Ogilvy and co make Masters look like a four-day pro-am

It hits you as hard as the blustery, broiling wind that bullies you from the northwest. By mid-morning it’s in the mid-30s at The Australian Golf Club. But as spitefully as the wind hurls itself around, you are hit even harder by a different type of atmospherics. This week we have a golf tournament.

Last week’s Masters at Huntingdale immediately looks like a four-day pro-am. At The Australian for the national open championship the field is better, world-class better.

The crowds are thick along the fairway ropes. They ooh and aah. Clap and sigh.

World No 1 Jordan Spieth is sent out early, well before sensible people have had breakfast or brewed a cuppa. Spieth’s first hole of the day is the 10th and that brings him a birdie. That’s how a defending champion should start. He has another on the par-five 14th but gives it back at the very next hole. In two holes his round has been summed up. Get what the course and the wind can give you and then hold for dear life.

Spieth finishes on even-par 71. Of the last six holes, he parred the first five but bogeyed the ninth. He will not complain. The wind was blowing harder by the hour, the greens getting quicker in the heat and drying gusts. Spieth has not harmed his chances.

But the man who catches the eye is Geoff Ogilvy, winner of the US Open in 2006 and the Australian Open in 2010. He played with Spieth and Lee Westwood and took shelter in the clubhouse after a three-under par 68. With seven birdies, two bogeys and one double bogey he had done his bit. He would wait for increasingly wild winds to play their part.

Ogilvy had more than the ease and calm of a man who had returned a good score in challenging conditions. He reckons he is on the verge of some very good golf, and that would be something. Playing at his finest he is one of the great players to watch. A swing so languid it almost falls asleep, Ogilvy hits long without any apparent hint of exertion. And when he putts well … well, he goes and wins a US Open and seven other events on the US Tour, the last the Barracuda championship last year. He has won more than $30m in prizemoney.

Ogilvy’s score could have been better. He spun the ball off the 9th green and into the water and on the 17th and 18th holes he twice hit sticks — not of the pin variety — as he sought to get his ball back in play from the rough.

“You could lose your head in that situation,” he said after the round. And he has been guilty of that in the past. “It was pretty annoying. I didn’t hit that bad a tee shot on 17, it was a couple of yards from having a wedge onto the green, but it catches a tree and it could drop down and it would be all right; it goes right it would be all right, but it goes left and ended up with a stick right in front of the ball. I was trying to be really conservative, I tried to chip it 50 yards right of the green and it just went straight left off the stick. So it was just one of those things, but got it up and down for a bogey, which wasn’t too bad.”

In similar circumstances on the 18th he would drop not one but two shots. Ogilvy said: “Again it hits a stick and goes straight up into the tree and drops down. I could have made six at worst but I made seven, which was wasting a shot really. So it was a shame on a par-five.”

Such setbacks have not always been taken so wistfully by Ogilvy. Perfectionists are, by definition, a jot hard to please. But he saw these lost shots, as he should: happenstance. They would neither rattle nor roll him for he was in the red on the scorecard and would stay there. He was happy to back himself and his golf swing against the hot field and furious wind.

While he has missed the first three cuts in the new golf year on the US Tour, Ogilvy has clarified the working and rhythms of his golf swing. It has been beginning to make sense to him over the past two years but a wonky putter meant it has not transferred into dollars in the bank.

“I was right in my head about my technique and stuff because I’d been working on it pretty hard,” he said. “I’ve felt better and better about my golf swing for probably the last two years really, and just been driving myself crazy with the putter a little bit, but that felt like it was getting better too.”

Time has taught us that golfers believe a return to form is always one practice or even just one putt away. It must be that way, for to despair is to give up. Take yesterday’s first-round leader Lincoln Tighe. After his 66, a round that must be described as one that would have shocked even his closest friends, Tighe said: “It’s unreal. I felt even last week at Huntingdale my game was there, I just didn’t really get anything out of it, but it feels unreal to be here and be playing as good as I did. To finish it off today was solid and I’m really happy.”

Such claims from Tighe are born of optimism. Similar observations from Ogilvy have roots in his record and a knowledge that the feel he has for his game now will not be betrayed.

Ogilvy, ranked as high as No 3 in the world in 2008, said: “It’s just been coming. It’s just been getting better and better and better. It’s a nice feeling, but it’s also a nice feeling to put a score on the board. It would be nice to start — at some point you’ve got to start — shooting lower scores.”

You know from his manner that Ogilvy firmly believes his reincarnation as a world force is on hand. He is not trying to convince himself, not trying to convince you. He just knows.

As for Tighe and what sounds very much like wishful thinking, well, the second round today will be the judge of that.