First let me say that I agree Kingston Heath is a wonderful golf course, in fact I have it among my personal top 20 in the world. Equally I acknowledge that the conditioning at Royal Melbourne has been inadequate for some time. There are reasons for the problems at Royal but this isn’t the forum to defend a club that certainly should have managed its treasured turf better in the past few years.
The argument between whether Kingston Heath deserves to be ranked number 1 or not essentially comes down to a single issue; whether conditioning is an important factor in determining the quality of a golf course. I say emphatically that it isn’t, that great grass is simply icing on the cake and that the greatest cakes don’t need any decoration. Playing links golf in Britain during a dry summer, for instance, is one of the most enjoyable experiences in golf. The bounces are irregular, the fairways are brown and you might regularly hit approach shots from sandy divots, but it doesn’t matter - if the hole you are playing is fun and challenging the surface beneath your ball is irrelevant.
For decades we have ranked Royal Melbourne at number 1, chiefly because its design is without peer in this country. It’s true that historically the courses have been well maintained there, but I don’t think you could argue they have been obviously superior to Metropolitan, Kingston Heath or others on the Sandbelt. Instead, it’s the quality of the individual holes, of the terrain and the greens and bunkers that has made Royal Melbourne our premier layout. Now the standard of the turf has dropped and when reviewing the judges’ scores this year it became apparent that many were marking the East and West courses down in design areas as a result of these conditioning issues. This is unfortunate, because although the state of the fairways will naturally affect your own golfing experience, it shouldn’t derail your ability to look at the holes objectively and determine how good they are.
The biggest problem with a panel that is focused too much on grooming is that most judges typically only see a course once during the two-year ranking cycle, which makes it next to impossible to accurately and fairly assess the typical turf conditions presented annually to the membership. I would hate to think that the only reason Kingston Heath and New South Wales passed Royal Melbourne this year was because they hosted tournaments, and looked spectacular in the process.
Personally, I had a wonderful week in November watching Tiger methodically dismantle the Heath. For me it wasn’t the crowds, or the play of Tiger or the frenzy around his every move (or every daytime move as it turned out) that struck me, but rather what a fantastic job Dan Soutar and Dr MacKenzie did on such a confined and relatively unappealing property. Kingston Heath is an incredible course, and might be the best-bunkered track on the planet. It isn’t as good as Royal Melbourne West though. Even without any grass on the fairways, RM West would be my pick as Australia’s number 1 golf course.
Darius Oliver, Architecture Editor Australian Golf Digest
