By some quirk of fate 88 years ago, Australian tennis was given the sporting equivalent of a blank cheque, passport to untold riches, and pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

For in 1923, at a meeting in France of the International Lawn Tennis Federation - the US had just joined England, France and Australia as one of 14 member nations - it was decided that the national championships of those four countries would comprise what would soon be known as the Grand Slam* of tennis.

The august group had already set in place some guidelines which are still in existence today: the administration of the Federation (now the ITF) was to be run from Paris, and Britain had the right to stage ‘the World Championships on Grass - in perpetuity'. 

And when, at its annual general meeting on 16 March 1923, the ITLF decreed that Wimbledon and the French, US and Australian national titles were to be the sport's 'Official Championships', Australian tennis' future was effectively secured.

By being granted membership of the game's most exclusive grouping - the Grand Slam club - Australia would always be a tennis superpower, no matter how thin and uncompetitive its playing ranks, or how inept and slow-moving its administration.

In this way, it has been blessed. In fact, it should kneel down beside its bed each night and offer a prayer of thanks to those 14 men, representing the main tennis-playing nations, who gathered in Paris for that historic vote.

For the annual two-week extravaganza, which starts tomorrow at Melbourne Park, effectively props up Australian tennis, making as it does so many squillions of dollars. The 2010 Australian Open - or the Grand Slam of Asia/Pacific, as the event now bills itself - achieved the highest ever single-day day/night attendance record (77,043) for any Grand Slam tournament and boasted an overall attendance of 653,860.

Ker-ching, ker-ching. Thank you ILTF, thank you federation president, Dr. H. O. Behrens, thank you Paris. Thank you, thank you.

Sure, there have been rocky times since the tournament was granted 'major' status in 1924. In the 1970s and 80s, the game's best players, such as Bjorn Borg, stayed away in droves and the men's title was won by the likes of Brian Teacher, Johan Kriek and the man from Lookout Mountain, Tennessee - Roscoe Tanner.

Now, though, thanks to a change of surface, change of date, brilliant new stadia, clever administration and marketing, the picture has never looked rosier for the custodians of our national championship.

Oh, that Australian golf - to choose another international sport at random - was so lucky.

Golf, too, has four 'majors', but three of them are played in the US and one in Britain. (How the sport's biggest prize was divvied up in that lopsided and American-centric way can only be wondered at, for it is a move which has greatly harmed the development of the game globally.)

Golf's Australian Open has nothing in common with its tennis counterpart except its name. It does not beat potential sponsors away with a stick; it accepts anyone who walks in the door of the Golf Australia offices with loose change jangling in their pockets.   

As the queues form outside Melbourne Park tomorrow, Channel Seven begins day one of its two-week, non-stop, day-night tennis extravaganza, and the face painters get to work outside Rod Laver Arena, golf officials in this country will again look on with envy.

And wonder how their Australian Open would look if, a century ago, golf's powers-that-be decreed that Australia should be a member of the Grand Slam club.  

(* It was not until 1933 - according to Bud Collins' Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia - that the Grand Slam term was coined. A New York Times columnist John Kieran, a bridge player, wrote of Australia's Jack Crawford - who had won the Australian, French, and Wimbledon championships, and was chasing the US title: "If Crawford wins, it would be something like scoring a grand slam on the courts, doubled and vulnerable.")