The male and female champions of last year’s Australian Open are out on Kingston Heath with last year’s PGA Champion of Australia and the sixth-ranked female player on the planet.

Throw in an LPGA Tour champion and a two-time winner on the DP World Tour, and you have heavy-duty marquee player action.

Especially if Min Woo Lee is cooking up a score.

How much fun is it to watch Min Woo Lee? He goes at pins like a dartsman. He throws driver at the golf ball like he’s spanking a bad feral cat. He fizzes his ball back to the hole like he’s reeling in a trout.

Meanwhile, Grace Kim, Hannah Green and Jordan Smith are bathing in red ink. Ashleigh Buhai is one-over. Joaquin Niemann is fighting wheat and demons.

And for the fan here at KH, and it’s the same over at Victoria, it’s cool to watch. These are world class people doing world class things, sticking long-bomb 7-irons to pins tucked on the edge of precipices. 

For the mug amateur, and we are legion, you would barely play these shots in your dreams. If an 18-marker at your club turned out at Kingston Heath today they could shoot 137.

And yet, there’s something missing.

The golf ball is not rolling.

Players aren’t crafting iron shots, nor calculating slope and release, and spin and non-spin, and all the other elements that go with Sandbelt golf when it’s firm and fast, and which sees the ball bounce and release and roll to denouement.

As Cam Smith said yesterday – and he did not miss ‘em, as they say - he’s used to landing the ball 25 metres before the target on Sandbelt courses.

Smith did say the “courses are in great condition, don't get me wrong”.

“But they're going to play so much different to probably how they're designed to play and how they're meant to be played.

“This is probably the softest and slowest I've seen a 'sando' golf course, which is not ideal, particularly for Aussies that love coming down here and being creative.

"It's going to play more like an American golf course, kind of target golf. You can land it at the pin and just kind of fire away, which is, again, not the reason we love golf down here.

“We love it because it's firm and fast and it's hard and you have to really think about shot shapes and be creative,” Smith said.

Hannah Green lets rip on the second tee at Kingston Heath. PHOTO: Getty Images

In Saturday’s stableford competition at Royal Melbourne, one can very safely assume, there will be no need to repair pitch marks – those greens are firm like the wicket at the MCG. They'd barely bruise from a full gap wedge. 

One assumes it would be similar at Commonwealth and Metropolitan and the superb Peninsula Kingswood. And given they’ve had the same amount of rain, you wonder what’s doing.

Smith wondered also.

“I've played down here in rain before and it'd still be like that (hard and fast) the next day, so I think that's a bull***t excuse, to be honest," he said.

"I think it's just been prepared like this for a reason and it's not how these golf courses are meant to be played.

"It's soft and it's actually quite disappointing."

Is there a fear that there are too many players in the draw, men and women, unused to Sandbelt golf, and who might rack up very high scores should the wind blow and things get nasty?

That would not be good. Many rounds could take many hours.

Yet, fact is, there was 25mm of rain on Wednesday, most of it one big dump. At 4pm, Yarra Yarra looked like the Yarra. 

And as one turf science type told Golf Australia magazine: "Kingston Heath has USGA-spec greens which are designed to hold moisture."

Regardless, the sun is out and the crowds are healthy for a Thursday, and there is red ink everywhere on the scoreboard.

And what’s thrilling these people is golf balls raining at pins like hail, and sticking there.

Golf may be more interesting to the purist when the ball is rolling – one need only listen to any table of knowledge assembled by the boffins on The Thing About Golf podcast to deduce that.

And those who take perverse pleasure in seeing star players’ golf balls putted off greens, and repelled from false fronts and backs, may be disappointed. There’s no carnage here this morning at the Heath; with welcoming greens and a gentle breeze.

But for the fan here on the ground at Kingston Heath, it is the skill of the players stiffing their golf balls at faraway targets that’s taking breath away. As in: how the hell do they do that?

It is world class golf, as befitting a DP World Tour event that’s also the Australian Open.