driving to the tournament very early on the Friday – it might have been 5am – and listening to the BBC World Service, and there was a report on what had happened the day before at the Aussie Open. The reporter wrapped it up by saying, ‘For years, the Sandbelt clubs have been running a competition to see who could present the fastest greens. Congratulations to Victoria Golf Club, because they won.’”

Mark Allen: “I remember turning up on Friday and Colin Phillips wouldn’t look at me. I had him absolutely cold when Peter Thomson dropped that ball inches from the hole and it rolled off the green. I had him cold. Colin Phillips, I have no doubt to this day, the 62 on the Tuesday scared him into double-cutting and rolling and turning it into a course where nobody was going to shoot a 62.

“I just felt like Colin was embarrassed about what happened and I caused that embarrassment and I felt that he would’ve been happy to see me miss the cut. And I wanted to be there on Sunday. I didn’t want to drive out the gates with my tail between my legs. We were never the same after that.”

Dominic Wall: “It was certainly exciting – a great championship from that point. The greens weren’t cut, I think, for two days. There was a significant amount of water put on the greens, and they responded well. And they came back into pretty good condition, to be honest. So what turned out to be not good on the Thursday certainly was great that it was able to turn around so quickly.”

Stuart Appleby: “The next day was like we played on a whole ’nother golf course. The greens… I heard they put a retardant or something on the poa annua and it made them dormant and that’s when they got so quick, and then the next day they sprayed them and woke them up.

“I had no idea what I was doing. It was like I just got time-warped and I went in a wormhole and ended up somewhere else.”

Richard Ball: “I couldn’t believe how green it was the next day. I do remember being fairly shellshocked about it. The biggest problem was going out there the next day and, after being terrified to hit the ball on the greens, suddenly you actually could give it a hit. I remember not adjusting very well.”

Steve Allan: “I don’t know how much water [was applied] or what they did on Thursday night, but come Friday when we restarted, the course was great. It was perfect. It was firm, it was fast, but it wasn’t unplayable. And at the end of the week, I was 12-under for three rounds. That’s a pretty standard winning score.”

Charles Howell III, who was 10-over par when play was called off on Thursday then led the field with a five-under 65 on Friday, in The Age: “I’m the most improved player!”

Mark Allen: “I got to my 36th hole, which was the Saturday, and I either needed a par or a birdie to make the cut. I was desperate because I really felt like Colin Phillips and the AGU wanted me to miss the cut. That was in my head, that’s what you think. I remember just nailing a drive down 18 and making my birdie or making my par or whatever it was to make the cut.”

Steve Allan: “I was playing well the whole second half of the year. I had a really good comfort level on the course; I enjoyed it. I was hitting the ball well and putting well.

“The first round, I got quite a few under par early, had a couple of bogeys and then came back with a good finish. I know I eagled 18 on the second day to finish six-under; I holed a pretty good long putt. That was in the morning. I wasn’t really sure how it was going to stack up, but I knew I’d be pretty close [to the lead]. At the time, I had a house just around the corner in Beaumaris, so I just went back there and watched a bit of the golf, played a few video games and got ready for the last day.”

A champ is crowned

Steve Allan: “I got off to a good start [on the Sunday]. I hit it close on the first. I was playing with Rich Beem, who obviously won the PGA that year. Craig Parry was in the group ahead. I birdied the first and Rich bogeyed it and I think I was straight out to a two-shot lead. I hit the ball well around that whole stretch, but I didn’t really make any more birdies. I remember being surprised that after I’d finished the seventh, I saw that I was still two ahead. I hit a really good shot into eight, which was playing as par 4. For the first time all day, I got a little bit ahead of myself. I had maybe six feet for birdie, I had a par 5 at No.9 coming up. I thought, I can put a bit of a gap here. I missed the putt then bogeyed the ninth and all of a sudden I was back to level.

“I was able to knuckle down and just start playing and hitting shots again and forgetting about exactly where I stood. I remember hitting a good shot into 11, making a birdie. Hit my tee shot a little left on 12, but that partners with the 13th fairway, so that was always a decent shot to hit. I had to come in blind over the ti-tree and I hit a really good shot in there to three or four feet and birdied again. When I played 13, that green was so steep, I was always trying to be short of it – front edge or short – I realised I was three ahead, which was weird. I’d only made two birdies and all of a sudden I was three ahead and then I three-putted 13. So again, I had to knuckle down and really get my composure, which I was able to do. I haven’t always been able to do that unfortunately through my career, but that day I was.

“I hit drives into the fairway bunkers on 17 and 18, and after I’d laid up on 18, I really wasn’t sure if Craig Parry in front had tied me. So I didn’t know if I needed a birdie or not. But before I hit my third shot into the green, I found out that I didn’t need birdie. So as long as Rich didn’t eagle, I just needed a par to win. I didn’t hit a very good pitch. It left me maybe a 25, 30-footer down and across the slope, but I’d had great pace all week so I really wasn’t too worried. I had a good feel for the putt and I rolled it up there pretty close. It would’ve been really nice to rip one up the last and make a birdie and do it in style.”

Craig Parry: “I was a little bit frustrated at getting close to winning our national Open without doing it. It was just another time when I finished second.”

Rich Beem: “It was fun being out there. It was fun listening to everybody cheer for Steve and I even got a little love down there. It was just great being in the mix and having a chance to win.”

Stuart Appleby: “It was like adding another microchip into your brain and ‘Plugger’ (Steve Allan), he had the most comfort doing that for three more days. The best guy won that week, and that’s the way it goes.”

Mark Allen: “I remember on the Sunday there being a feeling of, Thank God someone’s holding the trophy up! I was really, really happy for Steve Allan.”

Steve Allan: “I did, unfortunately, have to go back [to the USA] for Q-School. I didn’t leave the next day; I think it was two days’ time. It was great to be living around the corner. My agent at the time, Paul Galli, had rented the upstairs in a hotel bar in Brighton, just to have a party for his players. So that turned into our celebration. It was great. All my family and my friends were there. It was fantastic. From there we went back to my place. A lot of my friends came back.

“At some point late in the night we decided to go for a walk around Victoria again. Three or four of us went and had a walk around the last few holes. There was a security guard there and he stopped us and we said, ‘Oh, we won today, and we’re just walking around.’ And he was like, ‘Yeah, no worries.’”

Rich Beem: “We were kind of bummed out that we didn’t get the win. But even my caddie said to me, ‘You know what? I know you’re bummed out, but with Stephen winning, that changes his life now.’ I think it helped him get into a couple of really big events that he wouldn’t have gotten into if he hadn’t won. That took the sting out of it, as well as the Crown Lagers we had that night.”

Steve Allan: “I was definitely confident coming into the week. I put money on myself. I looked up the odds because I wanted to see what Geoff [Ogilvy] was [paying] on his home course and, while he hadn’t won yet on the PGA Tour, he’d been playing really well. Whoever was making the odds didn’t appreciate the PGA Tour compared to the Aussie tour, because I remember looking at Geoff’s odds and thinking, Oh geez, that’s a good bet. And then out of interest, ‘What am I?’ And on the page I was looking at, I was 100-1, and I’m like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me! I’m playing better than 100-1.’ I’m pretty sure ‘Lynchy’ (swing coach Dale Lynch) backed me. I know a few other people backed me. It wasn’t much money; it was only a $20 bet. And that was before the PGA Tour told us we weren’t allowed to do any betting.”

John Sloan: “I was really happy Steve Allan won. Steve had grown up playing the greens I prepared at Woodlands. He was used to firm, fast greens, so it was fantastic that he won. He’s a ripping kid.”

John Hopkins: “All the conjecture in the world doesn’t get you any further than the fact that Steve Allan won the Australian Open.”

Steve Allan: “I can understand why people would [think a 54-hole win carries an asterisk] when it’s only three rounds. One of Greg Norman’s Open wins was only three rounds. I still did what I consider the toughest thing to do in golf: stand there on the last day and beat everyone. It wasn’t like it got called off after the third round. If it got called off after the third round, you’d have to say, ‘Well, you didn’t [know the tournament was finishing then].’ I was standing on the tee with a reigning Major champion. Adam Scott was in the field. It was Geoff’s home course. Robert [Allenby] and Stuey [Appleby] were at their best. Badds had won a couple of Australian Opens at that point. Craig Parry hadn’t, but he did in the end at The Australian [in 2007]. Of the Aussies at the time, the only two that weren’t there were Greg and Steve Elkington.

“It’s probably more disappointing that I haven’t been able to do it again or give it a run.”

Lessons learnt

Simon Magdulski: “Do I understand clubs wanting to maintain the integrity of the challenge of their golf courses? Absolutely. It’s always easy in hindsight to look back and say, ‘That didn’t work very well, so the whole decision-making process was really poor.’ The important element of properly considering these things is to throw up all of the context, and Victoria being reduced to a par 70 and Steve Allan still ripping it apart when the greens had been softened up, it’s all part of the context. If that had been the way the golf course had been presented without a day having to be voided and that had gone on for four days – and had it been a par 71 or a par 72 – there would have been all this discussion about how Victoria’s probably not appropriate to be holding major events because the pros have had 35-under around the place. That’s probably the other narrative. Did it all work out perfectly? Well, obviously not, but these things are always easy in hindsight.”

Dominic Wall: “One of the benefits – if you can say a benefit comes out of something like that – was that there was a review. I had to write a detailed report about everything that happened afterwards. But where that sits now that I’ve left the AGU many years ago, I don’t know.”

John Sloan: “Toddy and I had to prepare a report for the board the next week and we went through every bit that happened – our concerns on the Wednesday night about those pins, which was backed up entirely by John Lindsay. I know that John went specifically and spoke to Colin about it and was told, ‘This is our tournament. Just make sure the guys are there in the morning with the hole-changer.’ John said to us, ‘Look, there’s nothing we can do about it. They’ve rented the course from us for the week, it’s their tournament. I hear you, but there’s nothing I can do about it.’”

Dominic Wall: “The positive things to come out of that were on two levels. One, bringing in the Australian Golf Course Superintendents Association, John Neylan specifically [see panel, page 101]. He would work very closely with the local superintendent and make sure that the course we wanted prepared was delivered and in the condition that we wanted it. So in that regard it was very positive. And I do think the relationship with the PGA Tour [of Australasia] got better after that. Not that it was bad before – it wasn’t a bad relationship – it was just that the AGU had done things in a certain way and felt they were doing a good job. And I do believe in a number of cases they were, but the relationship after that did improve.”

John Sloan: “One of the other really sad byproducts of it was the fact that everyone then became nervous about producing hard, fast greens. That reverberated across the whole industry, and it was not good because when [tournaments] went to ‘Metro’, the greens were soft and invariably ended up bumpy.

“Instead of looking at the processes and getting the processes right, I don’t think those lessons were ever learned, unfortunately. I remember when Peter Williams was at Royal Melbourne and ‘Crocky’ was at Royal Melbourne, those surfaces, you’d walk on them and they crunched. They were super-hard. And ‘Crocky’ used to say, ‘If the turf is not crunching, it’s too wet. It’s not dry enough.’ So unfortunately what happened in 2002 really put an arrow through firm, super-fast greens, which was disappointing. A lot could have been learned from the mistakes that were made at Victoria then, but I don’t think those lessons were ever learned.

“If you’ve been there for three or four weeks, come out and speak to us and say, ‘Gee, I’m really worried about these greens, because they look like they’re getting too fast,’ or pick up a putter and go out and putt them yourself. We were doing that every day with Trevor. It’s not as if it was a surprise, but unfortunately it comes across like we are trying to make excuses. That’s the problem. What I’m trying to do is say, ‘This is what happened.’ Everyone can have their own interpretation of that, but that’s factually what happened.”

John Hopkins, on Holden not renewing its naming-rights sponsorship of the Open after 2002: “It did not [make a difference]. They’d already made the decision. We knew that. We knew we’d lost them.”

Martin Jolly: “I was the guy that negotiated the deal for Holden through IMG – all of Holden’s sponsorships in women’s and men’s golf… they were significant sponsorships. They were coming to an end anyway. They’d been in golf for some time. Sponsorships change and they took a new direction.”

Colin Phillips, in 2005: “Naturally you think, Is it worth it? And yes, I did feel a lot of pressure to go then, but I also knew that it really wasn’t an issue that I should resign over. I got quite a few nasty letters from people suggesting that I do all sorts of things and that probably spurred me on a bit, and I thought, I really should fix this and make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

John Sloan: “Although it’s 20 years, it feels like it just happened yesterday. And the same emotions that I felt 20 years ago are still right with me now. It hasn’t gone away. Those emotions and what actually happened, they’ll stay with me forever. It’s very much etched in my mind.” 

2002 Holden Australian Open

Victoria GC (par 70), November 21-24

A new approach

For the next three Australian Opens after Victoria – the two at Moonah Links in 2003 and 2005, plus the Centenary championship at The Australian in 2004 – the Australian Golf Course Superintendents Association’s agronomist John Neylan began visiting the host courses regularly ahead of time in a bid to help avoid repeat scenarios.

Steven Potts, who was the chief executive of the AGCSA at the time, drove the initiative with the AGU’s then-executive director, Colin Phillips, to see where the AGCSA could assist from an agronomy standpoint.

“One of the biggest emphases was around green speed,” Neylan recalls today. “That was one of the ticklish points that came out of the Victoria Golf Club experience. And really just having a sounding board both from a superintendent’s point of view and an AGU point of view that things were going according to plan from an agronomic point of view.”

Moonah Links’ mighty Open course was new and Neylan was involved there during the establishment of the surfaces. “Moonah Links came along at a time when the AGU were heavily invested in it,” he adds. “There was a bit of pushback and negativity from players, but overall it was a pretty successful tournament [in 2003]. The golf course played pretty firm and challenging.”

The still-repairing reputation of the AGU did strike a hurdle during the 2005 Australian Open, the second to take place at Moonah Links. Another problem green surfaced when the wind began to blow from an unusual – and unexpected – direction.

“That went to hell in a handbasket for a bit,” Neylan recalls. “It was interesting, and I suppose it created a little more conservative attitude towards preparing golf courses for Australian tournaments. There was player pushback from having to play down there as a start; there was a little bit of negativity.

“The wind came in from a completely different direction than anybody had ever experienced there before and it caught things out. There’s no doubt about that. It probably focused a little bit on the design of the green because it’s a relatively narrow green, square to the tee, so there wasn’t a lot of room to move forwards or backwards in terms of shot play.

“The staff, they were watering between groups just to slow the green down. And of course, that caused a lot of anxiety and I suppose a lot of review of the comings and goings in terms of course prep from an agronomy point of view and, Maybe we should have anticipated this. That bit everybody on the backside, that 2005 tournament.”

More dramas were to follow. “A few years later (2009), we were up at New South Wales Golf Club as part of the AGCSA. It got windy up there and again play had to be suspended. That’s affected the way golf courses are typically prepared now. They’re probably prepared less hard and fast compared to maybe even member play.”

However, as Neylan says, all the expertise available and dedication to preparation won’t always be enough.

“Sometimes there’s just things from a maintenance and from an agronomy point of view that you could never anticipate. You can think of everything, but there’s just some things you can’t anticipate.”