Manolo Piñero gifts us one of those delightful golf stories. It happened in 1977 at the The Australian Golf Club, one of the two courses hosting the ISPS Handa Australian Open this week. We go back, riding on the prodigious memory of the Spanish champion, to the last round of that Australian Open nearly half a century ago. Piñero was 25 years old.
He played that final round with Graham Marsh and Jack Nicklaus. The Golden Bear was then 37 years old and had no less than 16 Majors under his belt. He would still win two more, the Open the following year and the Masters in 1986. He was also the defending champion and the author of a controversial remodelling of the greens carried out that year on that very course, at The Australian Golf Club.
We say it was controversial because not a few players, more or less publicly, after all, it was the great Nicklaus, then expressed that those new greens bordered on madness. “Some were unplayable, impossible,” Piñero confesses to Ten Golf as if he had them right in front of his eyes. Manolo and Nicklaus went out on the last day with chances of victory. The Extremaduran, based in Marbella, was five strokes from David Graham, the final champion, and the North American from Columbus, who had already won the tournament five times, by three. You can get an idea of how long his shadow was in that ranking…
64 players had made the cut and in that fourth round of golf no one managed to shoot under 70, while twelve signed 80 or more. One of them was Nicklaus. Scorecard of 80 and fourteenth in the ranking. One of the few he made in his career at his best level. Piñero shot 74 and finished eighth. “As soon as we signed the scorecard, Nicklaus confessed to us: I definitely got carried away with the greens, I overdid it,” recalls the Spaniard. They got up again and subjected them to a new remodelling.
This week two Australian Opens are being played at the same time, women’s and men’s. They are held on two courses. One is The Lakes and the other is the aforementioned The Australian Golf Club. The locals say that the first nine holes of The Australian are the toughest in the whole country. There are over 1,500 golf courses in Australia. Be careful. Seen this way, what Piñero did in 1977 can almost be classified as something heroic… The story is worth it.
“I arrived at the Australian Open straight from the Open de Brasil. Chino Fernández won it in Sao Paulo. We left on Monday and landed in Sydney on Wednesday at nine in the morning. It was a 42-hour flight. At noon I had the ProAm, so I didn’t have time to go to the hotel. They picked me up at the airport and took me straight to the golf club. I took a shower and went out to play without knowing anything about the course. I shot 32 or 33 on the first nine. Then, of course, I crashed, I don’t know if I shot more than 40, the whole trip came down on me,” he recalls with a smile. In any case, there was his calling card on the nine toughest holes in Australia. As if to intimidate the magician Piñero.
The Australian Open has been held twenty times at The Australian Golf Club. This will be the twenty-first. Nicklaus achieved three (1975, 1976 and 1978) of his six victories in this tournament there. In the list of winners of this course are other great players like Jordan Spieth, Greg Norman, David Graham or Kel Nagle. The last winner on this stage was Cameron Davis in 2017. By the way, in that memorable year 1977, the Australian Open was considered the fifth major. Many of the top 25 players in the world were there. “An Australian millionaire threw a lot of money and almost all the big stars came,” Piñero assures. It wouldn’t be bad if this historic tournament, first played in 1904, became a more significant stop on the calendar again.
Be that as it may, this year’s field is not bad at all. The Australian Armada repeats in full, with Cameron Smith, Adam Scott, Min Woo Lee, Lucas Herbert or Cam Davis leading the way. In addition, there are Adrian Meronk, who defends the title, Joaco Niemann, Robert MacIntyre or Ryo Hisatsune, the European Tour’s rookie of the year. As for the Spaniards, we have Rafa Cabrera Bello, Joel Moscatel, Alfredo García Heredia and Ángel Ayora. Rafa and Alfredo play this Thursday at The Australian. Remember, also, that this week three places for the Open Championship are up for grabs.
*PS: (As you can see in the image accompanying this article, The Australian Golf Club is known as the Augusta of Australia).
