Sportscenter host Scott Van Pelt says it was similar in ‘97 when Tiger Woods won at Augusta.

“There was nothing to compare it to. In Jack’s case there was no historical context for a 46-year-old to win the Masters. In Tiger’s case there was no historical context for a 21-year-old to win,” Van Pelt says in A Short History of Golf.

“And not just that but a 21-year-old to win and shoot the lowest score. And not just that but a 21-year- old to shoot the lowest score and win by the largest margin. And not just that but at Augusta National for someone who’s dad was a black man.

“I mean, you don’t try to find context because none exists. You just put it out there and say ‘well here’s what happened and boy, well, this was something’.”

Van Pelt had been recruited to the Golf Channel in 1995, in part because of his working relationship with the phenom. Van Pelt says when Woods won the ‘97 Masters, “it changed everything”.

“That’s when every single thing about the way golf was covered and talked about changed. Everything,” Van Pelt says.

“And the Golf Channel, where I was at that point in time, was just a baby, it was two years old. How we covered golf was a byproduct of this enormous tidal wave that Tiger created.”

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Tiger won the Open Championship St Andrews in 2000 and 2005. At Holyake in 2006 he put on a master class of stinging 2-irons. He didn’t hit a bunker in 72 holes. He hit a driver once and shouldn’t have.

He beat Sergio Garcia in a crackerjack US PGA Championship at funky old Medinah in 1999, the highlight of which was El Nino cutting his ball around a tree and chasing after it and ripping off a little leap in the middle of the fairway to see what happened. Good times.

Bad times: When Woods beat the all-yellow-clothed Garcia at the Open Championship in Holyake in 2006 he texted friends: “I just killed Tweetie Bird”.

Tiger won the 2000 US Open at Pebble Beach by 15 shots. Repeat— by 15 shots. He slaughtered them. He shot 19-under at the 2000 Open Championship at St Andrews and won by eight shots. He won the PGA Championship too but his fifth place in the Masters precluded a grand slam. He was 24-years-old.

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Maybe not with a vengeance. It’s golf, not Die Hard III. But Scotland is where golf became ‘golf ’. St Andrews is the viral epicentre. It’s the undisputed Home of Golf. And being there to watch the Open Championship at the home of golf—and leaning on the stone wall near the Road Hole, no less—well ... for this man of golf, i was borderline out-of-body.

For when you identify as a golfer – a tragic, a rusted-on crazy person, an addict who wakes each day to watch golf, reads the papers about golf, plays golf, drinks a beer and talks about golf, watches golf again at home on the couch while leafing through a golf magazine and checking the Internet for his club’s results and his handicap, and looking for golf gear to buy online before heading to bed torn between Shark Attack: Greg Norman’s Guide to Aggressive Golf by Greg Norman and Dr Bob Rotella’s Golf is Not a Game of Perfect - then a visit to the Old Course at St Andrews, you just have to do it. It is a Thing.

I was there on the Sunday of the 2015 Open Championship which was still round three given the wind on the Saturday would’ve blown caribou off tundra. My pals and I—a 14-man crew on a cultural (golf and beer) appreciation tour of Britain—had spent Saturday morning playing the nearby Scotscraigh golf course (promoted as “the world’s 13th oldest”) and we were flogged like so many horse thieves. Play was suspended for the pros on the Old Course while we thrashed away, flayed by heather and angry prickles. It was cracking fun.

Better fun was had four years earlier, in 2011, when my brother and I went in the ballot and actually played the Old Course and stayed in the Old Course Hotel in a room overlooking the Road Hole and the homely little Jigger Inn.

We woke from jetlag at 4am with the sun just coming up, the floor-to-ceiling windows delivering early morning hues of purples and mauves, and highlighting the contours and the promise of the Old Course. Man, it was good.

And playing it, well …

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Mackenzie had loved watching Walter Hagen; loved how he played. Hagen could be erratic but he played with flair. He had a crack. And his shots from wide out in the rough were as much fun as any.

Bubba’s work could be similar. See him in that play-off, from the pine straw on 10 at Augusta in the Masters, hitting wedge high and drawing up through a gap the tree tops, to a green he couldn’t see, well…

Seve Ballesteros was another for whom Mackenzie would’ve had affection, reckons renowned course designer and Mackenzie man, Mike Clayton.

“Ballesteros was the style of player that Mackenzie was encouraging ... Mackenzie didn’t want people to play golf like Hale Irwin. Hale Irwin—one of the greats—his playing style was to hit it down the middle, then hit it on the green, make two putts, and move on. And he’d do it 72 times and he’d win the US Open.

“Great player. Won the US Open three times. But his style was robotic. Which I think would’ve been anathema to Mackenzie. For that reason I think Mackenzie would’ve hated the US Open, the way they always set the course up. The ‘strategy’ is to hit a fairway thirty yards wide, then hit the green.”

Not to say that US Open setups don’t create drama.

Consider the 18th hole at Cherry Hills in the 1978 US Open. Andy North had led by four shots with five holes to play but bogied 14 and double-bogied 15 to give Dave Stockton and JC Snead a sniff.

North composed himself enough to make pars on 16 and 17 and walked onto the 18th tee with a 2-shot lead. Bogey the last and he was (probably) US Open champion.

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It would be played at the same course each year—Huntingdale in the Melbourne Sandbelt—and winners would receive a jacket, this one a garish yellow.

Gair’s experience in running golf tournaments amounted to promoting the modest Box Hill Open. As he told golf reporter Peter Stone from The Age, he’d also written and produced a children’s play called “Make Me A Smile”, which was staged at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre.

“How long did it last?” asked Stone.

“One day,” replied Gair.

But Stone was duly convinced the Australian Masters had sufficient star power — Lee Trevino was coming, Greg Norman was coming, local heroes Ian Stanley and Bob Shearer were aboard — and promoted the event in his journal.

And thus the famously sports-loving public of Melbourne heard about a brand new golf tournament bearing the oxymoronic slogan, “A New Tradition”.

Apart from financial stress—Inglis couldn’t pay Trevino to attend; the players nearly boycotted when prize-money was reduced, and it took something of a whip-around to come up with $10,000 to ensure the tournament wasn’t cancelled altogether—the first Australian Masters tournament got off the ground. And made a $50,000 loss

A successful vacuum cleaner salesman called Frank Williams was approached to bail DGI’s Masters out of the financial hole, which Williams did. He’d always loved golf, had played at Sunningdale in England as a boy. He tipped in the $50,000 on the proviso that he would own a half share in the venture.

“We did it really well the second year,” Williams said. “And with my input and expertise we lost a quarter million!”

But the pair doubled down. They found money for appearance fees for superstars Seve Ballesteros, Bernhard Langer, Ian Woosnam and Curtis Strange. They sold the concept to national TV broadcaster, Channel Seven, who agreed to give them 24 hours of airtime. They sold advertising space to advertisers, recruited sponsors and pitched it hard to the greater Melbourne sports- watching public. And they sold it as a battle between one man, the Great White Shark Greg Norman, and the world’s greatest players.

“It was a marketing exercise, the Masters,” Williams said. “The second year we decided we were going to make it a tournament worth coming to see with a lot of overseas players. Initially everyone had treated it as a bit of joke.

“So, we spent money on appearance fees, which some say is a bad thing, some say is a good thing. But if you wanted a decent tournament, you’ve got to have worldwide ‘name’ players.”

Norman was up for that. He promoted the event by jumping out an airplane. He emerged from a Huntingdale lake in scuba gear. Whatever they asked, the Shark did. And where the Shark went, people followed. And everyone got paid.

Norman won the Australian Masters six times. Adam Scott won it. Tiger Woods won it. Colin Montgomerie had a rare win outside Europe when he finished 10-under in 2001. The 1961 U.S Open winner Gene “The Machine’ Littler won the second one in 1980 aged 50. Other winners include Ian Poulter, Justin Rose and Langer.

The tournament became so successful that Williams and Inglis visited Augusta to watch the US Masters to see what they could learn from Augusta’s green jackets. Their casual enquiries received short shrift, according to Williams.

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“I really don’t like that question,” Graham told the author during research for A Short History of Golf. “I didn’t leave Australia because of ‘Australia’. I left Australia to play in a country that had an established tour.

“So that’s really an offensive question.”

Wasn’t meant to be. Just wanted to know why he’d left.

Why the offense? Graham perceived that the question had an agenda, had inherent critique. There was a time that Australian sportsmen were criticized for living outside Australia, for “abandoning” Australia, even shedding their Australian-ness. There is a hint of Texas in Graham’s drawl just as there is Florida in the accent of Greg Norman. Doesn’t mean they are not proud Australians. Graham resented the implication and carried it around on tour with him.

“You went all over the place trying to make a living, you travelled to different countries,” Graham said.

“If I had stayed in Australia, I would have finished up being a club pro or playing in Asia. I did not want to do that. I was following a dream. It had nothing to do my leaving Australia. The only structured tour was in the United States.

“I came here and was lucky; in my first year I won a tournament. So, instantly I knew I was a reasonably good player.

“So, you get your exemption and you just keep playing and playing and playing, and instead of flying around the world, you just go from [US] state to state.

“[World golf] was completely different to what it is now.”

Outside the U.S PGA Tour, there were not organized tours with big prize money anywhere in the world. International players such as Graham would fly off to contest a national Open and maybe a regional tournament either side.

In the U.S, Graham was accepted by the local professionals. He was of a generation just removed from Roberto De Vicenzo and Bobby Locke whom American players resented for winning ‘their’ tournaments.

Yet Australians Kel Nagle and Bruce Devlin were admired by Ben Hogan for their work ethic and willingness to travel, and it softened the locals. The Australians would make livings on tour, as would the great Bob Charles of New Zealand. It was Devlin who convinced Graham to make the move, according to Graham.

“Bruce had come over here and settled. He had tried to commute for a couple of years and found that to be impossible, and financially not viable. So he raised his kids here and bought a house here, and when you’ve got kids getting into school and you have roots on the ground, it’s hard,” Graham said.

“I stayed in America because that’s where the money was. And this is where the best players were. I didn’t want to go every January and February and play in Asia. I wanted a life. I wanted to play where the best players were. And I wanted to play where the most money was.”

The money was there because things were just getting exciting. IMG and television had created a ‘big three’ – Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Gary Player.

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“In rehearsals I was profane as could be,” Chirkinian told The New York Times. “I ripped everybody. We had seven announcers all wanting air time, and it was important they remember I was the boss. I treated my crew almost like children, and let's face it, sometimes children need to be spanked. It was a form of tough love.”

Chirkinian, an Armenian American, is known as the father of golf broadcasting. While the Masters had been broadcast prior to Chirkinian producing the event for CBS, Chirkinian made it accessible and personal for viewers. He gave the Masters at Augusta its look.

He produced the Masters for 38 years. His innovations are legion.

He had multiple cameras shooting from different angles. He sent cameras out with reporters to bring the action to the viewer. He was the first to put a camera in a blimp. He put white paint in golf holes so viewers could see them on TV.

He put microphones around the green so people could hear the players, the crowd. He put microphones on the tee-box so people could hear the pure strike of Persimmon wood on Balata ball.

He popularized the concept of players being ‘under par’ or ‘over par’, 2-under or 5-over, for example. Previously players were ranked on their score. A cut might be 144. A four-round score to beat could be 282 say, or 289.

Chirkinian put plus or minus numbers on leaderboards and in television graphics. He didn’t invent ‘par’, he re-cast it.

“I was probably the most innovative son of a bitch who ever worked in television,” Chirkinian said. “I’ve done so many things, I can’t remember half of them.”

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