You can look the numbers up but 30 years ago, it would be a fair bet the Australian participation at Wimbledon far exceeded the equivalent at The Open Golf Championship. Three decades on, however, Australian golfers regularly number more than 20 at the Open Championship yet, Lleyton Hewitt aside, there was not a single male player automatically qualified for the 2009 draw at The All England Club.

Peter Luczak will join Hewitt this year but we are still a long way from the Australian tennis' golden era.

The staggering decline in the number of world-class Australian tennis players has been matched by an equally surprising upsurge in the number of fantastic golfers this country has managed to produce. It would however be a mistake to think it was solely the result of fine administration. Golf is a fragmented sport run a combination of a national amateur body, six state associations and a union - the PGA - made up of professional players and those who work at clubs.

The Australian Institute of Sport has been perhaps marginally more successful that its tennis counterpart in producing players but that isn't saying much.

Rather our best players have come along a number of different paths. Greg Norman was the second most talented player of his era behind Severiano Ballesteros and Norman became the player he was through an extraordinary gift, an obsession for hard work and a desperation to prove he was the equal of anybody of his time. He was a good amateur - two years before his first win at The West Lakes Classic, Terry Gale beat him by 8 and 7 in the first round of the Australian Amateur - and six months before that win he was working in Charlie Earp's pro shop at Royal Queensland mending clubs, selling Mars Bars and putting up with the members. It is hard to imagine Bernard Tomic doing the equivalent.

Robert Allenby and Stuart Appleby - the first of the Norman-inspired generation - were the initial experimental wave of players lucky enough to come under the influence of Dale Lynch and Steve Bann at the newly formed (circa 1990) Victorian Institute of Sport. Geoff Ogilvy, Richard Green, Aaron Baddeley, Marc Leishman, Steve Allan and others followed and that program has been one of the most successful of its type in the world. Its success however was almost wholly the responsibility of the fantastic teachers rather than the influx of huge amounts of funding or brilliant amateur administration.

Gary Edwin guided Peter Lonard and Rod Pampling to successful careers in America and both would freely admit they were not even decent players when they threw out their old methods and adopted the individualistic Edwin style of swinging.

There were many ways to the upper echelons of the game and what is staggering to me is that tennis has seemingly failed to ask - let alone answer - the obvious question: why is it that golf has succeeded in producing players when tennis has not?

In a couple of ways the games are very similar.

Both are individual sports requiring serious dedication, athletic talent, flair and an uncommon obsession with the game. If you put all four together you will find Roger Federer and Tiger Woods, Rod Laver and Nick Faldo.

The other way in which the games are similar is the nature of the field of play. On the finest courses - not necessarily the ones you see on the PGA Tour - the best place to play to the flags is not from the middle of the fairway but rather the edges of the fairways over by the strategically placed hazards. That is the way at St Andrews, Augusta and Royal Melbourne. In tennis too the player rewarded is not the one playing up and down the middle of the court but rather the one flying close to the lines and the edges down the sides of the court.

It takes the same levels of skill and bravery to fly down the right, guarded by the boundary fence, of the 16th hole at St Andrews just as it takes to nail a tennis ball into the very edge of a court on an important point.

This gets me to my point. Australian golf courses are some of the best in the world on which to learn the game. The ground is firm and fast, the bunkers and shots around the greens demand fine short games. The pitch Geoff Ogilvy hit at the final hole of the 2006 U.S Open - which he ended up winning - was not learnt in America but rather from over the back of the 10th and 16th greens on his home course at Victoria Golf Club.

And the geography of this unique continent has cities clinging to the edge of the coastline and the result is that golfers are dealing with an ever-present seaside wind and that is a sure developer of fine shotmaking.

It is not fair to sweepingly generalize but Americans often grow up in perfect conditions on one-dimensional, long soft and ‘fair' golf courses and they have a lot of players very adept at playing that game. The rest of the world is catching up, however, and what the ‘overseas' players bring to America is an extra dimension of a game learned outside of the United States where the conditions demand more adaptability. Once the ‘foreigners' learn the American game they are flying and before long more than half the American tour - once almost solely populated by home grown stars - will be made up of overseas players.

In golf, our courses have really helped our players learn the game and they are a significant reason why we have been able to compete way above what our population numbers might suggest.

Surely it is time tennis looked at golf, its sister sport, and come to the conclusion that it is not the spending of millions of dollars on coaching - my assumption is that Tony Roche, Jason Stoltenberg and Darren Cahill are at least the equivalent teaching talents as Bann, Lynch and Edwin - and ‘programs' but rather that the courts of play are working so much against us in tennis.

Here is a game played at least half of the season on clay but as Paul McNamee argues: ''Inferior clay courts still exist in Victoria, but they are virtually extinct in NSW and Queensland. The fall from grace of Australia as a tennis superpower is highly attributable to the demise of clay courts, a surface which close to 90% of the top 100 men and women grow up on. But not in Australia - not anymore."

Surely it is time someone in tennis administration asked the question. Why has golf succeeded where tennis has so spectacularly failed?

The answer seems blindingly obvious.