Seven Notes on Australia’s Sandbelt Invitational

I've just finished a 10-day trip to Melbourne, Australia, to visit some of the best golf courses in the world and attend the Sandbelt Invitational. I'll have many more thoughts about this experience in the months ahead, but for now, here are seven stray thoughts:

1. First, let’s talk birdies and bogeys. The Sandbelt Invitational, hosted by the Geoff Ogilvy Foundation, wrapped up on Thursday in Melbourne, Australia. This unique tournament features male and female professionals and amateurs competing for four different titles. After rounds at Commonwealth Golf Club, Yarra Yarra Golf Club, Woodlands Golf Club, and the West Course at Royal Melbourne, Aussie pro Ryan Peake (-3) won the men’s professional competition in a playoff over DP World Tour member David Micheluzzi. Caitlin Peirce (+6), Kayun Mudadana (+1), and Amelia Harris (+7) also took home trophies—for the women’s professional, men’s amateur, and women’s amateur divisions, respectively.

2. For a while on Thursday afternoon at Royal Melbourne West, there were whispers that the course record of 63 could be in trouble. Peake played the first five holes in six under, notching four birdies and an eagle. He stumbled early on the back nine—going bogey, double bogey, bogey on Nos. 11-13—but hung on to record a 67 and a two-putt par on the playoff hole.

3. Peake has come a long way in the past 10 years. Once a decorated junior golfer, the Western Australian lost his way in his early 20s, joining a motorcycle gang and ending up in prison for assault. While serving his five-year sentence, Peake got back in shape, and soon after his release in 2019, he began winning tournaments on Australia’s pro-am circuits. He is now a regular on the PGA Tour of Australasia.

4. At age 53, Melbourne native Richard Green has had a career year. He racked up five runner-up finishes on the Champions Tour and finished in third place in the season-long Charles Schwab Cup. In just 26 tournaments, he earned more than two million dollars—about a fifth of what he accumulated in 466 events on the European Tour, where he spent most of his prime playing days.

During the past week at the Sandbelt Invitational, Green has had to flex some skills he rarely needs on the Champions Tour.

“There’s not too many times you can hear your ball land on the green from 180 yards out—in America, definitely not,” he said after finishing T-4 among male professionals, three strokes behind Peake and Micheluzzi. “This is one-of-a-kind golf, the Sandbelt. You can play and practice on [Royal Melbourne] and get your game tuned into this type of golf, but it’s hard to make that work anywhere else. We just don’t play anywhere else like this. It’s just special stuff.”

5. Is Melbourne the best golf city in the world? I’m not sure it’s particularly close. You could make an argument for St. Andrews or Edinburgh, but St. Andrews doesn’t have Melbourne’s depth and variety of courses, and Edinburgh isn’t a golf city so much as the hub of a great golf region. Philadelphia boasts a wonderful array of Golden Age designs, but its climate and soil are no match for the Sandbelt’s. The concentration of excellent-to-amazing courses in the south suburbs of Melbourne is unique, and something every serious golfer should experience at least once.

6. The excellence of courses like Royal Melbourne and Kingston Heath is due as much to turf presentation as to architecture. Firmness is a kind of religion among Melbourne superintendents, and the fact that the ball doesn’t stay where it lands makes even the simplest strategic concepts (bunker on the inside of the dogleg, bunker on the other side of the green) come alive.

Should you take risks and “chase angles” in order to open up pathways to pins in the Sandbelt? That’s up to you and your preferred course-management guru. But I doubt even the most hardened data scientist could go to Melbourne leave with the impression that angles never matter.

7. The Sandbelt Invitational—the brainchild of Geoff Ogilvy and Mike Clayton, great players and even greater advocates for the game—offers a utopian vision of competitive golf: women and men, amateurs and pros, learning from each other and competing on the finest courses in the world. The Australian game is lucky to have such a tournament, such venues, and such leaders as Ogilvy and Clayton.

This piece originally appeared in the Fried Egg Golf newsletter. Subscribe for free and receive golf news and insight every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.