The Amateur Championship of Australia is already into its third day, but how many golfers know it?
The tournament better known as the Australian Amateur this year has a naming-rights sponsor to officially become referred to as the adidas Australian Amateur.
Whatever you want to call it, it’s the most unheralded important golf tournament in the country. A date change from March (when it was played from 1994 until 2011) to January was made to better fit in with the global amateur tournament schedule, while the abandonment of a matchplay component in 2021 to instead be 72 holes of strokeplay arguably impacted its prestige and certainly altered its historical consistency.
But neither switch explains the lack of attention this particular national championship receives.
Talk to any golfer from yesteryear with an intimate knowledge of the Australian Amateur – Mike Clayton (the winner in 1978) comes to mind, as does Tony Gresham (the 1977 champion and three times a runner-up, including to Clayton) if you want to go back a little further – and the lack of attention and reportage is inexcusable.
Like many national amateur championships, the Australian Amateur was considered the premier golf tournament in the nation in its early years. With a history dating to 1894, it pre-dates the Australian Open by a decade so had a built-in headstart in the prestige stakes. It’s also worth remembering that the Open was used as a qualifying tournament for the Amateur back then.
Where the Australian Amateur sits in the landscape of golf here is difficult to define today. The move to strokeplay was made in part to help prepare would-be professional golfers – which is what most contestants are – for the format they’d need to conquer at the play-for-pay level. However, matchplay served up some of the most compelling contests in the championship’s history.
Without wanting to cherry-pick the best, we will nevertheless single out one modern classic – the 2013 final when Cam Smith came from 5 down to big-hitting Geoff Drakeford at Commonwealth Golf Club to win 3&2. It was the first example of the grittiness we know Smith is repeatedly capable of displaying and that helped make him an Open champion a mere nine years later. It is a final that also grew in significance in the years afterwards, especially considering that Drakeford has since abandoned his playing career despite entering the top 500 in the world ranking.
Has the move to all-strokeplay eroded that quality? Perhaps. Three stagings at the count-all-the-shots format is not a deep enough reservoir of evidence to be certain just yet. Although one gets the feeling it was a 125-year tradition that didn’t really need messing with.
The most recent format change came amid COVID, with a July 2020 announcement made ahead of the 2021 championships. Some efficiencies were evident in the changes, while a few were made to fall into line with other national amateur championships. It wasn’t just the Australian Amateur going under the knife, either; the Mid-Amateur, Senior Amateur and Interstate Teams Matches (main and junior) were all overhauled.
Golf Australia’s then-operations manager Simon Brookhouse said the “exciting restructure” would modernise the entire suite of national championships and ensure they’re played at the best possible venues.
“GA has been reviewing its key events since OneGolf began with a view to making them align better and played in a way that’s more logical for host clubs, athletes and us as organisers,” Brookhouse said in July 2020.
“The immediate focus has been on our national championships to ensure their relevance and that they have a professional and consistent delivery across the country, wherever they are hosted.”
In truth, however, the format of the Australian Amateur has been tweaked numerous times, especially on the men’s side.
In the early post-World War II years there were no qualifying rounds in the men’s championship, and all entrants played matchplay. In 1948, 149 players competed in the event. From 1959 to 1995, the format was 36 holes of strokeplay qualifying followed by matchplay for the top 64 players. In 1971, the field was reduced to 32 players for the matchplay rounds. From 1996 until 2011, the qualifying rounds were played over 72 holes. In 2012, qualifying rounds were reduced to 36 holes, with the leading 64 players qualifying for the matchplay rounds. In 2007, the formation of Golf Australia (the amalgamation of the Australian Golf Union and Women’s Golf Australia) led to the men’s championship being played at the same venue and time as the women’s championship. The scrapping of matchplay eventually came from 2021.
This week is the fourth edition held at strokeplay and it’s not difficult to imagine there being no further format changes – at least not for a while. Where the Australian Amateur stands among our biggest championships in another 20 or 25 years, however, will have as much to do with whether Golf Australia wants the championship to be seen as an elite event for our leading amateur golfers or part of their preparation for a likely professional career.
Can it be both? Perhaps. For now, though, the past decade of change has left the Australian Amateur Championship in a state of flux.
