Most professional golf tournaments are reliant on players being the stars of the show, but the game at the top level is so awash with money it makes it all but impossible to entice the few current day superstars to our shores to play.

Few, if any, are as big as Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer or Gary Player were in the 1960s and 1970s when they came here routinely and, between them, won the Australian Open 14 times.

Instead, at this week’s twinned men’s and women’s ISPS HANDA Australian Open at Kingston Heath and Victoria, the field is headlined by our local stars including Min Woo Lee and big sister, Minjee, the Camerons Smith and Davis, Marc Leishman, Hannah Green and the PGA champion Elvis Smylie playing his first week as the bright young star with expectations on his shoulders. (He’ll be just fine.)

The other young Australian hopeful this week is Karl Vilips who only turned pro in June but played well enough over the second half of the Korn Ferry Tour season to earn his 2025 PGA Tour card.

The defending champion Joaquin Niemann is delightfully back alongside a men’s field half filled with DP World Tour players, the contingent of which improves with each successive year of the Open’s co-sanctioning arrangement.

One of particular interest for those looking for the next generation might be the 20-year-old Spaniard Angel Ayora, who was sixth last week at Royal Queensland. He is managed by Javier Ballesteros, the son of the great man, and if he’s half as much fun to watch it’ll be a darn good show.

The real stars this week, however, are the two golf courses and they don’t cost anything aside from a fee to cover the inconvenience to setting the whole show up.

Indeed, if the courses put their hands up for an appearance fee, it’d be well north of a million dollars if the rate of two top 100 players in the world is the measure. (Kingston Heath is rated 22 in the world and Victoria 96.)

Kingston Heath is not only one of the very best courses in the country but one of the most important, and what began in the very early 1980s at ‘The Heath’ directly impacted what happened at Victoria a decade later.

In the late 1970s, after decades of poor management, Kingston Heath was overgrown with ti-tree and poorly conceived planting dominated by non-indigenous eucalypts, especially the mahogany gums of the forests far to the east of Melbourne.

The club hired a new young superintendent, Graeme Grant, who set about transforming the condition of the golf course as well as restoring so much of what was lost in the decades after Dan Soutar and Alister MacKenzie finished the course in the late 1920s.

Forty years on, the wisdom of those who took charge of the club has been fully vindicated.

Very predictably, given the nature of club members who always have “a particular affection for the mud-heap on which they play” (Alister MacKenzie) there was much opposition at the time to the changes to the course.

But it was the club’s policy of taking any tour event they were offered which broke the back of the critics as pros from all over the world came and lauded not only the flawless conditioning but the resurrection of the brilliant architecture of Soutar and MacKenzie.

In 1995, Victoria set off down the same twinned path of conditioning and restoration and many here this week think the disparity in the world ranking is not reflective of the quality of Victoria, a course transformed from its poorly conditioned 1994 Victorian Open incarnation, a tournament which proved to the impetus for the club’s Captain, the cricket legend Ian Meckiff, and his committee, to do something.

Either way, rankings are not so important, and the golf both the men and women are asked to play this week is amongst the most interesting in the world.

Despite early week rain softening the greens more than usual, the bounce of the ball will be an important part of the required judgement.

The fairways are "perfect" but so is every Sandbelt fairway at this time of year, so no longer do courses earn extra marks for carpet-like surfaces to hit from.

The real highlights of both courses are the unique heathland roughs which give them beautiful texture and a magnificent colour contrast with the deep green of the fairways.

Golf gets a hard time environmentally from people who hate golf but few, if any, have ever walked these magnificent Sandbelt courses and understood they are the sole preserves of indigenous heathland in the entire city.

The Sandbelt, too, is famed for its short holes and few extend beyond 180 meters. Because so many of the short holes are built on flat ground (14 at Victoria and 15 at Kingston Heath are two exceptions) the architects tended to build short to mid-length par-3s surrounded by fearsome bunkers and significant penalties for missing the target.

For both men and women, precise irons are the requirement, especially if it’s windy.

The fearsome 15th, the only hole MacKenzie completely changed from Soutar’s original 1926 routing, has looked relatively simple in the benign practice conditions this week, but those with long memories will recall Greg Norman’s beautiful low 5-iron ripped into a north wind on the final day of the 1995 championship as one of the great shots hit in the Open.

These are not long courses despite being stretched almost as far as is practical (see the new 12th tee at KH this week – a hole 100 meters longer than when Peter Fowler won in 1983) but both more than make up for it with some of the finest golf course architecture in the world.