Could be just me but…

I would sooner watch my 14-year-old beat up digital passers-by in Grand Theft Auto V than the indoor, hybrid bit of kit that Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods cooked up to challenge LIV Golf and sell naff hats.

LIV Adelaide is fun and festive and free; and the Australian Open is storied and cool and high class, particularly now that McIlroy is coming to Royal Melbourne, it will be magnificent.

The Melbourne Cup is a more fun day out than the W.S Cox Plate, though the latter has a better field and is a more competitive day of top-class thoroughbred horse racing.

Test match cricket is luxuriant, slow food, a long lunch at the Opera House; and T20 cricket is a Filet-of-Fish and McFlurry on a Friday night in the Macca’s carpark at Warriewood.

And once you’ve known the distinct, hoppy notes of a craft pale such as even Mick Fanning’s mass-produced Balter XPA, you cannot slide your tastebuds down the pole and sup upon generic tinny lagers that come from the same vat at Carlton United.

Again, it could be just me.

PLUS...

The Aussies at The Open

Nine Aussies take on Royal Portrush at this week's 153rd Open Championship. Paul Prendergast reports on the Australians' chances in Northern Ireland.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that, of the four major golf championships, you may have favourites, and non-favourites, and some you simply can’t split.

For mine, the two top billers are the Open Championship, the 153rd edition of which Padraigh Harringon just kicked off with a birdie on the first at Royal Portrush, and the Masters at Augusta National, first won by “The Joplin Ghost”, Horton Smith, in 1934.

And I can’t split ‘em. Won’t split ‘em. Both are just grouse, and brilliant, and fun, and marvelously entertaining, in their way.

Cameron Smith of Australia about to own the 18th Hole at the Old Course at St Andrews on the way to winning the Open Championship in 2022. PHOTO: Getty Images

In one you can drink beer at 9am after Adam Scott rolls in a putt on the second play-off hole before heading out to play for your own green jacket. The other you stay up late on the couch to watch Cameron Smith, apparently nervelessly, roll his ball over the mighty swales of St Andrews to glory.

How do you split those moments? You can’t split those moments. And I can’t split the Open and the Masters for the best tournaments of the golfing year.

Fence-sitting? Of course. Fence-sitting gets a bad wrap in these polemic, binary times. When once having a bob each-way was lauded as balance, today every critique or praise, or anything in between, is proof that the expressor is woke or Nazi, perhaps both.

I say: enough. Straddle that fence, buckaroo, lay down and hug it to your chest like a cowpoke at a bush rodeo enjoying the sunshine through his bottomless chaps.

Or something, I don’t know.

PLUS...

Cam Smith busting a gut to end difficult year at Open

Australia's 2022 British Open champion, Cam Smith, is ready to turn round a "frustrating" season at Portrush after working feverishly to get back to his winning ways.

I do know this: the Open and the Masters are definitely greater in theatre and fun and a host of other markers than the one-dimensional shit-fight through clutching witch-fingers that is the U.S Open at any given venue where the rough is fed blood-and-bone for a month.

Test of golf, sure. Once a year, beat ‘em up. Just don’t expect your entertainment to come in the form of outrageous shot-making, the champion JJ Spaun’s drive onto the par-4 17th at Oakmont not-withstanding.

Also this: all three tournaments are one-thousand percent better than the PGA Championship of the United States because it’s little but a beefed-up generic PGA Tour event played on beefed-up generic golf courses, and shouldn’t be a major, they should share the ‘major’ status around the continents of the world, and anoint, on a rotational basis, the national Open championships of Thailand, Portugal, Turkey, South Africa, Australia and, say, if their golf chops warrant it, Guatemala, with world major championship status, as a promising young sports writer makes a fine case for here.

PLUS...

Cleary: PGA Championship is generic, beefed-up Tour event not befitting major status

It is the mangiest of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. It is the drummer in Spinal Tap. It is the character “Mike” – the not very funny one – in The Young Ones. It is a fifth wheel in a four-event swing. It is, of course, the United States PGA Championship, known as a “major” championship. And its time should be up, reckons Matt Cleary.

But I do love the Open Championship. What’s not to like? Pure, fun, links golf, weather a factor, feel a factor, such is the ubiquity of the PGA Tour, and such is the “world” status of the DP World Tour and even LIV Golf, we don’t see enough of it.

The theatres that show off the skills of these great players, these great actors of our time, are not often enough hard, scorched, dormant, brown fairways running between great thundering sand dunes that separate human habitation from the cold, implacable, terrifying depths of the Atlantic Ocean.

Why wouldn’t the Scottish Open showcase the great links courses of the world at Carnoustie and North Berwick? That Renaissance is pretty cool. But Royal Troon, Royal Dornoch, those ones on islands in the Outer Hebrides, take 'em there, showcase links-land. Showcase la différence.

LIV Golf should be played more on links courses, especially before the Open Championship, that mad bastard Donald Trump is a LIV Golf supporter, of sorts, and they could play at his Trump-branded courses at Aberdeen and Turnberry.

And, if Lady Justice has a sense of humour, the Top Dog at Alligator Alcatraz won’t let him watch.

Could be just me.