It would be preposterous to play an event the week before Wimbledon on a clay court but, such is the commercial reality of the golf tour, the week leading up to The Open Championship at St Andrews sees the American tour in Illinois and the Europeans playing a soft inland course at Loch Lomond in Scotland.

Tom Weiskopf's design is unquestionably a beautiful place to play golf but it's in one of the wettest parts of the country and the conditions the players will find this week will bear little relevance to the firm and bouncy turf of The Old Course.

Years ago, the Irish Open was played a couple of weeks before The Open at the wonderful Dublin links at Portmarnock but new inland courses, hungry for publicity and legitimacy, offered a better deal to the tour and so one of the very few tournaments on a true links was lost. Now, The Open aside, it is hard to find anything professional played on the courses where the game developed.

One of our better hopes at St Andrews is Geoff Ogilvy and he is playing Loch Lomond after a couple of years of coming over a week earlier and playing a selection of Scottish links. That plan never really translated to decent results but he was fifth in the 2005 Open so there are at least some positive memories of the course. He played the French Open last week in Paris and seemed to be playing neither well or badly and what has become one of the biggest events in Europe was won by the remarkable Miguel Angel Jimenez. (Stop Press, Tuesday: Ogilvy has just decided to pull out of Loch Lomond and will spend the week practising in Scotland.)

The French Open was once just another Continental Open but it was played on some of the fabulous old courses around Paris including Chantilly, St Germaine and St Cloud. In the late 1980s, the local golf association built their own course in an unfashionable part of the city on a piece of cheap land and an architect created a course that tries to look like a links but its based on clay and the holes, especially at the end, are indistinguishable from any TPC course on the American Tour. Commercially it was the making of the event and they play for a prize fund that was unimaginable two decades ago but there was something wonderful about going to France and playing one of their best courses as opposed to a course you could find anywhere.

Justin Rose bounced right back from a horrible final nine in Hartford last week to win at Aronomink in Pennsylvania and continue the staggering run of success for British players in America. He was won twice now in the last five weeks, Lee Westwood won the week before The U.S Open in New Orleans and Graeme McDowell was triumphant at Pebble Beach.

As it does every year, the British press has spend the last two weeks asking the same old ‘what is wrong with British tennis' question and just as it is in Australia those in charge of the game could do worse than look at golf and ask why both countries can produce golfers - with miles less funding - but not tennis players.

Marc Leishman was the best Australian in Pennsylvania finishing seventh, a shot ahead of the ninth placed Jason Day, Aaron Baddeley in 11th and Stuart Appleby another shot back in 16th.

Leishman was quietly gone about building on what was a fantastic rookie season in America, Day is having the best year of his young career and Baddeley is showing some form after going back to his childhood coach, Dale Lynch. One of the great unanswerable questions of Australian golf is where would Baddeley have been now if he had stuck with Lynch and not headed off in other directions looking for a secret that would take him to the top of the game.

Anyone who was good enough to win a pair of Australian Open before their 21st birthday was good enough to get there but he is barely over 30 now and there is still time to make a mark. Rose was good enough to finish fourth in the 1998 Open at Birkdale as a 17-year-old amateur and surely that was pedigree enough to assume he would ascend quickly to the one of the top places in the rankings but it was taken him more than a decade to really establish himself as one of the best but he has done just that in the last month.