The famed “Cups” region of Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula is a great expanse of undulating paddocks, with the sort of low-lying vegetation typical of wind-fraught seaside locales, and reminiscent of the barren and craggy Yorkshire Moors. Hardy Moonah trees survive in proliferation, conquerers of the merciless winds.

To turn any part of it into a golf course, taking into consideration the relentless and fickle gusts, the scrubby, uneven terrain, and the needs of hobbyist golfers to enjoy themselves, is quite a feat. Greg Norman and Peter Thompson, two Australian golfing greats, arrived at the National Golf Club one typically blustery day in February to mark the opening of two adjacent links courses of their design, Moonah and Ocean respectively.

To the left of the monumental National clubhouse is Bass Strait. To the right, Port Phillip Bay. It’s a haven for the well-off middle-aged, and buggies on the fairways outnumber the Volvos, Porsches, Jags and Storms in the car park.

Among well-heeled locals, it’s a development excitedly anticipated. The opening is a chance for them to rub shoulders with Norman, Thompson and Adam Scott. That Adam Scott is there at all seems symbolic: a handing-over. Every wise head in the room believes him to be The One – the next huge thing in Australian golf. And he is introduced as such. Not Baddeley; not Ogilvy. Not Appleby or Allenby. Indeed, the name Scott breaks the sequence of tri-syllabic names ending in Y like a full stop. Scott.

If Shakespeare’s Dogberry was right, and comparisons are not only odious, but odorous, Adam Scott, more than any Australian golfer in living memory, has to live with their unrelenting pong.

Because he emerged suddenly from the wings when all Aussie eyes were on one A. Baddeley, that smell – a cocktail of our need for heroes and the frisson of two bucks sharing the same paddock, shaken and stirred by the press – has clung to him from day one. Timing is the only reason Scott has always had the reputation of stealing Baddeley’s thunder. When their paths crossed in 1997, Baddeley just happened to get to the intersection first and was, for a moment, the prodigy. At 15, he’d made the news by making the cut for the Victorian Open during the Australian Junior Open. Then the lurking Scott came the grouter in the final round, shooting 67 and beating him by a stroke. In 2001, Scott’s first year as a pro, as Baddeley won a second Australian Open then held off Sergio Garcia to win the Greg Norman Holden International, Scott beat Justin Rose at the Dunhill in South Africa, and almost pulled off the English Open before being overtaken by inexperience, and Peter O’Malley. In 2002, he took the Scottish Open by a record 10 strokes. Already, he was shining against the foil of doubt about Baddeley’s ability to make cuts anywhere outside Australia. And trenchant, largely unjustified, criticism from people like Butch Harmon, who happens to be Scott’s coach, about Baddeley’s irrepressible self-confidence. Baddeley’s civility was thought of as the restraint of a young man trying to overcome the worst aspects of his nature. By contrast, Scott was demure and gentle.

Scott’s apparel, mannerisms and, more importantly, his swing, call up the most malodorous comparison of all. I think you know what that would be. He’s the one who will suffer the Woods comparisons more than most. It happens as soon as people see that swing – as automatic as salivating at the sizzling tang of Scotch fillet and mushroom sauce, or catching a yawn. He swings, they exclaim “Tiger”. But then, he shares Tiger’s coach, and Woods once shared with Scott the secret of his wide stance. Being an ambitious teenager at the time, he took it immediately to heart and set about installing it in his nerve memory just as soon as he could get out to the nearest tee. Now it’s second nature for him to set up like any normal man, then glide the right foot a few inches further away from the target. Add speed of shoulder, hand and hip through the ball, and you have the closest thing you’ll get – technically anyway – to Tiger Woods. Not that he’s just a wannabee. No amount of superstar-coaching will cause the shoulders and hands to move faster, or the hips to give full rotation to every swing without those subtle, infuriating detours along the way. Anyone can try; not many get the whole machinery just so.

Fans, even American fans – and he’s already a very popular golfer – are hoping Scott is The Man. People seem to have acquired a distaste for Woods, perhaps perceiving in his little tantrums and his propensity to act like the PR man for Woods, Inc., an impatience to glorify his own myth. The world seeks the Next Great Hope. Some might say it seeks the Great White Hope.

Meanwhile, Australia seeks a Great White Shark. Greg Norman might be on the way out, but Aussies need someone to continue that unbroken chain of golfing champions stretching back to Von Nida.

Greg Norman makes any young golfer starry-eyed at possibilities of wealth and influence that extend far beyond a playing career. He arrived today in typical fashion landing a hundred metres or so from the palatial clubhouse in a chopper. His colossal yacht was bobbing away regally, not far away, out in Port Phillip Bay.

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Like The Young Ones, each represents, and typifies, an era. Peter Thompson, the staid, eloquent winner of five British Opens in the 50s and 60s, is loquacious, speaking in a way typical of a time when to give a polished public speech was noblesse oblige for stars, who just knew how to do it, and if they didn’t, were trained. Even formulised inanities were delivered with style. Loquaciousness turned to garrulousness in the “express yourself” 70s and 80s. Greg Norman has a habit, when holding court, of slipping into a somnolent rhythm. As his mouth operates, even he sleeps for a while. A week ago, he hypnotised an entire room with a monologue on the impending war on Iraq, before suddenly shaking himself awake and asking if there were any more golf questions.

Garrulousness turned to discretion in the nineties and noughties. Scott is today. Polished, polite and wary. His voice has a feline drawl which seems prematurely American. His tone is appropriately respectful. “I don’t think the public see how much I’ve been helped by these two guys.”

Three generations of golfer; three manifestations of masculinity. Thompson walks with a straight gait and offers a dignified, firm handshake. He comes from a generation that shook its head disbelievingly at the young Normans of the world – shambling along defiantly in their flares and open-neck shirts and chunky jewellery. To the next generation – according to Geoff Ogilvy – Norman “made golf cool in Australia”.

Scott’s as close to the ideal of masculine skill as it gets in the epicene, post-macho era of manliness. No longer, it seems, does a sportsman need to “psyche” opponents with teeth-gritting, hairy-chested demonstrations. Scott is that unsettling combination of gender-balance and physical potency characteristic of so many youngsters today who understand, in the most scientific way, that power is fitness plus technique, and that the mad, testo-and-adrenalin surge is best confined to “world’s strongest man” contests. Scott has that Ian Thorpe way about him: statuesque, powerful, well-drilled, metronomically consistent, his lisping softness of disposition belied only by walnut-hard eyes, windows to a tough kernel of a soul.

Of course, it’s an approach that, in some athletes, can seem bland and robotic. You’re a Baddeley person or you’re a Scott person.

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Today, Scott has the look of a young man returning from sabbatical. He hasn’t been around long enough to slip back into the public domain with a comfortable click, as Norman might. That respite was self-imposed, and his re-emergence, after skipping the Heinekken Classic last week, has generated great interest. He’d ended the 2002 season utterly exhausted – a state he’s attributed to a hectic schedule of 35 tournaments which saw him enter the world top 50 and the top 10 money list, and win two tournaments. It was a year in which he’d barely practiced. He was good enough to make the play-off with Lonard and Coles at the Australian Masters, but the pressure finally exposed his lack of preparation, and he was gone at the first extra hole. The end of 2002 saw the yippiest putting of his short career. He looked at his stats with disgust: top of the list when it came to greens-in-regulation. Putting: around 60th.

Today is his warm-up for the ANZ Championship at NSW Golf Club, which will be his platform for an assault on the world top 20.

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This area, in Cape Shanck, is not just a community: it’s a golf community. The opening of these courses is cause for excitement. Norman’s words ring in their ears: “The people of this area don’t realise how lucky they are. As a golf destination, it’s one of the best in the world. It will become one of the destinations.” Endorsement from the Great White Himself. Ka-ching!

Peter Thompson is less commercial and more poetic: “This was a golf course just waiting to be uncovered. Really, what we did was peel off the plastic, and there it was. We just gave nature a bit of help.”

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“Geez! Did you see that?” Every shot is met with a disbelieving gasp. On Norman’s Moonah course, Scott and The Shark square off for nine holes, before Scott does seven on the Ocean with Peter Thompson and a couple of lucky, local prize-winning members. Gerard Healy and Robert Dipierdomenico are hosting, attempting to entertain the gallery with interviews and gags on a faltering PA system.

Scott’s been making 180-metre shots into the wind with an iron. For the gallery of members who forever strive to master the wind, the ability of these two to work with it is a revelation. Because they’re relaxed, their golf seems incredible. Norman chipped one in earlier from thirty metres, seemingly without pausing. Imagine how that state of mind might have gone at Augusta in ‘87. Or ‘96, or… Scott would polo-push the sort of 6-foot putt that most present would agonise over, as though it was a “gimme”. In these conditions, with a playfulness that suited the occasion, they displayed a vast array of substantial skills, looking all the while as though it’s the sort of thing they do in their sleep. All this in the sort of unyieldingly stiff breeze that makes schoolboys want to strangle each other and disturbs hats, toupees and carefully-crafted $300 coifs.

Norman had earlier said he designed the course with “thirty mile an hour head winds and following winds” in mind, a challenge to length and strategy. The enthusiastic gallery of about 1,000, followed them about in 36 degree heat, old men ignoring their distress and the solicitations of their wives to ride buggies on the heaving fairways. To see how two elite golfers would drive and shape the ball in these conditions was, to them, a gauge of their own prowess. Norman and Scott, then Thompson and Scott, simply chewed up the makeshift course that spanned 16 holes of Moonah and Ocean.

The most challenging aspect of both courses was their lack of monotony. Each hole looked and played differently. “I don’t see why golfers should be punished with a 78 hundred yard golf course like these guys will be playing at the US Open pretty soon,” said Norman over the tricky PA system.

Considering the winds, the greens were perfect. About four mill long with some fuzz, to prevent the rolling we saw on the concrete at Victoria.

The One needs to be dubbed with a nickname. Dipper conducts impromptu interviews with the crowd to come up with one that best describes Scott. “Terrier” is one, but it seems Norman’s “swivel hips” will hold sway for now.

If it wasn’t for the fairways – sometimes lower than the surrounding straw-coloured hills adorned by lamp-posts and gates and fences and old shacks – you’d swear you were walking through acres of seaside paddock. Those fairways are better manicured than the greens of most public courses. As they walk up to a green, look at the ball, look around at the green, back at the ball, walk around, cast one last look at the ball over their shoulder as they walk away, their heads seem full of computations unimaginable to the awestruck gallery.

One member is confused at Moonah’s eighth. “How come this isn’t a par 5? Scott’ll hit this 180, max.” Then Scott clouts a 215 metre drive. Some old bloke has strolled up the fairway to be there as the ball lands, only to watch the thing sail over his head and out of sight. When they predict a 7-iron, Scott, Norman and Thompson use a pitching wedge.

When it’s all over, softly and breathily, and with disquieting deliberateness, Scott assesses the year ahead: “No matter where I decide to play, my desire is to win.” Augusta? “I’ll have higher expectations this year, knowing I did play well there.” He allows a gleam to escape the black holes of his eyes.

Written for ABC Sport Monthly issue 6, March, 2003. Never published.