If nothing else, Royal Troon’s Open Championship highlighted just how formulaic and - many times - dull, professional golf can be when it goes to less than interesting golf courses.

It’s a generalisation because the best of American golf includes a significant portion of the finest 100 courses in the world, but those courses are so rarely used as PGA Tour venues. Riviera, Pebble Beach, Muirfield Village and TPC Sawgrass are certainly exceptions to the week-to-week courses pros find on the American Tour.

So many of their great clubs couldn’t imagine anything worse than the intrusion of the circus which is modern professional golf whereas here in Australia the opposite is the case with all our best clubs more than willing to open their doors.

Like the best of the British clubs, the business model of relatively low fees and high membership numbers isn’t hurt by the attention of championship golf. And, after last week, who doesn’t want to play the Postage Stamp or see if they can keep it off Rory McIlroy’s 11th hole train line?

Allan Shipnuck, the American journalist, writing after the halfway point at Troon and a 6-over-par cut said: “The mindless paint by numbers golf that works so well on marshmallowy PGA Tour set-ups has led to despair and ruin at this Open. For two days at least art triumphed over science.”

Great links have the usually irreplicable advantages of sandy, rumpled ground, enduringly great architecture and wind and year-in and year-out The Open is the greatest spectacle of man versus both the elements and great architecture.

In the past month on the PGA Tour, we’ve seen a couple of 59s, one by Hayden Springer and another by Cameron Young, the runner-up to Cameron Smith at St Andrews a couple of years ago.

Of course, 59 on any golf course is an incredible score but Young made his by hitting some version of a wedge into every par-4. With no wind and soft greens, it’s a mirage of properly great golf. None of which is Young’s fault. He’s just answering the questions as best he can.

For three days, the Open field was at the mercy of the draw and those who found themselves on the right side of it had, to say the least, something of an advantage. Those who barely made the cut and got out early on Saturday played in beautiful conditions and Adam Scott, amongst others, shot a great round (66) and played themselves into Sunday contention.

The leader, Shane Lowry, in stark contrast was out barely before tea in cricket parlance and, in the worst of the day, was around in 77, his 11-shot second round gap over Scott erased.

By Sunday, all those with a chance were playing in the same conditions and Xander Schauffele emerged with 65, an uncommonly great score on a course arranged in the immortal Winged Foot 1974 U.S Open words of Sandy Tatum, not to humiliate but rather to identify the world’s best players.

Nor was it done so much with the putter as relentlessly accurate long play play from tee to green. Hitting nine of 14 fairways on a relatively narrow, bouncy links and 16 of the 18 greens is both impressive and testament to a game which saw him win this summer on the wildly different tests of Valhalla and Troon.

Scott was the best of the Australians, tied for 10th with Jason Day one behind him and just outside the top dozen. The others - Min Woo Lee, Jasper Stubbs, Elvis Smylie and Cam Smith - all missed the cut and it’d be a time since so few Australians made the weekend.

It’s certainly harder to get into the field than it was in the 1970s and early 1980s when the leading six on the Australian Tour moneylist were exempt. Over time it was whittled down to three and then one, replaced by exemptions to the leading three (not already exempt) in the Australian Open.

The week before the Open final qualifying is more difficult too. In the "old days", the 36-hole qualifier offered at least a dozen spots at each course but now it’s only four and little more than a token gesture maintaining a sense of the championship still being "open".

It's a long way from the days of Peter Thomson’s first four Opens when everyone, even the defending champion, had to play the qualifying. One wonders who thought it a good idea Ben Hogan, the reigning Masters and US Open champion, needed to prove himself worthy of a place the 1953 field at Carnoustie.

Next is the Olympics (on perhaps the fourth best course in Paris) and then, three weeks from now, the Women’s British Open at The Old Course. On windless days and with four drivable par 4s St Andrews is short for the men but it remains the game’s most fascinating course.

Women’s golf enjoys a much more sensible relationship with power than the men’s professional game and it’s not an absolute prerequisite, but simply an advantage if used sensibly, for success at the highest level. It promises to be a great championship and the most interesting golf between now and the Presidents Cup.

The way Schauffele, Scottie Scheffler and the rest of the best American men have played this year we’d better get our skates on if we want even a shot at beating them in Montreal.