The Sandbelt, on the south-east side of Melbourne, is the patch of land on which Australian golf was decided. The patch is about eleven miles across, runs in a rough arc from Black Rock down through Cheltenham to Sandringham, and sits on the kind of fine sandy loam that drains the rain from a winter morning faster than the maintenance crew can mop the cart paths. On that patch sit nine courses that, between them, have produced the look and the language that defines a continent’s idea of what a golf course should be. The course at the head of the group, by the consensus of the people who have walked all of them and most of the people who have only walked a few, is Royal Melbourne, and the eighteen at Royal Melbourne that does the most of the work is the West.
The West was designed by Alister MacKenzie in 1926. MacKenzie spent five weeks in Melbourne on the trip in which he produced the routing, then sailed for America and did not come back. The construction was carried out by Alex Russell, the 1924 Australian Open champion and a member of the club, who walked the routing with MacKenzie and then translated the sketches into the contours the course still wears. The collaboration is the reason the course looks like a MacKenzie course and plays like one even though MacKenzie himself never saw the finished version. The greens are the MacKenzie greens. The bunkering is the MacKenzie bunkering. The way the holes step across the rises and falls of the property is the MacKenzie routing. The reason the corners of the bunkers are the precise corners they are, and not the corners on the drawings, is Russell.
The greens that the rest of the world copied
The thing on which the West makes its reputation is the greens. They are large, they are heavily contoured, they run firm and fast in the summer months, and they sit on the kind of native couch grass that, when the wind is off the bay and the maintenance crew has stopped watering on a Wednesday afternoon, produces a putting surface that will release a wedge shot the same way a links course will release a wedge shot. The contours are not the soft, modern, three-percent contours of a TPC course. They are the contours of a designer who believed a green should have three or four discrete plateaux on which a pin could sit and that the difference between the right plateau and the wrong one should be the difference between a birdie putt and a two-putt for par.
The sixth green, on the par-four that turns sharply to the right and asks for a tee shot down the left side that flirts with the bunker complex, is the green most often cited as the one that captures the design philosophy. The pin on the back-right shelf is reachable only from a tee shot up the left edge of the fairway. A tee shot bailed out to the right side, which is the easier line off the tee, leaves an approach that cannot get within thirty feet of the back-right pin because the contour falls away from the line. The course rewards the player who plays the harder shot off the tee with a shorter putt at the end of it. It is the MacKenzie principle, in one hole, more clearly than on any other par four on the property.
The bunkers as part of the architecture
The bunkers on the West are the second feature of the course that produces the reputation. They are deep, they are scalloped, and the lips of them, on the fairway bunkers in particular, are turfed almost vertically in a way that produces a bunker shot the player has not got the option of advancing more than fifty yards. The visual effect of the bunkering, on the approach to a green from a tee shot that has flirted with one of the complexes, is the visual effect of a course that has been designed to make the player conscious of the line they have chosen. The bunker is not there to catch a stray shot. The bunker is there to dictate the line of the tee shot that is trying to avoid it.
The bunker complexes are also, on a course of this age, the elements that have required the most ongoing attention. The current presentation of the bunkering is the product of a long and careful restoration programme led by the club, with the goal of returning the shapes to the originals as MacKenzie and Russell laid them out. The current version of the West is, by most measures, the closest version to the 1926 original the course has been since the original was new.
The Composite Course
The fact about Royal Melbourne that the visiting Tour player will discover on arrival is that the West is not always the course they will play. The big international events held at the club — the Presidents Cup, the World Cup of Golf, the Australian Open in some years — are played on what the club calls the Composite Course, which is twelve holes from the West and six from the East routed into a single eighteen-hole course. The Composite was originally devised to allow the club to host large events without sending traffic through the streets that border the West, and it has become, in the years since, the version of Royal Melbourne the international television audience has come to know. The Composite is a great course. The West, on the consensus of the Tour pros who have played both, is the better one.
The reason for the consensus is the holes the Composite leaves out. The closing stretch of the West, in particular, is the section of the course on which the Composite has not been able to reproduce the demands of the original routing. The seventeenth, a long par four that turns gently to the right and plays into the prevailing wind, is the hole on which a tournament round will be decided more often than any other on the property. The Composite, by the constraints of the routing, has to substitute one of the East’s closing holes. The substitution is a fine hole. It is not the seventeenth on the West.
What it is like to play
The walk on the West, for the visitor playing it on a Tuesday morning, is the walk of a course that has not been forced to do anything it was not built to do. The fairways are wide enough that the player will hit them, the greens are large enough that the player will reach them, and the trouble is concentrated in the places where, in the second shot or the putt, the player will discover what the course was actually asking them to do. The score the visitor walks off with, on the West, is almost always higher than the score the visitor expected to walk off with on the first tee. The reason for the gap is the greens. The reason for the gap is also the bunkers. The reason for the gap, on the broader accounting, is the design of a course that asks a question on every shot and does not, on the wrong answer, allow the player to recover the stroke they have given away.
The West, in summary, is the course that has done the most to settle the argument about what good golf course design looks like in the southern hemisphere. The argument was settled in 1926 by the work of a designer who saw the property once and a member of the club who walked it every day. The course that came out of the collaboration is the one a hundred others on the same patch of sand have been compared to ever since. The comparison, on the evidence of the West itself, has not produced a serious rival.