The most significant of price Marc Leishman likely knew he would pay for signing with Greg Norman’s Saudi golf league was, come the second Thursday in April, he’d be at home watching The Masters on television.

Last week, the Warrnambool man declared he’d played some of the best golf of his career when he won at Doral which, the scores suggested, lived up to what the pros in the 1960s dubbed "The Blue Monster”.

The split in the game is, as they say, what it is, but either way Augusta at least brings most the best players in the world together for the first time since The Open Championship to give us some idea of the order of things.

The PGA Tour/LIV split shows no sign of imminent resolution, but the most compelling story this week is Rory McIlroy’s decade-long quest to complete what seemed inevitable in 2014 and add the career Grand Slam to his resume.

It’s obviously no easy achievement as only Ben Hogan, Jack Nicklaus, Gene Sarazen, Gary Player and Tiger Woods have managed it. Bobby Jones, too, if you count the 1930 version.

It asks players to master a wide variety of courses from the British links to the narrow, rough-infested USGA torture tests usually imitated at the PGA Championship and Alister MacKenzie’s Augusta National.

With its wide fairways, the course shows how space off the tee can still demand great driving and the fearsome greens and expansive areas of short grass surrounding them offer short game options those familiar with Royal Melbourne, likely MacKenzie’s finest course, would recognise.

It was the ideal course for Greg Norman, Tom Weiskopf, Ernie Els and Johnny Miller but 11 times between them they looked on as second place men and someone else left town with the green jacket. How was this possible?

Given how prolifically they’d won elsewhere, we can assume the grinding pressure and expectation of the final nine holes was a part of it and this is where McIlory finds himself.

The test of what was originally Alister MacKenzie’s front nine, but now so familiar as the second half of the course, is a succession of holes where both triumph and disaster are on a knife’s edge.

“At most courses” says Woods’ caddie Steve Williams, “you have three or four yards to play with but at Augusta there are times when you have two or maybe even only one.”

Those familiar with Royal Melbourne on a fearsome championship day in the wind will know exactly what Williams means.

Of course, one yard either way is the great examination of The Road Hole green at St Andrews, and no one admired The Old Course more than Alister MacKenzie.

We have five players in the field – Cam Smith, Jason Day, Cam Davis Min Woo Lee and Adam Scott who thankfully and finally put a stop to the "why can’t Australians win at Augusta" question a dozen years ago.

Lee is the most interesting after his win a couple of weeks ago in Houston. Like McIlroy - and unlike his more credentialled older sister Minjee – Lee is a flashy player who drives further than most and plays with both uncommon flair and charisma. And, like Norman, he seems likely at some point to win at Augusta simply because he combines huge drives with imaginative irons and a magical short game.

At the other end of his Masters career is the extraordinary German Bernhard Langer. He first went there in 1982 with a famously yippy putter and came away wondering how he could possibly master the greens.

By 1985, he was competent enough on the greens with what was then his shortest club, but is now his longest, to beat his great rival Ballesteros and Curtis Strange who made a mess of the par-5s on the final nine.

No man has played with the intensity of Langer over such as long period, and few have won as many (125!) tournaments. Anyone old enough to see his early career irons shots were treated to skills most of the rest only dreamt of.

Nick Faldo, Sandy Lyle, Ian Woosnam, Ballesteros, Langer and, a little later, Jose-Maria Olazabal, transformed the tour in Europe. All six had remarkable careers at Augusta and it’s long past time McIlroy joined them.