The National Sports Museum was launched today at the spiritual home of Australian sport, the Melbourne Cricket Ground. Several years in the making, the museum houses many Australian sporting and golfing treasures including Geoff Ogilvy&aposs signed golf bag, a club owned and used by the first Australian Amateur Champion L A Whyte and a plethora of relics that tell the colourful story of our great game. Golf Australia Manager of Game & Club Development Nick Green said, “The National Sports Museum is a comprehensive gallery of sporting artefacts and mementoes that define who we are as a nation. Sport has forever been an integral part of our identity and it is a great achievement to have golf included in the museum&aposs broad and vast array of content.” Other features in the golf exhibit are authentic putters used by some of our greats including five-time British Open winner Peter Thomson, Sloan Morpeth and the late Norman Von Nida. In addition to this, the museum will also house a selection of vintage golf balls, bags, trophies and team uniforms that represent our proud golfing heritage. Green added, “The National Sports Museum has done a fantastic job in combining contemporary and historical memorabilia to illustrate the history of golf in Australia and I encourage any sports fan to make the effort to go and see the amazing history contained within the museum at the MCG.” Aside from golf, there is a spectacular array of items on display including our first ever Olympic medal won by Edwin Flack in 1896, &aposBaggy Green&apos caps, Brownlow Medals and artefacts representing all of the sports that have identified our nation for decades. The National Sports Museum is located across two levels of the newly-refurbished Olympic Stand and is open to the public from Thursday March 13. The museum is three times the size of the former Australian Gallery of Sport, established in 1986 and demolished in 2003 as part of the MCG&aposs redevelopment project. Please visit www.nsm.org.au for further details.
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