{"id":322134,"date":"2025-12-02T06:00:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-02T06:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/322134\/"},"modified":"2025-12-02T06:00:15","modified_gmt":"2025-12-02T06:00:15","slug":"cameron-smith-praises-return-to-separate-men-and-womens-competitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/322134\/","title":{"rendered":"Cameron Smith praises return to separate men and women\u2019s competitions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Australian <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theage.com.au\/link\/follow-20170101-p5kwnh\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">golf superstar Cameron Smith<\/a> says he\u2019s much happier that the Australian Open has returned to its original format, after being <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theage.com.au\/link\/follow-20170101-p5kuno\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">highly critical of event organisers last year when men and women played at the same time.<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Smith, who last year lamented the softer condition of Kingston Heath because of a joint format with women, told reporters on Tuesday that he was consulted about separating the men\u2019s and women\u2019s events for this year.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Cameron Smith is much happier that the Australian Open has reverted to its original format.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/b9108a76db609766656915af7f3d967dba2ce3df.jpeg\" height=\"390\" width=\"584\" \/><\/p>\n<p>Cameron Smith is much happier that the Australian Open has reverted to its original format.Credit: Getty Images<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI definitely had a few conversations with Golf Australia and [CEO] James Sutherland in particular. I think there was a lot of back and forth through the last couple of years and I think everyone is pretty happy with the result,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cEveryone is talking about the Aussie Open again, which is what we wanted. We wanted back at Royal Melbourne and we wanted it to be an event where international stars come down and compete and make it the event that it once was, so I think we are on the right track.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australian golf superstar Cameron Smith says he\u2019s much happier that the Australian Open has returned to its original&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":321472,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[566],"tags":[64,63,755,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-322134","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-golf","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-golf","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/321472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}