It’s been forty-eight years since an American, largely unknown to us, came to Melbourne and won a significant championship.

Mark Lye, a pro only a year and who’d won less than $1,500, to that point, on the local Tour teed up at Victoria in the 1976 Colgate tournament and beat a field including US Open champion Lou Graham, Tom Watson a young Greg Norman and the remarkable 56-year-old Kel Nagle who was third behind Simon Owen.

Ultimately Lye won the Australian money list in 1976 and earned his place into big events in America on the back of it.

The ISPS HANDA Australian Open men’s champion, Ryggs Johnston was as unheralded in Melbourne as Lye was decades ago and staggeringly as unfamiliar with either Victoria or Kingston Heath as anyone else from Montana who’d never been to Australia.

Of course, conventional wisdom says it’s impossible to win on the Sandbelt courses without knowing how to play them and Johnston hadn’t even time to play a practice round at either course. Likely the rain affected and softer than usual greens helped but this was a remarkable achievement and one hugely helpful to his DP World Tour status.

Unlike Elvis Smylie who’d missed at the first stage of the school, Johnston made it all the way to the final in Spain, shot 21-under to tie for 7th place and set himself on his way.

He's more than on his way now, jumping, with Smylie, into the winner’s category, one of the benefits for both young men being a place in this week’s six-million-dollar, sixty-six player, tournament in South Africa.

In the end Johnston made a 15-footer for a birdie at the formerly long par-5, 14th but playing down the wind was little more than a middle iron second shot and from there played flawless golf over the difficult run to the clubhouse from Kingston Heath’s 15th tee.

It’s not as difficult as the final four at Carnoustie but it’s been remarkably effective as exposing faults over the decades.

Curtis Luck, playing ahead was the man most likely to beat Johnston but after missing both the difficult par-3 15th green and the par-4 16th, and saving pars, he missed the fairways at the 17th and 18th and neither time could he scrape out the fours he so desperately needed.

Second earned Luck a spot in The Open, but he’d have swapped Royal Portrush, and a whole lot more, for the European card on offer to the winner.

Jiyai Shin was probably as favoured to win the Women’s Open as the Montana-man was unfavoured as she’d lost a play-off to Karrie Webb in the 2008 Open at Kingston Heath and knew the course, albeit one played in a quite different order.

Shin earns less credits for her remarkable play because she largely competes on the women’s Tour in Japan, a Tour which is now more popular than the equivalent men’s, one in the age of Isao Aoki, Jumbo Ozaki, Tommy Nakajima and Graham Marsh was almost as big, in prizemoney terms, as the Tour in the United States.

Either way, Shin is clearly much closer to the very top of the women’s game than her high twenties ranking suggests.

There was much comment on the set up of the golf courses and the greens being noticeably softer than years past. No doubt they were, and the rain surely didn’t help but it’s been a long time since Sandbelt greens played anything like they did in the famed (or infamous) era in the 1970s when Royal Melbourne was at its Claude Crockford, fiery peak.

In truth, those 1970s days bordered on silly and somewhere in between what we saw this year and Royal Melbourne of the 1970s is the ideal.

Of course, the bigger question is the distance the modern ball flies and what equipment has done to courses designed to not only be playable for the members but to test the finest players.

Nor was there any legitimacy in the argument forwarded, largely by the men, about the two previous ‘mixed’ opens who suggested the pin positions were compromised by having women included in the field.

Caddying for Su Oh, I saw multiples of difficult pin positions I’d never seen on either course and although the putting surfaces were perfect the softer than usual greens weren’t ideal.

The weather though is the weather and the championship did nothing to detract from the reputation of either course as two of the finest pieces of architecture professional golfers are likely to play in their careers.