10 Great Things About Royal Melbourne

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With the holiday week and my need to inspect Tasmania's finest golf, not to mention a 15 hour plane ride home, posting will be light. Still, I just can't let go of Royal Melbourne yet, so there's my Golf World Monday item with a few player quotes and here, in a stunning world exclusive, a few more thoughts on the course.

Frankly, it's morbidly depressing to think we won't see a tournament golf course this fascinating for a while. I could have filed a book on what I saw out at Royal Melbourne this week, but I'll only bore you with a few observations.

  • The course gets more interesting, more fascinating and more beguiling each day you study it. I watched five days of golf there and feel like I hardly know it.
  • The greens are complex, yet the key features are easy to remember. This is vital in attracting the affection of players who want to shape shots off of the contours (and therefore, makes the strategy so much more interesting.)
  • The conditioning. So firm, so fast and so pure, yet not too green or unnatural in appearance.
  • The bunker faces are firm with little-to-no sand on them while the floors are raked. There is simply no excuse for not doing this in the United States and elsewhere.
  • The club has the best members-only logo in golf. I'd post it, but what's the point. We aren't members.
  • Not all of the best holes on the property are on the Composite course, meaning the tired suggestion that it's not great because it requires a Composite 18 is, well, tired.
  • The par-3s. Tiger said it after the round, and it was echoed by several players: par-3s do not need to be 250 yards to be interesting. They can be 150 yards and still all the best players can handle...assuming the architect did his job. And to think they left out several others on the property that would have been just as fascinating to watch.
  • Every Presidents Cup match played the most interesting holes on the course. Yes, many of RM's standout holes came early in the round, but every match passed through the first through sixth holes, and for that matter, the seventh through thirteenth. It was considered an unusual flow, but it worked well.
  • They open their doors to professional golf. The Presidents Cup this week, the LPGA in February.
  • The Composite course features three of the best short par-4s in the world. As in, top 10 on my or most sane individuals' list of favorite short par-4s: 1, 6, 10 on this year's Composite, better known as 3 West, 10 West and 1 East.