Greg Norman was doing his best to be diplomatic but it was clear something was bugging him.

The International team captain had been buzzing about in his golf cart, with assistant coaches Tim Clark and Frank Nobilo trailing not far behind, stopping at every green to putt balls from half a dozen spots - across slopes, down hill and up dale.

But a bemused look creased his face; something wasn't quite right.

When BPL asked him about the greens - seemingly the subject of his displeasure - Norman said: ''They're not how I remember them .... Let's just hope we get a couple of really hot days between now and Thursday.'' And with that, he zoomed off to check out another hole.

What he meant was the fabled Royal Melbourne greens of old - the veritable marble staircases where any shot mistakenly hit above the hole would invariably be penalised - are now a much different beast. More like a tame, overfed moggie.

And his memory isn't playing tricks on him because since Norman last played here, at the 2005 Heineken Classic, much has changed at this jewel in the sandbelt.

The fairways are now Legend Couch grass, which is a slower than the previous type of couch and means balls don't career into trouble from hard-baked brown fairways. They behave very obediently now and come to a stop after maybe 15 or 20 metres at most. The club has also laid fescue on the fringes of the greens to prevent the spread of poa, meaning bump-and-run shots are now a much trickier proposition.

In fact, the playing characteristics of the course are so different to those in 1998 - when the Internationals stormed to their one and only Presidents Cup win over the US - that any notion of home-ground advantage to the Australian-dominated International team has gone clean out the window.

Once Royal Melbourne's most obvious defence, the greens today were a dark green colour and while they were certainly fast, they were hardly the shiny brown table-tops that caused collective quaking in boots at any pro tournament.

Perhaps we're being picky because the course is looking an absolute picture, no doubt about it, but in a soft, green American kind of way, not a dusty, hard, brown, traditional Melbourne sandbelt kind of way.

But still, there's three days to go till the first tee shot is hit, so perhaps we shouldn't be getting too alarmed just yet.

The Americans seeing the course for the first time certainly seemed enraptured by it. One of the first US players out today was the little-known Webb Simpson who, even though he was the winner of two events on the US Tour this year, had us reaching for the tournament program to identify him.

Norman stopped on his sortie to shake Simpson's hand on the third tee. Simpson's caddie bounded up to the Australian to ask if all the holes were as fascinating as the first three, in particular the first, a short par four, saying they reminded him of Augusta National.

Happily settling into the role of history teacher, Norman told him short par fours were a particular feature of Royal Melboure and that both courses were actually designed by the same architect, the renowned Scotsman Alister Mackenzie. Neither Simpson nor his caddie could believe it. Their opinion of the course rose another notch.

What Norman will be hoping by Sunday night is that Simpson and his 11 teammates will be feeling slightly less in love with Royal Melbourne and that, with the help of some northerly winds and heavy rolling of the greens, it metes out the same savage treatment to the Americans that it did 13 years ago.