The tournament that follows Augusta is played at Hilton Head in South Carolina and it has always been one of the most interesting on the tour. Arnold Palmer won the first event there in 1969 and the combination of celebrity winner and a new and universally admired Pete Dye golf course quickly elevated its status.

It is one of the shortest courses on the tour, the fairways are narrow and the greens are the smallest the players are asked to hit at all season. Australian winners, Graham Marsh (1977) and Peter Lonard (2004) both had the precise game needed to win there as does Jim Furyk, the winner this week after a playoff with Englishman, Brian Davis.

Stuart Appleby played his best tournament in America for ages when he tied for eighth.

For years he had been one of the most reliable players in America but at the beginning of last season he changed clubs - after playing his whole professional career with one manufacturer - and at the end of the season he had finished outside the top 125 money winners, the magical number that guarantees automatic entry to the majority of the following years events.

It is impossible to tell if his poor season was due to the equipment change, or just plain below his talent-level play, but he did play the finest back-to-back rounds ever played in Australia when he opened last year's Australian Open with two 66s in the worst of the weather.

He did not win but those two extraordinary rounds suggested he had turned a significant corner. Instead he flew back to America and opened the year with five missed cuts and ties for 61st and 67th in his first seven events. Runs like that are grindingly depressing and frustrating but sometimes necessary parts of finding a game that is lost. The last three weeks have been better. He was 30th at Bay Hill in Palmer's own event and last week, 14 places lower in Houston. Those places are nothing to write home about but sometimes making a run of cuts is precisely what restores the confidence.

Watching his progress this season will be interesting because he is still well-capable of playing at least another half-dozen successful years.

Tied with Appleby was Nick O'Hern who happens to be one of the most anonymous good players in the world and a great model for players who think orthodox good looking swings are all it takes to be a good player.

Of more interest is Aaron Baddeley who played a bizarre round of 74 to finish in a tie for 22nd. He won at Hilton Head a couple of years ago and he must have had hopes of repeating that triumph when he made three birdies in the opening five holes. Instead he followed a bogey at the 7th with a triple bogey at the 8th and two back nine birdies were off-set by a handful of bogeys. It added up to a 22-putt, three-over round and whilst it was his best finish so far it was a more than disappointing round.

When Baddeley won the first of his two Australian Opens in 1999 as a teenager he looked like being the next local star. He successfully defended his title at Kingston Heath but within half a year he had changed teachers in search of the twin mystiques of ‘the secret' and ‘another level'.

Sometimes that search is successful and sometimes not and for Baddeley it was not.

His career was barely held together by a great putter and an uncommon talent for playing the game. Geoff Ogilvy played the opening two rounds of the 1999 Open at Royal Sydney with Aaron and he noted a couple of years later that ‘if Aaron still hit the ball the way he did back then he would be one of the best three players in the world.'

He is back working with his boyhood coach, Dale Lynch, and like Appleby his progress will be well-worth observing. You know exactly how O'Hern is going to play this year because he always plays so predictably. Appleby was equally predictable until he changed hats, clubs, balls and golf bag but this week was a measure of progress. Baddeley has never been accused of consistency and the question for him is whether there is a chance he can ever play the way everyone assumed he would when they witnessed that extraordinary coming-out a decade ago at Royal Sydney.