Australian Open 2012: Melbourne's long journey to the centre of the tennis world For Murray, Djokovic and company, the Australian Open ranks up there with any tournament - even Wimbledon. They know that it sets the tone, and the pecking order, for the whole season. And yet you only have to go back 25 years to find a completely different picture, one in which the Australian Open lagged a long way behind the other three Grand Slam tournaments. In those days, it was tennis's answer to the US PGA in golf, the poor relation of the four majors. But at least the PGA has always had a strong field to call upon, consisting of the world's top 100 golfers. Until the late 1980s, many of tennis's biggest names could not even be bothered to board that interminable flight Down Under. Bjorn Borg turned up only once, in 1973. Jimmy Connors reached the final on both of his appearances, lifting the Norman Brookes Challenge Cup in 1974, but never came back again. John McEnroe finally deigned to make his debut in 1983, by which time he had been world No 1 for almost three years. All this was to the benefit of John Lloyd, the outstanding British player of the era, who took Vitas Gerulaitis to five sets in the final of 1977. In fact, if Gerulaitis had not cramped up, and Lloyd had not altered his game in an attempt to take advantage (a fatal mistake, since he had been winning before the problem developed), he would probably have ended Fred Perry's long reign as the last British Grand Slam winner. "It was disappointing, because no one can take a Grand Slam away from you, even if it was the weakest," Lloyd said. Still, you don't have to be a brain surgeon to see that I wouldn't have reached the final in a full-strength field. I don't know how many of the top 10 were there - maybe three at a guess? I can understand why people didn't want to come. In 1977 the Australian Open ran through Christmas, and the prize-money wasn't fantastic. Personally, though, I always loved going to Australia. I would travel out six weeks early and play all the tournaments I could. In his one Grand Slam final, Lloyd was not competing at the blue planet of Melbourne Park, but on the green turf of the Kooyong Club, which hosted the tournament between 1972 and 1987. This was still the heyday of lawn tennis proper, when the French Open was the only Grand Slam not played on grass. Even now, Kooyong retains an air of old-world elegance, rather like Queen's Club in London. For Mats Wilander, the only man to win the Australian Open at both its modern venues, it has always felt like a shrine to the glory days of Australian tennis. "The walls were all hung with pictures of the great players they had in the middle of the century," Wilander said. People like Laver and Newcombe and Emerson. At times the tennis came second to the history, but I enjoyed the whole atmosphere of the place. Kooyong finally bowed out in 1988, when the Australian Open made its decisive move across town. The name was different - Flinders Park - but this was a revolutionary venue. Centre Court, later to become Rod Laver Arena, seated just under 15,000 people, almost twice as many as its predecessor and was the first court to have a retractable roof. The authorities originally wanted to surface the courts with artificial turf, but the players objected. They opted for Rebound Ace instead, a rubberised compound that no one in Europe had seen before. "When Rebound Ace got hot, the surface became sticky, which made it awkward to move on," recalled the former British No 1 Andrew Castle, who played in the last Australian Open match at Kooyong when he and Anne Hobbs lost the 1987 mixed-doubles final to Zina Garrison and Sherwood Stewart. "When the temperature climbed, it sometimes felt like the court was melting," he added. I remember waiting to go on Rod Laver Arena in 1990, playing doubles with Nduka Odizor, and there was this smell of burning rubber coming off the surface. When we got out there, we found that the people from Channel Nine were frying an egg on the ground. With the exception of such minor teething problems, the new-look tournament was thriving. Since 1987, it had been nailed down to a regular time slot in early January, and the big-name players were starting to clear their diaries for the month. There were still a few oddball winners. Remember Petr Korda in 1998, or Thomas Johannson, who came through the field in 2002 without beating a single top 10 player? But in recent years, it has been monopolised by those three kings of tennis: Djokovic, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. The inducements have improved too, with A$2.3million (£1.57million) on offer to each of the singles champions this year. No wonder the players have all made a beeline for the gym in preparation for the first Grand Slam of the season. This is the world that Agassi helped to create.